The Casket Ottis Built for Arlis

I said nothing. There was nothing in the English language to say.

Arlis told him the rest that afternoon, in his slow, clear voice. He had known about the truck all along, and he had not been angry at Ottis for sitting in it, not for long. He had been angry that Ottis would not say why.

After Eula died he was ashamed of how he had shaken Ottis’s hand at the graveside like a stranger’s, and the shame made him quieter, and the quiet grew roots. For seventeen years he had carried both pages in Eula’s Bible, and he did not understand why the two of them were such fools.

And then he said what he wanted.

He said, Put them in the box with me. Both of them, together, the way you wrote them and the way I wrote them. And not Janelle, and not the man from the funeral home. You do it, Ottis. You set them in my hands yourself.

“Why?” my husband had asked him.

Arlis, by his account, thought about it for a while.

“Because you never got to be in the room,” he said. “I want you to be the last one in it.”

I do not think I can explain what that did to my husband.

He sat in the kitchen with the old envelope between his fingers, and the weight of the six years, and the forty one afternoons, and the vending machine in Nashville, came into his shoulders and rested there, and then I think it began to lift. Nothing heavy goes all at once. But I watched it start.

Arlis did not die that week. Dying is slower than anyone in a story tells you. He lasted nearly two more weeks, and they were, I believe, the best of the whole year.

Ottis went every day after that, at one o’clock instead of two, because he couldn’t wait. They watched ballgames with the sound off.

They talked about the flatbed in 1974, and the cow that got into Eula’s garden and ate her tomato plants, and Arlis laughed so hard he coughed into the pillow, and Darla came in and told them both to hush.

On the fifteenth of October, which was a Thursday, Janelle called us at ten past five in the morning.

I took the phone. Ottis was already sitting on the side of the bed with his trousers on. She said her daddy had slipped away about an hour before, easy, with her holding his left hand and Darla on the other side.

She said, “He asked for Mr. Ottis around midnight, and I told him you’d be there at one. And he said, ‘I know he will.'”

I told her we would come.

When we got there Ottis went in first. I watched him climb the steps and stand at the front door with his cap in his hand, and I watched Janelle open it.

She put her arms around his waist and her face against his chest, and my husband, who does not hold people, held her.

Mr. Prater came from the funeral home a little after seven, a soft-voiced man in a gray suit who had buried most of our friends. He said in thirty years he had received a handmade casket twice, and that he would be honored.