The Casket Ottis Built for Arlis

I put my hand on his back. I did not say anything clever. There was nothing in me that was clever.

He was crying, a little, without sound, the way a man will when he does not know it is happening. A drop fell on the bench and darkened the wood, and he looked at it with surprise and wiped it away with his thumb.

I had seen my husband cry exactly once before that, at his mother’s burial in 1998.

He picked up the plane, and after a while he went back to work.

On the ninth day, in the late afternoon, my husband stood the finished box on two sawhorses in the middle of the shop and stepped back from it.

I have seen caskets all my life, in funeral homes and on church floors, and they are almost always dressed up as something else. A piece of furniture. A boat. This was not dressed as anything. It was a plain pine box, long and straight and clean, with the heart wood showing in wide, quiet bands, joined at the corners with dovetails you could have read like a signature.

He had eased the edges until they felt like the lip of a cup. There was no stain, only a rub of boiled linseed oil, and the whole thing came up the color of strong honey, with the barn’s old nail holes sitting here and there in the grain like something remembered.

I put my arms around his middle and pressed my face against the back of his shirt, and we stood like that until the afternoon light climbed the far wall.

The next morning he put the lid board over his shoulder, drove it to the Tidwell house himself, and I rode beside him. Janelle met us at the door.

He carried it in like a man carrying a child, balanced on his right shoulder, walking sideways through the front door, mindful of the frame. The living room had been cleared for the hospital bed. Somebody had set two kitchen chairs side by side. He laid the board across them.

Arlis was awake. He looked a good deal smaller than the man I knew, with the color gone out of him and his big hands open on the blanket, but his eyes were clear and he watched Ottis the whole way across the room.

He put his palm flat on the pine. He drew it slowly down the length, from one end to the other, the way you might gentle a horse.

“That’s a good board,” he said.

“It’s from your granddaddy’s barn.”

“I know where it’s from.” Arlis’s mouth moved. It might have been a smile. “I watched you carry it off.”

Then he turned his head toward the kitchen. “Vonnie, honey. Take Janelle in there a minute.”

I took Janelle by the elbow, and we stood together at the counter in the yellow light and pretended to wipe at it with a dish towel. The wall between the rooms was thin.

For a long time I could hear Arlis’s voice, low and slow and steady, in the rhythm of a man reading something he knows by heart. I could not make out a word. I could barely hear my husband at all.