The Casket Ottis Built for Arlis

On Sunday afternoon, before the doors opened for visitation, Mr. Prater told Janelle the family could have the room to themselves as long as they wanted. Janelle called us. “Daddy said you were to do it,” she said. “Mr. Ottis, you’d better come on.”

The room was the small chapel at the back of the funeral home, with green carpet, sheer curtains, and a pot of white mums by the door.

Arlis lay in the box in his good navy suit and the blue tie Eula had bought him, his big hands folded at his belt. He looked like himself with the worry taken out, and the pine gave off a faint warm smell, like a fireplace three rooms away.

Janelle met us at the door of the little chapel and said she would give us a few minutes. She looked at my husband and said quietly, “Thank you.” Then she went out.

“Vonnie,” Ottis said. “Would you wait out in the truck?”

I understood. I patted his arm and walked out through the lobby and pushed through the glass doors into the cold October afternoon.

I sat in the passenger seat of the truck, parked by a magnolia tree, with my hands in my lap, looking at the glass doors shining in the pale sun.

I thought about forty one afternoons. I thought about a window on the third floor with a curtain half drawn.

I thought about Eula, who had seen a truck from her bed and said let him sit, and I wished with my whole heart that she could know how it came out.

I do not know exactly how long he was inside. Twenty minutes. Maybe twenty five. I did not look at the clock.

What I know, because he told me later, is that he did exactly what he was asked.

He took both papers from his shirt pocket, still folded together on their old creases, and unfolded them one more time and read both sides. His own four sentences, then Arlis’s, then his own again.

Then he folded them the way they had been folded for seventeen years. He bent down over the box. He lifted Arlis’s right hand, which was cool and heavier than he expected, and he laid the paper in the palm.

He closed the fingers over it, and then he laid the left hand over the right, and held both of them there with his own.

He told me he said something. He wouldn’t tell me what. I do not need him to.

When he came out through the glass doors his face was wet to the collar. He walked across the lot with his cap in his hand and did not wipe it.

He got into the driver’s seat and shut the door and sat looking straight ahead, breathing like a man who has carried a weight a long way and set it down on the right spot.

I did not say anything. I reached over and put my hand on his knee, and he laid his hand over mine, and we stayed that way until Janelle’s car turned into the lot.

The funeral was Monday morning at Cedar Grove, and the sanctuary was full to the doors. Mechanics from Wartrace came in their church shirts with their hands scrubbed raw.

A row of bus drivers sat together. Eula’s old third graders, grown now, some with gray in their beards, filled two pews on the left.