The Workbench Nobody Was Allowed to Touch

What Jonas knew

“I used to go to Grandpa’s on Saturdays,” Jonas said. “Starting when I was nine. You were at the elevator all fall, and Mom would drop me, or I’d ride my bike. She didn’t tell you because Grandpa asked her not to.”

“I asked him to wait, Curt,” Pam said from the doorway, thick-voiced. “He said it wasn’t time. He said you’d come around to it on your own, and if anyone pushed you, you’d go the other way.”

He had been right about that, too.

“He didn’t say much,” Jonas went on. “He’d put something in my hand and tell me to sneak up on the line. That’s what he said. Sneak up on it. Don’t go at it, you go a hair shy and then you ease up to it.”

I laughed, once, and it came out wrong. It was the same thing he had said to me when I was nine with the coping saw. I had forgotten it entirely. It had been sitting somewhere in me for forty years like a coin in a coat.

“He taught me to sharpen,” Jonas said. “He showed me the stones. He said a dull chisel is a liar. He taught me to cut a finger joint on a piece of pine, and then he said I could do one on oak when I was ready, and then he got sick.”

“When did he give you the card?”

“The first Saturday in November. Before he went in the hospital.” Jonas wiped his palms on the apron. “He said put it in the bottom drawer, the one that sticks. He said when your dad is ready, he’ll open it himself. He’ll go looking.”

“And I never did.”

Jonas did not say anything to that, which was the kindest thing he could have said.

“When we moved the bench,” he said finally, “I made sure the drawer came over with the card in it. I waxed the runners a couple years ago so it’d open. I figured if you ever pulled it, you’d find it.”

“I didn’t pull it.”

“No, sir.”

“The mallet,” I said. “When you were thirteen.”

He looked at the floor.

“I was going to give you the card that day,” he said. “I had it in my back pocket. I picked up the mallet first because it was the last thing Grandpa had me hold, and I just wanted to feel it a second. And then you came in.”

I could not look at him.

“And I thought, if I hand it to him now, he’ll put it in a frame and hang it up on the wall with everything else, and nobody will ever make the thing.”

That is my son. He is sixteen. He had me figured out to the inch, and he had done it without a speech, and he had been kind enough to be right about it quietly.

“So I decided to build it myself,” he said. “Orlin’s been bringing me the oak. It’s off the old crib floor out at the Kubat place, dry as a bone. He sits in his truck out front and won’t come in. He says he’ll wait to be asked. I turned sixteen in August, and Grandpa would’ve said that’s old enough. I figured I’d get it done by your birthday, and if you got mad, at least it’d be made.”

My birthday is the twenty-first of November. I would be sixty.

“I wasn’t going to get mad,” I said.

“You sort of were,” Jonas said. “Three weeks ago. With the chisel.”