They always ask. What do you do in that small New Hampshire town, especially since you retired? Well, not much really. Some reading, some part-time teaching of grade school kids and, oh, yes, lately I've been busy in my cellar woodshop on the two coffins I am making for Priscilla and me.
In this matter I am less Boy Scout than tightwad. A few months ago, I called on Junior Bartlett, our family undertaker -- family in the sense that we are a family and he is the only undertaker in town and we have known him for 50 years. As a monopolist in a growth industry, he has buried his handiwork in all five of the town's old cemeteries. I arranged to pay in advance for what I know in advance will need paying for. No sense in having the kids do then what I can do now, is there?
Junior and I didn't do much dancing around about price; he knows me. I pared everything down to bare -- very, very bare -- necessaries. Then he brought up the coffin.
"Now, Evan," he said, in that everlasting, unoffending voice of undertakers, "about a casket."
"Yes," I said. "What about one?"
"Well," he said. "You probably need one. Most people do." We had eliminated cremation, Pris and I, one evening when I asked about it and she said, "We have burial lots up in the old North Newport cemetery, don't we?"
"Four of them," I replied. "Bought long ago. Most expensive land I ever bought if you figure it by the square foot."
"Well," she said. "I think I'd like to have my bones in that ground up there. No sense wasting all that money." I agreed with her, and said I'd fix it so that I would stretch out right next door to her.
So Junior took me to the casket room. A shining chamber where gleaming caskets with polished handles were stacked on polished shelves, glinting life. On the floor, there was a neglected orphan sort of casket without a single gleam. Simple in design with utilitarian handles. Not very garish.
"That's the cheapest, I suppose," I said. I could have been less gauche and said "least expensive," but I wasn't. Junior nodded. Then in his modulated, elbow-supporting, undertaking voice he replied -- in a tone that told me he was doing me a favor --
"Eighteen hundred dollars."
"Holy Cow! I'll tell you this, Junior. I'm not putting $1,800 in the ground!"
"Don't blame you," he said, still using that unsurprisable tone. After all, what can surprise an undertaker?
"I'll make my own," I said, now speaking more to myself than to Junior. "I do woodworking."
"Don't blame you," he said. He paused. "I think I will, too." Junior also is a woodworker. And perhaps he will. He is frugal, a product of New Hampshire, the Cheapskate State.
Then he said, "But don't make it out of pine, with all those knots. Use some good hardwood."
Oh boy, I thought. Put good hardwood in the ground? Never. So I lied. "I have a stack of good cherry in the cellar."
He nodded. "Or maple," he said.
I'm not quite finished with mine -- from knotty pine, of course, but the knots are solid -- and next I'll work on Pris's. I hope I'm doing things in the proper order and have first things first. But I can't help it if I'm not. I measure Pris -- "Stand up against the wall; lie down on the floor," I say. She's a good sport. She knows I want to make sure that hers fits her well. This is one-of-a-kind, once-in-a-lifetime stuff. Made to measure. She deserves it. And, after all, the old carpenter's maxim is, "Measure once and cut twice; measure twice and cut once." She's patient with me; should be. We've spent a long lifetime together. I'm going to make her coffin nest inside mine -- like Egyptian sarcophagi -- so we can store them under the summer kitchen. It's convenient of her to be smaller than I.
Well, they do ask. And that's what I tell them.
Evan Hill, '48, a retired journalism professor, is a freelance writer living in New Hampshire.
