The Workbench Nobody Was Allowed to Touch
He taught me to hone a chisel on the oilstone, first the coarse side and then the fine, until the edge threw back the lamp light in a bright clean line. He taught me to read the grain, to feel for which way it ran with the heel of my hand, and to plane downhill with it instead of fighting it.
He taught me, with infinite patience, how to sneak up on a line.
I took tools down from the pegboard. The first time, I stood there with the dovetail saw in my hand, looking at its black outline on the board, waiting for something to happen. Nothing did. The outline just sat there, empty, a shape the exact size of a thing I was holding.
My father was not gone from it. I had thought he would be. I held the saw by the same handle his hand had worn smooth, and if anything he was nearer.
Orlin Kubat came by the second Saturday in November. He parked on the street and sat in his truck, and I walked out to the curb and knocked on his window.
“You coming in or not?” I said.
“Been waiting to be asked,” said Orlin, who is eighty-three. He wiped his boots on the mat for a full minute. Then he stood in the garage door and looked at the bench for a long time, at the lamp and the glasses and the boy in the apron, and said, “Well, I’ll be.”
That was all he said. It was a lot, for Orlin.
The last corner
By the third week of November the chest was a chest.
Jonas had closed the fourth corner. He had planed the lid. He had cut the till to slide on its cleats, and chiseled out the little mortise for the leather strap handle he had bought with his own money at Fleet Farm.
On the Thursday before my birthday, he cut the last of the cutouts in the till, a row of shallow beds shaped to hold each of the twelve tools. He had traced them off the pegboard onto paper, and from the paper onto the oak.
On the Friday night, we sat and finished the lid. Jonas cut one thing into the underside, with a small V-gouge, taking his time: four letters, in my father’s square capitals, copied off the time card. My name, short the way he had always said it.
One of the corners had a gap you could see if you looked, a hairline, no wider than a thread of the pencil. Jonas knew it was there. He wanted to remake the whole side.
“Leave it,” I said.
“It’s off, Dad.”
“I know. Leave it.” I ran my thumb along it. “I want one place on this box where you can tell it was made by hands.”
He thought about that, and then he nodded the way my father used to, once, without looking up.
We finished at ten past ten. He rubbed in the last of the oil with a rag and stepped back, and the two of us stood looking at it under the old lamp: white oak, honey-colored under the oil, a leather strap, twenty-six inches of finished work on a bench that had waited four years for it.