The Plain Pine Box Mama Asked For
It was a fair question. There is a version of me, and I have met her at three in the morning, who spent two years on the night shift while her sister called on Sundays. That version might have enjoyed being the one who knew what Mama wanted, in front of Gary and Gordon Teague. I looked at her for a good while.
Then I went to Mama’s Bible, the big black one on the dresser in the back bedroom, and I opened it to the front, where she kept the funeral folder. She had never written anything down. She had only told us. But the folder held the hymns she wanted, and a card from the Teague Funeral Home with a handwritten note on the back in her square, careful printing. It was dated the previous spring.
It said, Plain. No fuss. Money to the school.
I sat down on her bed and I cried then, for the first time since Sunday.
It was not proof for Noreen. It was proof for me. I had not been punishing anyone. I had been doing the last thing my mother asked.
The week that followed was the longest of my life, and I am including the weeks I spent on that bedroom chair.
Noreen did not come back to our house Monday night. She took a room at a motel in the next town with Gary, which told me more than she meant it to. On Monday afternoon she called our cousin Janice, who lives in Waterloo and has never kept a piece of news to herself, and told her I was burying Mama in a pine box like we were paupers.
I learned about that at the Fareway on Tuesday morning, in the produce section, when Janice’s sister-in-law touched my sleeve and said she was so sorry things were hard right now. “Noreen said you’ve had some money trouble. No shame in it, honey.” I turned the color of cabbage.
I went out to the car and sat a minute. I prayed the kind of prayer with no proper words in it: Lord, I am so angry I cannot see straight. What came back was Mama’s voice, plain as day. She’s got a lot of love and not enough places to put it.
I started the car.
On Tuesday afternoon, Gordon Teague called me at home. He is a man who chooses his words the way a mason chooses stones.
“Glenda, I wanted you to hear this from me. Your sister was in this morning. She wrote me a check for the cherry casket and asked if I could make the switch quietly.”
My stomach dropped. “What did you tell her?”
“I told her what I tell every family. There is one signature on the order, and it is yours. I told her I would honor it.” He paused. “I did not cash her check. It is in my desk drawer. I told her I would hold it, in case she changed her mind.”
“Gordon, I’m sorry about all this.”
“Mrs. Fisk, in twenty-six years I have had a hundred families come in here and fight over the price of a box. I have never had one regret going plain. I have had plenty regret the other.” He cleared his throat. “Your mother came in last spring, did you know that?”
I did not.
“She sat in the showroom for an hour. She put her hand on that pine box. She asked me what it cost and she told me she wanted it. I wrote it down. I did not feel I should say so unless it came to that.”