“In three words,” says Robert Frost, “I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: It goes on.”
As soon as Dad had determined when his week of treatment would occur, he strategically scheduled Holy Smoker II, giving him a date in June to aim for.
He underwent the treatments. At his follow-up meeting a few weeks later, his doctor declared, “You have a lot less cancer than you did when I met you.”
23: THE COFFIN PROBLEM
* * *
There was no way around it. My coffin had become a pain in the ass. We hadn’t worked on it for months, and in the meantime it had represented nothing but a large, immobile obstacle in the middle of the dusty workshop where Dad continued to produce.
In those long months, he built Ralph’s Christmas gift.
He built a series of cedar birdhouses with carved comical faces that he donated to charity auctions.
He built a decorative shelf to display beer steins behind Louis’s bar.
He built another shelf to display a train set, also for the bar.
As a gift for one of his nieces, he turned an old walnut post into a garden pedestal, crafting an octagonal top from various pieces of exotic wood (the same pieces I’d coveted and been denied).
He built a pergola for a garage, an entrance ramp for a barn, a set of basement stairs. He reframed a door at my sister’s house, helped me repair a burst water pipe, and continued the ongoing upkeep of his own house and yard.
* * *
I woke up one morning after a middle-of-the-night bout of insomnia, during which my imagination had conjured up a strangely destructive reverie.
“I had a sort of waking dream last night,” I said to Gina as we stood in our pajamas on opposite sides of the bed, hair disheveled, pulling the sheet taut and smoothing it between us.
“What was it?” she said, dropping a pillow into place.
“A potential solution to end this whole coffin problem.” I hadn’t told her yet of my idea to turn the box into a shelf, worried she might reject the plan and I’d be back to having no idea what to do with it until my death.
“What?” she said, straightening the comforter. “Suicide?”
I dropped my pillow and scowled. “Um, no? No, my idea was to rip the whole thing apart, sort of like performance art, like that Art of Noise video where they destroy the piano. And then I could use the wood for something else.”
“Oh,” she said. “I was just thinking, you know, your unexpected death would be kind of an interesting plot twist.”
“And then you wouldn’t have to store it.”
“And I wouldn’t have to store it.”
“You’re weird sometimes.”
“I’m not the one who’s building a coffin.”
* * *
This was, unfortunately, not the first time I’d found myself with a coffin problem. A number of years before, I’d had the opportunity to obtain an abandoned 1977 MG Midget for the cost of a salvage title and towing fee. It then sat in our garage for five years. I was in no position of insight. I just knew that the idea of owning a little British roadster was brilliant, and the idea of getting it practically for free made me a sort of hero. I’d managed to get the Midget engine to turn over once or twice with strenuous hand cranking, but it never caught. Nevertheless, it maintained its air of promise, as I dreamed of buffing its grimy sun-faded maroon exterior to full gloss, of hearing the putter of my own success under the hood. Eventually, I gave up and sold it for a hundred bucks.
This was followed by a full set of distressed wicker furniture I greedily plucked from a curb one night and carried down into my basement, where it then occupied a preciously large percentage of my workshop space for more years than I care to remember, awaiting my healing touch. I’d checked out a book from the library on how to wind wicker—this furniture was “distressed” in near-fatal ways—and I had calculated that I could teach myself the craft of upholstery and that one day this free set of furniture would reign as the centerpiece of a patio, which I would also have to build. Eventually, I abandoned this plan and set the furniture out on my own curb, where it was quickly plucked by another greedy salvage picker. God bless him (or her).
This was followed by an excited phone call from my father one day, telling me that he was at a construction site where thousands of old red street-paving bricks had been dumped and would be plowed underground unless someone wanted to haul them away, which led to a frantic making of arrangements—this was the moment when I seriously considered buying a dump truck, ownership of which would have represented a coffin problem of its own—and then the daunting presence of a huge mound of red paving bricks in my backyard and a phone call back to my dad asking how to design a driveway.
My mother was as complicit as my dad. She had passed down the gene of hopeless imagination and an instinct for bringing impractical whims to fruition. When she decided that my dad needed a parrot (this was a completely one-sided conclusion), she found one at a pet store, somehow kept it hidden in the White Bedroom for two weeks, and presented it as his Christmas gift. So now my dad had a pet parrot, entirely as a result of my mother’s belief in her ability to corral the improbable. (There was also the contributing factor of my father’s high tolerance for absurdity.)
“Corral” is an operative word here. Mr. Blifel, the parrot, was not even the most improbable animal to occupy the old family home. There was a long history in that house of unconventional pets that had arrived under unconventional circumstances. One Easter, my parents gave each of us a baby chick, which itself was not that unusual among Catholic families at the time, but I never knew any other kids who got to keep theirs to maturity. We did. Mine was a rooster.
The next year, we got a duck. We named it Waddle. This might seem like an awfully pedestrian name for a duck in a household that also included my mother, the Namer of Things, but the duck was not named simply for its gait. It was named after Dave Wottle, a local-native-turned-Olympic-gold-medal runner whose gimmick was wearing a billed cap. Waddle/Wottle grew quickly through the spring and summer, chasing us around the backyard and nipping with its orange plastic lips at our fingers and pant legs. When the weather turned cool, my dad built a pen in the basement, but there were territory issues between the duck and Bette Davis Eyes, so our pet soon was transferred to a local nursing home with a reflecting pond.
Finally, one Easter, my mother went for broke in terms of religious symbolism, sauntering into the living room with a young lamb on a leash. We kept “Ali Baba” all summer. She grew large, with the carriage and musk of livestock. My kid brother rode her like a pony, and the four of us took her for walks through the neighborhood on a leash. My parents said if we were ever stopped by a policeman, we were to say it was our sheepdog. I think this was a joke, but what did I know?
By autumn, it was clear Ali needed to go, and my parents contacted a sheep farmer who promised to take her as a pet, under the assurance that she would not be butchered. He arrived in an old sedan with his wife and a daughter who looked to be my age and seemed a little . . . off, an impression half-explained when the farmer mentioned that she’d been butted by a sheep when she was young and had suffered some sort of damage. They returned to the car, the farmer and his wife settling into the front seat after loading our sheep into the back with the daughter, the one who’d been attacked by a sheep.
My mother’s impulsiveness meant that she didn’t know anything about the bird she had purchased other than that it was a parrot. In fact, it was an orange-winged Amazon, captured in the wild. They are loud and dirty and mean. And they have a life expectancy of up to a hundred years. Which meant that even now, well after she was gone, my dad was still in charge of the daily care and feeding of her long-ago caprice.
24: FURNITURE OF SORTS
* * *
As a new year began, my dad and I found more time to work. The lid of the coffin would be a stacked series of four rectangular oak frames that formed a low-profile pyramid. The process was technically
demanding. Each of the layers required miter cutting and fitting 45-degree corners. We were making the cuts with my brother’s electric chop saw, whose big round blade made cutting far easier than did my dad’s hand-operated miter saw. But it was impossible to get the four corners all to meet cleanly.
“This is a great tool,” my dad said as we leaned in together, eyeballing a joint with a frustrating eighth-inch gap at its corner. “But it’s for building houses, not making furniture.”
To hide the imperfections of our work, he had come up with a plan to inset oak splines across the corners. Each spline required the painstaking setup of a jig to guide the router, using a series of clamps—fifteen or more—to hold everything in place. At last, when everything was right, my dad would pull the router forward, one pass only, steady as she goes, a plume of mealy yellow dust spewing out like sand from a dune-buggy tire. Twenty-four times we did this.
Three days into our new routine, I’d warmed back up to the process. Long into the evening, I could still taste the chewy air of the workshop, its toasted nutmeg lingering in that singular space where scent meets imagination. As I left the barn each afternoon, exiting into the winter chill, little problems persisted in my mind. I awoke in the middle of the night after the third consecutive day of work, thinking about how each layer of the lid would fit, with the final piece as a sort of capstone. I thought of my mom’s hundreds of rosaries. What if I removed the crucifix from one of them and inset it into the lid? This is something John would have thought of, I mused, something decorative and ritualistic. But it wasn’t John’s idea, and it wasn’t my dad’s. It was small, but it was mine.
* * *
This corner was particularly obstinate. The 45-degree cut wasn’t clean—my fault—with a slight but unacceptable convex. We tried a second cut, we sanded and shimmed, but the two boards refused to meet on a level plane. I stood on one side. My dad stood on the other. We stared at it, frustrated.
“What if I put extra pressure on top of the router while you pull it through?” I suggested. I leaned across to his side of the table and placed my crossed palms atop the yellow router casing. “Like this. And then I’ll push down while you pull.”
He nodded. “That could work. I don’t know any other way.”
He started the motor. I set my hands on top, and slowly, we eased into the cut. After an inch or so, I felt the router depress beneath the pressure of my hands, as though I were pushing suddenly into cookie batter.
“Stop!” my dad groaned, fumbling for the switch. “We ruined it,” he said before the motor was even done winding down.
We hadn’t accounted for the fact that I was pushing down on the portion of the tool not locked into place. My pressure had caused the router bit to drill past the quarter-inch set and through the opposite side of the boards.
We stared at it a long moment. I’d pushed a hole right through the lid.
“Can we hide it with a spline?” I asked.
Splines had become our magic solution. But this was a stretch.
“Maybe. If we’re lucky. I don’t know.”
“Even if not,” I said, “the bad part will be on the inside of the lid.”
“Think about that,” my father said. “People are going to spend more time seeing the inside of the lid than the outside.”
“Including me,” I said.
* * *
I returned for another day of work. The time away had allowed each of us to refine our reaction to the damage I’d caused.
After a spell of assessment and discussion, we carefully cut and fitted a strip of wood into the groove we’d routed. It worked. We were able to hide the ragged hole.
As we began setting up to rout out yet another corner, Dad mentioned that his electric bill had arrived in the mail. Three hundred dollars.
“It’s all this,” he said, referring to the power tools and dust collection motor. “It really sucks it down.”
I’d been keeping a tally of the costs, saving receipts for everything. But those were just my expenditures. I hadn’t calculated his contributions—electricity, wear and tear on his tools, glue and screws and nails. And certainly not his labor. A corollary to the genetic restlessness of my dad and brothers is that we consider our work to be an economic advantage. If I can spend a weekend cutting down a tree and splitting the logs, I’ve saved the cost of both a tree service and a cord of firewood, and in my mind, that’s the same as making money. Nevertheless, he was putting a lot into this coffin that wouldn’t show up in my accounting.
* * *
Work continued on the lid. As my father set up the router to put a scrolled edge on the corners of the stacked layers of boards, I clamped one of the frames to a set of sawhorses. Dad did a test run on a scrap piece of lumber, checked it, and nodded approvingly. He handed the router to me. “Here. You do it.”
I accepted the tool. Dad stepped back to watch. I eased tentatively into the first run along the edge.
“Don’t take too much in one pass,” he said. “Just keep going over it. A little more each time. Be patient. And don’t let it tilt on you. Keep flush to the board.”
Slowly, I started to get a feel, recognizing in the whine of steel chewing through oak how deep I was cutting. The work took a lot of physical effort and control as I held tight to the two molded black handles. The machine spit a constant stream of hot sawdust into my face; I could feel it filtering down into my flannel shirt. After the first edge was done, I shut off the motor, shook out my shirttail, wiped my glasses clean, and brushed off my stocking cap. Then I ran another edge. All the while, Dad watched, arms folded, leaning against the door.
I changed router bits and went to work on the inside edges, a different feel, a different grain. I’d been at it for two hours and felt like I’d been waterskiing through wood pulp, my sinuses clogged with dust, chest itching from the oak tendrils, forearms tight, jaws clenched, eyes irritated, and lenses clouded.
When the routing was finished, we assembled the lid temporarily atop the casket’s opening. Dad pulled the cap piece from the sawhorses and set it in place. He laid his palm against it and leaned down, eyeballing the lines.
He stepped back, still keeping his eyes affixed to the box. He chuckled. “You know what? This looks pretty good.”
I’d been wiping my eyeglasses on my shirttail. I replaced them and stepped back. Unexpectedly, it looked different. It looked complete. It looked elegant. It looked like furniture.
25: A DISTINCT LACK OF SHALLOWNESS
* * *
“I think you’ve got a problem,” Paul Hummel said, extending the tape measure upward for a third time.
He stood in the bright fluorescent light of my father’s workshop, a swipe of sawdust on the sleeve of his navy blazer, another on his crisp gray dress slacks, his blue eyes staring down at the casket, which rested on a set of sawhorses with its lid set temporarily on top.
“It’s too tall. It won’t fit in the vault.”
I thought he was joking. In under five minutes since his arrival, he’d already asked if we’d tricked out the inside of the lid with a Kindle, and suggested we turn the box on its side and use it to hold pony kegs, and pondered the temperature it would reach if we fed it into his crematory. Undertaker humor: his stock-in-trade. I figured this was just him continuing to yank our chains.
But then I looked at my dad, and he wasn’t smiling. He was already calculating something I was slower to grasp. The process of evolution on the lid, adding the tiered layers, which now, finished, looked classically composed and which Paul himself had initially described as beautiful, had also lured us away from our adherence to the measurements I’d scribbled in a notebook four years before, when I had toured the funeral home’s casket room with Paul as my guide.
I’d invited him here to see it, hoping to get his opinion of the work and, as my email had said in jest, “see if we’ve made any grievous errors.” He’d made time between appointments to stop by. His first reaction had been encouraging. He paused j
ust inside the old beveled-glass door and took it in with admiration, chuckling in approval. “That is really cool.”
He made a slow circuit around it, inspecting the corners, asking about the wood and some of the finer points of design and construction, repeating the compliment as he ran his hand along the beveled edge of the lid: “Really, really cool.”
Then came the wisecracks, and then, with a narrowed gaze, the question. “How deep is it?”
We measured. Twenty-four and a quarter inches.
“Ooh, boy. It’s gotta be twenty-two. Maybe twenty-two and a quarter.”
He wasn’t joking.
The one thing my dad and I had known all along was that we could do whatever we wanted as long as the outside dimensions of the box were smaller than the inside dimensions of a standard burial vault. We’d been careful to take into account the additional width of the handles. Sure, it had grown slightly deeper with Dad’s canny addition along the bottom edge, a lip offering a finger hold in case a pallbearer lost his grip on the handle.
But this final process of making the lid had found its own muse, as Dad mulled it over in bed at night and we fixated on the intricacies of carpentry. It had grown taller with each improvement, but only by the thickness of an oak board. Or two.
“Let me make a call,” Paul said, pulling his smartphone from his jacket pocket. He asked the receptionist at the burial-vault company for the inside dimensions of a standard vault. She put him on hold.
“You know,” Paul said to me as he waited, “you could always get the bronze one. They’re bigger.” He winked. “Twenty-two grand.”
Furnishing Eternity Page 16
