The Casket Ottis Built for Arlis

When Ottis came into the kitchen his face had no color in it. He put a hand on the back of a chair.

“I’ll be back at two tomorrow,” he told Janelle.

From the other room Arlis said, in a voice just loud enough to carry, “I know you will.”

In the truck, Ottis sat with both hands on the wheel. I watched him look through the windshield at nothing. A full minute went by.

“Vonnie,” he said. “Arlis asked me to put one thing in that box with him.”

I waited.

“He told me where it is.” He swallowed. “And I think he’s had it for seventeen years.”

He reached for the key, and then he took his hand back.

What Arlis had asked, Ottis told me that night, in pieces, over a cup of coffee neither of us drank.

There was a Bible by the hospital bed, Eula’s, soft and black with a broken zipper, the one she carried to church for thirty years. Arlis told Ottis to take it down and open it to the Psalms. Near the middle was an envelope, folded and unfolded so many times the creases had gone furry as cloth.

Ottis knew the handwriting before he took it out. It was his own. It was the letter he wrote at the kitchen table in April of 2009, and Arlis had kept it all this time, in his dead wife’s Bible, where a man keeps what he reads when nothing else will do.

“Take it out,” Arlis had said. “Unfold it.”

Ottis did. He told me he read his own words in his own square print, and he said them over to me that night, slowly, so I could keep them. He had written: *Arlis.

I could not come in. I sat in the truck forty one afternoons and watched your window. I am sorry. Whatever you need built or fixed for the rest of your life, I will do for nothing. Ottis.*

That was the whole thing, four sentences, and in all our years I had never heard my husband say one of them out loud.

“That’s not what he wanted me to see,” Ottis said. “Turn it over, he said.”

On the back, in blue ballpoint, in a hand that shook, there were a few more lines. It was dated April 11, 2009.

Arlis had read my husband’s letter in his own kitchen the day it came, gone straight to his desk, and written an answer on the back of the same page. And he had never sent it.

Ottis. I got your letter. I know about Gene. I knew it the whole time I was mad, and I stayed mad anyway. I am not mad now. I don’t know how to quit being quiet. Coffee pot is on Fridays. Arlis.

“He wrote it that very day,” Ottis told me. “He said he walked it to the mailbox four times.”

“Four times?”

“Four times. Got to the box and couldn’t open the door. Walked back. Did it again. He said it was the longest walk of his life, and he never did get it in.”

I put my cup down.

“I had a letter from him the whole time, Vonnie.” My husband said it in a flat, wondering voice.

“It was in the house with him. Six years, he was sitting over there with the answer, and I was sitting over here with the question, and we lived ten miles apart.”