Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [196]
21
THE COFFIN WAS a simple pine box with a domed lid and it took Jeb and me all night to build. Even with power tools it took two men twelve hours, though our work was interrupted by visits from people who’d come for the funeral—Pop’s agent, Philip Spitzer, who was like a brother to him, his wife Mary, Reverend Bob Thompson from Exeter, others too. Jeb and I would be at the table saw or the chop saw, or we’d be clamping and gluing pieces of pine together on the worktable, when the front door of Jeb’s shop would open and people would move slowly toward us down the long concrete corridor. We’d stop and walk over to them. There’d be long tight hugs, a shake of the head, tears and sometimes even a teasing or two. Jeb would describe his design, that he’d decided on a coffin with no nails, just glue and dowels. He’d show them the cardboard template he’d sketched to get the arc of the domed lid, how he’d used that to trace the final shape onto pine boards he then cut on the band saw. My main job was to rip the forty staves we would need to cover those supports for the finished cover.
We told them this, and we told them other things, and we listened to whatever they had to say. Our father’s body lay in a funeral home in Haverhill not far from the courthouse and police station, but as his coffin began to take shape in Jeb’s shop, people who loved Pop would stand before it and lower their voices. They looked from the coffin to Jeb and me then back at the coffin. Before leaving, they’d take a small scrap of pine we no longer needed, pushing it into their coat pockets or holding it in one hand. They hugged us once more and walked back down the concrete corridor out into the night.
For long stretches Jeb and I were alone. In many ways it felt like old times. Jeb was the artist at this; I was the slow, careful, mostly competent worker. While Jeb glued and clamped the planks of the side panels, a smoking cigarette between his lips, three-day-old whiskers across his chin and cheeks, I was cutting the shorter lengths for the end panels. Sometimes we’d glance over at each other at the same time, and our eyes would catch and we’d shake our heads and well up. Other moments, we’d be busting each other’s balls the way you did on a job: “You call that square? What a butcher.” More than once, one of us would pass closely by the other on the way to a new tool or task and we’d reach out and squeeze a shoulder or upper arm, then pull each other in for a quick hug.
Many times during the night—pine dust in the air, smoke from Jeb’s Marlboros, the heated electric engine smell of the power tools—one of us would shake his head and say, “Three hours, my ass.”
Just before dawn, we began to tire but not much. We had just screwed the lid to its long piano hinge when the shop door opened and against the gray light stood the silhouettes of two men. One of them pulled the door shut behind them and they came walking down the corridor, a cooler over the shoulder of the shorter one, a bag under the arm of the other. Walking into the light were Sam Dolan and Kourosh, who had flown all night from Seattle, and they’d brought beer and sandwiches. There were hugs and some laughter, quiet words that got quieter as we stood back and looked at my father’s nearly finished coffin. It was long and straight, the corner joints tight and clean, a router bead running the length of the closed lid whose arc was slight, all forty staves glued tightly together and sanded smooth, this new pine the color of bone.
We four sat against the wall. We ate our sandwiches and drank cold beer. Maybe we talked about the wake that would start in less than twelve hours. Maybe about the funeral the next day and how the ground was too frozen for the burial and we’d have to wait till spring for that, Pop’s body to be kept in a vault in a local cemetery until then.
While we talked and ate and drank, I kept looking at the coffin sitting over on the worktable, this last project for our father. I stood and brushed the crumbs and sawdust off my legs. I walked