because over in the corner there was a coffin.
A casket, standing on two sawhorses, and my flashlight landed right on it and my whole body locked up. I stood in that bolted-shut back room a good while before I could make my feet move. But when I finally got close, I saw it was not a thing to be afraid of. It was beautiful. Hand-built, the wood planed smooth and oiled, the joints tight as a whisper. And it was not the only one. There were two more finished ones along the wall, and lumber stacked for more.
On the workbench was a ledger, and reading it explained the whole thing, and turned my fear into something closer to shame for being afraid.
The man who rented this shop before me, out here in Muskogee, was named Cecil, and Cecil built caskets. Not to sell. The ledger was a list of names going back years, families around the county, and next to each one, in his pencil, the same two words. No charge. When a family lost somebody and could not afford a proper burial, word got to Cecil, and a beautiful hand-built casket showed up, and nobody was ever told where it came from.
He bolted the storeroom from the inside because he slept in here some nights, finishing a box for a funeral that could not wait, and he went out the alley door, which the landlord sealed up later, which is why it looked like a man had bolted a room and then vanished into air.
He did not vanish. There was a note folded in the back of the ledger.
A man ought to be buried decent, money or no. If the family would be shamed to take charity, do not tell them it was free. Just tell them it is already paid.
Cecil left in the middle of the month because he got his own bad news and did not want to be a burden to anybody. He went to a hospice two states over to be near a sister, and he passed there in the fall. He never told his customers, because his customers were grieving people and he did not want his dying laid on top of their dying. That was the kind of man he was, right down to the end.
On the sawhorses, the casket he was working on last had a name penciled inside the lid. His own.
I am not a carpenter, but I am a working man with two hands. I finished Cecils last casket. Took me a month of evenings and it is not as fine as his, but it holds true. And when I called that hospice and learned he had been buried out there in a plain county box because he had no money of his own left, I could hardly stand it.
So here is what I did. There is a family in this county right now who just lost their father and cannot afford to bury him. They are getting a beautiful hand-built casket this week, and nobody is going to tell them where it came from. I am just going to say it is already paid.