The Three Machinists Who Found Dennis’s Tools

Forty-Four on the Mantel

On the mantel in my front room stand forty-four brass candlesticks, and every one is different. Dennis made one for every wedding anniversary, on his lathe, in the evenings after supper, with the barn door shut.

The first is lumpy. He filed it by hand from a bolt in October of 1982, because we were poor and he did not own a lathe. He bought the South Bend the next spring, mostly, I think, so he could do the second one better.

He never let me see one until it was done. On the morning of the seventeenth of October, every year, I would come downstairs and find it at my place at the breakfast table, shining, with a fresh candle in it and Dennis behind the newspaper pretending he did not know how it got there.

The last was number forty-four, with a little acorn on top. He gave it to me last October and said, “Next year is the big one, Nance. Forty-five. I’ve got something special planned.”

Then came the stroke in the barn on the twenty-eighth of July, at the lathe, and three days later he was gone. I had assumed whatever he planned had died with him.

I stood at that lathe in a feed mill on Mill Street in my church coat and put my hand on the half-finished brass.

“He was making me number forty-five,” I said.

Ernie took out a big white handkerchief and turned his back and blew his nose like a man trying to hide a landslide.

“There’s a drawing,” Brent said softly. “It’s taped inside the bottom drawer of the box, under the liner. I thought it was a part. I didn’t read it.”

He pulled the bottom drawer and lifted the rubber liner, and there it was. A single sheet of graph paper from Dorsey Tool and Die, folded in quarters, with the tape gone yellow at every corner.

It was a careful pencil drawing of a candlestick, with the measurements along the edge in his square hand. Base two and a quarter. Bead one sixteenth. Cup seven eighths.

Across the bottom he had written one more line, and I have said it to myself most nights since.

No. 45. October 17. Don’t tell Nance.

I laughed. I could not help it. I laughed until I had to sit down on an upturned bucket, and then I cried until my face hurt. Hub laid his hand on top of my head the way you would with a child, and I let him.

“Nancy,” he said at last. “We can finish it.”

“Can you?”

“Ernie can.” Ernie turned around red-eyed and nodded.

“It has to go home,” I said.

“It does.”

“Mrs. Eckert,” said Brent. “Let me bring it back myself. All of it, on Saturday. I can borrow my cousin’s rollback and I know four men with strong backs.”

“You’d lose your money.”

“I’ll figure that part out.”

“No, you won’t.” I stood up off the bucket. “Brent, you did not do one wrong thing in this story. You are not losing nine thousand dollars because Kirk Burkhart is a thief.”

“I can’t do much,” I told him. “But I know a man who can.”