The Rosewood Casket (13 page)

“I think it’s a beautiful idea,” said Kelley. “Like that Dolly Parton song, ‘The Coat of Many Colors.’”

Charles Martin frowned at her so fiercely that she wondered if she had just killed a new song idea for him. He was always trying to mine real life for things to put into his music, but he never seemed to be able to think up things out of the blue. He only knew a song idea when he heard it on somebody else’s lips. Like the quilt discussion: he had probably been thinking up tunes while they were still talking about it. Even when it was his own father dying, Charles Martin seemed to look at life through a plateglass window—like he didn’t take it all
personally
, she thought. Part of him always stood back and watched. He had stopped looking at her now, so Kelley went back to pushing spongy egg fragments around her plate, and resolved to keep her mouth shut and stay out of his family business.

“Well,” said Lilah, collecting plates from the table. “Sitting around here all morning isn’t going to get any work done. You guys go out to the barn, and let us see what we can find in the attic, and get started on the quilt.”

When Lilah started clearing plates away from the table, the men set off for the barn to see about fulfilling their father’s last wish. It was a fine day, temperate for March between gusts of wind off the ridge, and Clayt cast a longing look at the field and the woods beyond as he led his brothers from one enclosure to another. A cabbage butterfly flickered past his line of sight, and he was tempted to follow it, but a glare from Robert Lee pulled him back.

The barn had been there as long as any of them could remember. It figured in sepia family snapshots dating back to the twenties. Even then it had been a weathered structure, mud brown, without a trace of paint, but the doors had been kept in good repair, then and now, and the patched tin roof kept out the rain. The barn looked none the worse for wear, although it had outlasted its usefulness. No livestock lived here, and no grain was stored in its corncribs.

“This place sure brings back memories,” said Charles Martin. “I keep seeing a whole bunch of different scenes in my mind, all superimposed, like one of those music videos where things flash by almost too fast to register. I smell fresh hay, and I see Grandmaw out here in an apron feeding chickens, and that brindled calf Robert Lee took to raise one year. Oh, lord, and the hayloft. Why, that would be a whole video in itself. Remember the time Garrett jumped out, playing paratrooper, and got a tine of the pitchfork stuck in his leg?”

“I still have a hell of a scar from that,” said Garrett. “But I count myself lucky. It was just a deep flesh wound. If I had landed just a little bit to the left, or a little bit harder, it would have killed me.”

“You didn’t cry much, though,” said Charles Martin. “What were you, then, about eleven? The main thing I remember is seeing that big black point sticking through your thigh, and being surprised that you weren’t screaming bloody murder.”

“He was probably in shock,” said Clayt.

“No,” said Garrett. “I’m always like that. People tell me I have a high threshold of pain. But I always figured that hollering about being hurt didn’t accomplish anything, except maybe throw your rescuers into a panic. And we were always around blood on the farm. Hog blood—people blood. What’s the difference?”

Robert Lee said, “I don’t remember that incident. It must have happened after I left home, which is just as well, because it sounds terrible. Surely, Garrett, you have better memories of the hayloft than that.”

Garrett grinned. “None that I want Debba to hear about.”

His older brother reddened. “I don’t want to hear about them, either, thank you! Didn’t we used to have a rope swing in the loft for playing Tarzan?”

“I remember that!” said Charles Martin. “Now that would make a good visual, I think, for a number built around barn memories. Milking cows … kissing girls … sitting on a bale of hay, practicing the guitar.”

“Will you forget your goddamned singing career, Charlie? Remember what we’re here for,” said Robert Lee.

“Now you need to be quiet in here,” said Clayt, yanking the barn door open with a rope slipped through the hasp. “There’s at least one red bat living up in that loft now, and I don’t want to disturb it any more than I can help.”

“Bats?” said Robert Lee, even more exasperated than he had been with Charlie. “Well, damn it! Can’t you just shoot them?”

“I can’t, Robert. No. Because they do a lot of good. They eat a ton or so of insects a year, which is more than I can say for—” He shrugged, and turned away. “The light switch is over here.”

The unspoken insult hung in the air, and Robert heard it as plainly as if it had been shouted.
“… More than I can say for car salesmen.”
He set his jaw, and walked on, without hazarding a glance at any of the others.

“Do any of you still do any carpentry?” asked Charles Martin.

“I’ve put up some bookshelves, and mended a fence or two. Nothing as fancy as what Daddy wants,” said Clayt. “I’m willing to try, though, if the wood is any good.”

“Should be, if it was stacked right,” said Garrett. “Long as it stayed dry up there in the loft.” He looked up at the vertical wooden ladder, nailed to the wall of the barn. “Looks like it’ll hold us. Guess I’ll go first,” he said. “I can handle the trapdoor. Clayt, why don’t you go last, in case Charlie gets a splinter in his manicured fingers, or you have to catch Robert Lee.”

Ignoring their protests, Garrett lunged for the ladder and shinnied upward, disappearing into the loft above. “It’s all right up here!” he called down. “The floor seems sound enough. And the wood has a tarp over it.”

Charles Martin, who had turned the small bedroom in his house into a weight room, had no trouble with the ladder, but Robert Lee took a good five minutes of hard breathing and tentative footing before his head poked through the opening into the loft. “I don’t see why we all had to come up here and look at a woodpile,” he said, his sides heaving with the extra effort of speaking.

“Because if the wood is all right, Robert, we have to get it down out of here,” Charles Martin told him.

Garrett, who had already removed the covering from the stack of wood, was studying the boards, running his fingers along them, and even sniffing at them. “It’s stacked right,” he said. “One board lengthwise, then one crosswise, so that there are spaces in between to let the air circulate.”

Clayt emerged from the trapdoor and wandered over to look at the sleeping bat in the rafters, but he saw nothing except the tattered web of an orb weaver, strung from one beam to another and studded with dead flies encased in gossamer. On another beam, the papery white of an old wasps’ nest stood out against the shadows, but he saw no insects hovering around it. Too early yet, and too cold for them. Clayt went to inspect the woodpile. “Rosewood,” he said, tapping the end of a board. “You can’t even get this stuff anymore.”

“I’ve seen it advertised,” said Charles Martin. “In Mexico, I got Kelley a little hand-carved jewelry box—”

“They call the new stuff rosewood,” said Clayt. “But the wood products described by that name nowadays are actually made from the wood of the cocobolo tree.”

“You mean it isn’t wood from rose bushes?” As soon as he said it, Charles Martin grimaced. “No. I guess not. Look at the size of those boards. They can’t be cheap. Why do they call it rosewood, then?”

“Color,” said Garrett.

“Looks brown to me.”

Clayt nodded. “Those boards are untreated. They’ll turn a deep reddish color when they’re sanded and finished, same as your Mexican jewelry box, but it isn’t the same wood. The old rosewood—these boards here—was a rain forest tree. It is now an endangered species, and it is no longer harvested. Certainly it’s illegal to bring it into the U.S., even if you could get hold of some.”

Still short of breath, but interested, Robert Lee said, “So this stack of boards is valuable?”

“Maybe a couple of thousand dollars,” Clayt told him. “Hardwoods grow slowly. An old walnut—say, twenty feet tall or so—can fetch as much as five thousand bucks. I’ve heard of people going off to church and coming back to find the old tree in their front yard chopped down and hauled away by timber rustlers.”

“If it’s so valuable,” said Robert Lee, “why did Daddy let it sit here in the barn all these years? Anybody could have broken in and taken it.”

“It’s been here a good fifty years,” said Clayt. “Maybe longer. I’m not sure when real rosewood started getting scarce. My guess is that Granddaddy Stargill bought it to make a wardrobe or a table for Grandmother, and he never got around to it.”

“And it was too good to use for scrap,” said Charles Martin.

“It wasn’t cheap, even back in the old days,” said Clayt. “You wouldn’t waste it on fence boarding or patching jobs. This lumber was meant for a piece of fine woodwork.”

Garrett tried to scrape off a sliver of wood with his fingernail. “Damn, this stuff is hard! We’re going to have a hell of a time trying to work with it.” To Clayt he said, “Have you been in the woodshop, lately? What kind of equipment are we talking about here?”

“Old hand tools, from what I remember,” said Clayt. “I haven’t looked at ’em in years.”

“Hand tools.” Garrett scowled. “You know how long it would take just to plane this stuff with hand tools?”

Charles Martin scratched at the top board and sighed. “’Bout as long as it took to grow it, I reckon, boys.”

*   *   *

Reverend Will Bruce was making his late afternoon hospital rounds, visiting his ailing parishioners. He had left the call on Randall Stargill until last. Someone from the rescue squad had remembered to call him to report Randall Stargill’s sudden illness, and, while he knew that the old man might be past knowing that someone had come by, he felt it his duty to come anyhow and say a prayer at the bedside. Besides, some of the family might be present, and he could express his sympathy and offer whatever comfort they felt in need of.

Will did not really feel like a pastor to old Mr. Stargill. His father—whom he sometimes still thought of as the
real
Reverend Bruce—had been the minister of most of Randall Stargill’s long life, and Mr. Stargill had plainly regarded the elder Bruce’s successor as an unnecessary modernization, inadequate to his spiritual needs. Will Bruce was more than forty years younger than the old man, and, although he had known him all his life, he felt no closer to this parishioner than he did to any stranger he passed in the hall. Randall Stargill had always been polite, but never more than that. His few utterances were seldom about anything more personal than the weather. He sat in church like a man waiting for an overdue bus.

Will Bruce was not even sure what prayer the old man would want uttered in his behalf. Did he want to live? He had not seemed grief-stricken at the death of Clarsie a while back, but some widowers swallow their sorrow, and then die like abandoned dogs a few months after their bereavement. He had not thought Randall Stargill would be one of those. He seemed sufficient unto himself, and perfunctory in accepting the condolences of his neighbors. Was Randall Stargill a tired old man who had seen enough, and was ready to go?

He wondered if Randall Stargill’s sons knew any more about his frame of mind than his pastor did. They had never seemed a close family. The boys always behaved—in church, in school, in the community; Randall saw to that. But they behaved without excelling, and their father never seemed to take any pride in their accomplishments. It was enough for him that they did not embarrass him by getting into trouble.

Some of the Stargill sons were close to Will Bruce in age, but Dwayne, who had been in the same grade with him, had died years back, and the others had left the community. Will Bruce and Dwayne Stargill had been, by common consent, acquaintances, but never friends. Dwayne, of course, had been the exception to the family rule. He had got into whatever trouble there was going, from smoking in the bathroom in the sixth grade to drag-racing on country roads in his high school years. He never finished school. Dropped out and was gone one day. Randall Stargill’s countenance at church was unchanged. One by one the boys left, and he seemed unmoved by their absence. Then Clarsie died, and he sat through her funeral as impassively as ever, and went home to an empty house. He had been alone on the mountain for more than a year.

Will Bruce slipped into the hospital room, returning the smile of a passing nurse. He was a regular here. Most of the members of his church were elderly. The still form in the bed lay unmoving, eyes closed, and looking younger than he had in recent years, as if the long sleep had smoothed out the wrinkles from his life.

Will Bruce did not notice the still figure sitting in the straight chair in the corner until his name was called.

He turned from the dying man and struggled to sort names and faces in his memory. The stout, red-faced man in gray polyester pants and a shiny blue jacket stood up and extended his hand with a sad smile of welcome. “Good of you to come by, Pastor.”

He had it now. The oldest son: a salesman somewhere in the Midwest. “Robert Lee! I’m glad to see you after all this time. I wish it could be under happier circumstances.”

“Well, Daddy’s close to eighty. He’s worn out. We knew it had to come. Didn’t think he’d outlive Mama, and worried about how he’d look after himself if he did.”

“He may pull through yet,” said Will, looking back at Randall Stargill’s expressionless face. “He looks at peace, though, doesn’t he?”

“I expect he is,” said Robert Lee, sighing. “He hasn’t solved his problems, though—he’s just passed them along to us.”

Will Bruce waited. He knew that most of grief counseling consists of listening. He pulled up the other chair, sat down next to Robert, and prepared to hear him out.

“We decided to come one at a time instead of all together to sort of space out the visits,” Robert explained. “Clayt was here earlier. I don’t know if Daddy hears us or not. Feels kind of funny talking to someone who just lays there with their eyes closed.”

The minister nodded. “I know. I do a lot of visiting with the sick, you know, so I see this—well, quite a bit. I always assume that folks can hear me, though, even if they can’t give any indication that they do.”