Furnishing Eternity

by David Giffels

  What the family started to discern soon after my mother’s passing was just how much my dad had been carrying her. Although his own health had rebounded remarkably after his cancer and he remained social and engaged, my mother no longer traveled well, so he stayed close to her side. My dad was kept from doing so many of the things he loved to do and that they used to do together—going to football and basketball games, dining out, traveling. At one point, my dad came down with a debilitating attack of vertigo, and my mom, who had all but given up driving, had to take him to the emergency room. She parked at the top of a small grassy incline, which they had to descend together, and she was so afraid of falling that she clung to him, even as he had to sidetrack at one point to vomit in the bushes. This pathetic-looking pair finally entered the sliding glass doors in such a state that the attending nurse asked, “Which one of you has the emergency?”

  He dealt with her loss by making himself as busy as possible, restlessness remaining his perpetual condition. He continued to empty her prodigiously stacked closets, to sort the rosaries, to leaf through her folders of newspaper and magazine clippings and books upon books upon books, the long comeuppance of her old White Bedroom. He retook control of a life that hadn’t been entirely under his control.

  So it wasn’t hard to get him roped into building a coffin with me. But it was hard to fit myself into his schedule.

  * * *

  When the measurements were done, I pulled myself to my feet and took a seat at the table. Dad got to work with the math, something he is preternaturally good at. He figures in three dimensions in his head as effortlessly as I daydream about sex. If I tell him I need to fill a hole with concrete, he can tell me how many eighty-pound bags of ready-mix I need (with an alternate figure if I prefer sixty-pound bags) before I’ve even begun to work the puzzle.

  “Eighty-three by twenty-seven by twenty-three,” he said, already determining how the standard lengths and widths of store-bought one-by planks would fit into these dimensions, including the oak strips that we’d be incorporating into the sides and ends.

  It was only a matter of a minute or two before he was dictating a shopping list to me:

  Number two pine or poplar . . . eight pieces of one-by-eight

  Five red oak one-by-sixes

  Sheet of three-quarter-inch plywood

  “Do you have time to go now?” he said. “We can take my car.”

  I hesitated, confronted by the suddenness, a realization that we were moving beyond the conceptual, that something as mundane as getting in the passenger seat of his Ford Edge for a trip to the strip-mall hardware store would seal the fact that we were actually going forward with this.

  “Yeah,” I said a little hollowly. “Yeah. We could go now.”

  10: LUMBER: A LOVE STORY

  * * *

  I’ve always felt a swell of euphoria upon passing through the automatic doors of the big-box hardware store. Say what you will about the depletion of the American soul via mass commerce and suburban homogenization (I say such things all the time), but I just can’t help feeling that old thrill of anticipation, of electric uncertainty, of pragmatic discovery, of endless possibility. It may be all tamed and standardized and prefabricated and barcoded, but still, whenever I enter that atmosphere, my genetically coded senses lock onto the faint nearby blood-black scent of iron gas pipe and the sour vanilla of cheap stud pine, primal aura of midwestern resourcefulness.

  I didn’t care that we were nestled between a Bed Bath & Beyond and an hhgregg. When my dad and I entered Home Depot that day, we were reentering every trip we’d ever taken together to West Hill Hardware, an old helter-skelter mom-and-pop in inner-city Akron, perhaps the most enchanting place I know. Its presence goes to the very beginning of my sense memory. I can remember being too short to see over the counter, standing against my dad’s leg as he gabbed with the big, sweet, crusty old guy who owned the place, Paul Tschantz, a white-haired man in an undershirt and stained khaki work pants. I remember staring at the rack containing various diameters of wooden dowels as a cat pawed at my shoelace. West Hill Hardware is as much junk store as home-handyman retailer, and it’s the only information source I know, other than my father, to turn to with the important questions of how: how to make things, how to fix things, how to understand the ways things work. The wide back porch, the potholed parking lot, and the adjacent jumbled garage are filled with architectural salvage, the stuff that makes scavengers tingle with prickly-heat lust—old claw-foot tubs; boxes of opaque Vitrolite tile; secondhand doors stacked against secondhand doors, dozens of them; oak and yellow pine and industrial steel, with questionable cats meandering in and out. The first definite stirring that I was truly becoming a man was when Gina and I bought our first home and I started going to West Hill Hardware with repair issues of my own. Sometimes, when cash-poor, I would charge my purchase to my dad’s account, which he’d had forever, and which was penciled into a worn ledger book pulled from under the counter. Paul Tschantz patiently taught me how to dismantle and repair a heavy old brass lockset I’d pulled from my front door, saving me both the expense and the reduced dignity of a new and inferior fixture. His son Richard, the third generation to work in the business, helped me figure out the complicated configuration of a new gas line based entirely on a sketch I’d made on the back of an ATM receipt. West Hill Hardware is scented like a motherland: machine oil, ancient dust, metal filings, and last week’s newspaper. It smells like a church, it sounds like my grandfather, and it looks more like home than anywhere except my actual home. It offers the truest of all comforts: a way to self-reliance.

  When Gina and I bought the sprawling, tumbledown old Tudor out from underneath the health department’s stack of violations, nothing worked. No usable plumbing, no safe electricity, steam lines spraying hither-and-loo like a scene from a Popeye cartoon. The roof was mossy, rotten, and full of holes, the house invaded by an anarchy of raccoons, squirrels, bats, mice, carpenter ants, feral cats, and a wild wisteria growing unimpeded through the third-floor servants’ quarters. One day in the early stages of restoration, a plumbing contractor offered to trade me a rehabbed steam radiator, which I needed, in return for the massive old porcelain tub-style kitchen sink I’d reluctantly—after much protestation with Gina—agreed to replace with a more practical modern sink. He said he could use the sink in a rental unit he was remodeling. Months later, my brother Louis asked for my help. He’d bought a salvage porcelain sink from behind West Hill Hardware that he was going to use as a washtub in his old farmhouse, and he needed assistance lifting it onto a trailer.

  The minute I saw it, I knew: he’d just paid fifty bucks for my old sink. Turned out it didn’t fit in the rental unit kitchen but was a precise fit in my brother’s laundry room. That’s about the best explanation I can give for the whole “why” of West Hill Hardware.

  * * *

  My dad thrives on these places because he loves stories, and these places are made of stories. He loves reading stories. He loves hearing stories. He loves telling stories. I’ve heard him relate certain tales more than once, and I hear in each telling the internal rehearsal, the refinements of foreshadowing, punch lines, bits of dialogue. One of my favorites takes place in a local counterpart to West Hill—Reeves Lumber, a little family-owned lumberyard where my father, having earned insider status, was allowed into the back warehouse whenever he wanted to scavenge odd bits of exotic lumber for whatever wild hair he’d happened onto that particular week.

  One Saturday, he was the last customer to leave before the lumberyard closed at noon. The old man at the counter, one of the owners, was planning to stick around and work on some project in the back workshop. My dad departed; the old man locked the front door, retreated into the wide-open back shop, and began setting up his worktable. In the process, he accidentally triggered his nail gun—square into the middle of his left hand. Attached to the workbench, he frantically grasped around him, realizing almost immediately that he was beyond reach of anything that
could help in any way, and that he was alone, and that nobody was coming back until Monday morning. As men of a certain era and certain stripe will do, he didn’t panic, but instead began making plans for a very long weekend spiked to a workbench. He adjusted himself as comfortably as a man can get in such a situation and wished he’d eaten breakfast.

  Soon he heard a sound. The front door. Shuffle of feet. His partner had forgotten something and returned. The old man called out, and just like that he was saved, but not before establishing prime stock in the store-counter legend. This story was told countless times—who knows how close it is to the original facts, and who cares?—and it grew in legend all the way up until the night the place burned down, a few years later, in a shocking terminal of black flames.

  So our entry now into the brightly lit order of orange steel shelves was not as far removed as it may seem from the wild frontier of those sawdusty backroom lumber stacks.

  My dad walks fast, and he doesn’t look back. He’s always been this way, but as he’s entered his ninth decade, it has become a defining feature. Whenever a car full of family arrives at a restaurant parking lot, for instance, he’s halfway to the front door before anyone else is out of the car seat. This has earned him a new nickname: “There goes Antsy Pants,” we’ll say as we watch the back of his jacket disappear into the horizon.

  Watching him grow smaller down the high-shelved aisle, I grabbed a battered steel cart from the holding pen and hurried to catch up.

  We slowed when we reached the lumber aisle. The selection ritual was about to begin.

  The last time I’d bought new lumber was to replace rotting boards on the face of the garage, an entirely practical and unromantic transaction. The last time I’d bought new lumber for a project based on whimsy—which is how I was defining this casket endeavor—was when I stumbled across a slab of salvaged marble that appeared to be exactly the dimensions of a suddenly imagined bathroom shelf unit to cover a radiator. My dad, naturally, dropped over for a visit just as I was beginning and spontaneously designed it for me, drawing up a set of plans on a legal pad with a series of details that never would have occurred to me.

  Before moving into a house that sucked all this kind of energy into its repair and upkeep, I’d been following my dad’s path, building more and more ambitious furniture, or reclaiming and rebuilding other people’s cast-offs. My late mother-in-law had a particularly keen eye for deconstructed curb-find furniture. She delivered a Victorian rocking chair to me one day, entirely dismantled and dumped into a cardboard box, some of the spindles splintered at the ends, painted in layers of eggshell, green, and yellow. I stripped all the paint to find that it was cherry. I repaired the spindles, then reassembled it, gluing it together in the complex Rubik’s formula of chair assembly, a process for which six hands would be helpful, plus a lot more patience than I actually possess.

  The chair now sits in a corner of Gina’s and my bedroom, and it looks great, and it wobbles only a little if you don’t count the right arm, which wobbles a lot.

  But it’s the process that I love, more than the product. And it’s the process that I missed. I enjoy working on my house, but it’s different than building furniture, as anyone with old plumbing can tell you. There’s a lot of work and no glory in fixing a leaky bathtub drain, not to mention fixing the ceiling hole caused by the leak. As my dad once said of plumbing, “The only way anyone could tell you’ve done it right is if no one can tell you’ve done it at all.”

  As my dad and I slowed to a stop before a long aisle of vertically stacked boards, an old excitement took over, the thrill of the quest. The lumber was arranged in increasing increments of quality and price, from basic framing lumber to furniture-grade: pine to poplar to oak.

  We’d figured to use midgrade pine, calculating that the ultimate purpose was somewhere between permanent and temporary. I stopped in front of the display of one-by-eights, stacked vertically. I pulled out the top piece, knowing full well it would not be the one I’d select. The top board on the stack is never any good, because it’s always the one the last person put back, and there’s always a reason. Lifting it and setting it aside is akin to opening the lid of the Cracker Jack box, ready for the hunt to begin.

  Just in case, I sighted down its edge, and sure enough, it was not only warped but also chewed up along one corner.

  I pulled out the next one and ran it through my hands. A knot showed through both sides. I set it aside.

  More warped boards, more knots, more dinged corners. Eventually, I narrowed down the stack of maybes, aided by my father, who pointed out that any warping would be pulled straight in the process of joining the corners and edges. Finally, with sufficient certainty, I fed the best eight eight-foot planks into the rack on the orange steel cart.

  We moved down the row toward the end, to the harder, richer vein of red oak, more expensive but also easier to negotiate. The grain was cleaner and the wood more fine, plus we knew we’d be ripping it into three-quarter-inch strips, so the whole face of any given board wouldn’t show. We leaned half a dozen planks along the face of the display as I dug deeper and deeper.

  I was doing my best to approximate some sort of organic connection, but inside I felt more than a little deflated. This wood, each piece affixed with a bar-code sticker, was soulless, assembly-line lumber. A chef acquaintance of mine once described to me the process of preparing coq au vin. He said that the first step is to go to an organic chicken farm, carefully choose a rooster, give it a name, take it home, and feed it for a couple of days, talking to it in soothing tones not only so the bird is not stressed when you finally chop off its head, but also so there is an emotional investment that will carry over into the preparation and finally the meal itself, which, if executed properly, will honor both the bird (we’ll call him Alfred) and the chef, the meal representing the crowning transaction in a brief yet rich affair.

  I’ve always felt the same way about wood. Countless times—many of them in my dad’s workshop, many in my own—I’ve dug and sorted, tapped and hand-weighed, sniffed and tested with a thumbnail for density and sometimes even tasted, seeking the one piece of wood that felt true to its purpose. A piece with some kind of blemish or oddity, with soul. I form meaningful relationships with my building materials.

  One time, in the storage shed of a semiprofessional junk collector, I found a hunk of hard old oak salvaged from a door edge, and I offered the guy five bucks for it, pointing out that it had two holes in it.

  “I usually charge extra for those,” he intoned.

  Another time, I dropped by my dad’s barn in search of some weird piece of scrap lumber suitable for a little wine-stopper display holder I was concocting as a gift for Gina. I knew theoretically what I wanted, but I wouldn’t know what I was looking for until I found it—the arch from an oak rocking chair leg. For a long, uncomfortable moment, my father hesitated, suddenly aware of its perfection, uncertain whether he wanted to let it go so easily. I get it. I can’t even throw away the handles of broken brooms and shovels.

  After my grandfather died, I inherited an ancient wooden box that used to sit in the old man’s Geppetto-like workshop, an utterly fantastical place that was carpeted with a deep cushion of his cigarette butts and was as close as I will ever come to transport into the world of the Brothers Grimm.

  The box now sits on a little table next to my desk, slightly battered, deep brown, neatly dovetailed at the corners. It is labeled on the front in faded black lettering pressed into the soft wood:

  COMMERCIAL

  WOODS OF THE

  UNITED STATES

  Prepared by

  National Lumber Manufacturers

  Association Washington, D.C.

  Inside are forty-eight little rectangular blocks, each numbered and labeled with the wood’s source, its properties, and its uses.

  No. 45, for instance, is tupelo, which comes from “Virginia, Kentucky, southward and westward to Texas” and is useful for, among other things, “millwork,
factory flooring, tobacco boxes and veneer.”

  No. 32, rock elm, of the “Lake States,” makes fine automobile bodies, refrigerators, and (in a curious overgeneralization) “woodenware.” Northern white cedar, No. 3, light in weight, soft, and easily split, is a fine choice for “posts, ties, poles, shingles and canoe ribs.” Willow (No. 47) is good for “baskets, furniture and artificial limbs.”

  A number of the samples specify among their uses: “coffins.” In each case, the suitability seems both logical and lyrical. Tidewater red cypress, for example (cypress, a symbol of mourning). And chestnut (not too heavy). And sap gum and red gum (both versions of eucalyptus, whose leaves are medicinal). And redwood and western red cedar (resistant to decay).

  * * *

  For all my fascination, however, there was no tidewater red cypress at Home Depot. No chestnut. No sap gum.

  Trying to intoxicate myself with the scent of raw timber here only reinforced that we were working with the Miller Lite of lumber. The ceremony would have to find its own way into the job.

  We finished in the lumber aisle, rolled the cart back through the brightly lit store, stopping for a bottle of glue and small brushes to spread it. I grabbed a sixteen-foot tape measure that I spotted on sale and we rolled on to the checkout: $257.03.

  11: THIS AIN’T NO PICNIC

  * * *

  One year before.

  It was cold, and it was still dark, and we were standing in the parking lot of the high school that had graduated us three decades before.

  Other reasons we shouldn’t have been there:

  Because it was a Saturday morning. Because it involved running. Because it involved running five kilometers, which I had recently calculated, to my dismay, to be in excess of three miles. The very word “kilometer” concerned me. It was a word that had been aborted, along with “milligram,” “Celsius,” and all the rest, when St. Hilary Elementary School gave up trying to teach us the metric system, a grand global experiment declared dead by the nuns.