the price of lumber in tahlequah

Most of his days were aimless, bearing no direction as though from an age before the compass when domains were small, each horizon contained, but on an autumn morning, he woke with a task, not quite urgent but charged and necessitating his full attention, a directive delivered through the nonsense facts of dream. Sonny Gordon, the self-proclaimed Redskin Redneck of Lake Tenkiller, was to build his own coffin, preferably before the next full moon, in accordance with his ailing body’s calculations. In middle age, he caught a bad case of pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis which made his breathing tight as a snug corset. His lungs scarred and his career as a laborer curtailed, he lumbered along performing odd jobs, mostly as a painter. Occasionally a neighbor would throw him a few dollars to help with shed construction, or a charitable foreman would contract him to help lay foundations. These rare carpentry jobs were the most rewarding as they allowed him to author destiny and forget the dark anchor within his breast. 
          Now his hair was a shock of white, his face red as ragged earth, and his eyes shrouded by the onset of glaucoma. But loss always begets some form of gain, and his bleary vision churned all finer details to a quizzical wash. 
          That morning, Sonny found himself under the terrible light of a big box hardware store. He traversed grubby aisles and purgatorial noise before his work-worn fingers reverently traced the edges and fronts of a four-by-four slab of Brazilian cherry lumber. Delicate but marvelous finish, strong as plains rock. He turned it over looking for a price tag but the board was bare. He searched for an employee but all shades, near and far, moved by a sportier meter. Exhausted, he took a seat on a display in the Home & Garden section. He removed a wrinkled loose-leaf page, held it close, and studied the blueprint of his simple coffin. Altogether he needed six pieces of lumber. Despite a rotund potbelly, his frame was petite. He’d allocated for a full-frame coffin, but since he was customizing it himself, he wet his pencil and changed some estimates, nicking down the cost. An employee, some reservation punk, manifested before him.
          “You can’t sit on the display, mister.”
          “Where should I sit?”
          “I don’t know. But you can’t sit there.” 
          “Oh,” Sonny rose with some effort. “Fixin to build a coffin. I need a price check on this here lumber.”
          “Where’d you get it?” 
          “In the lumber section.” He coughed a glassy, chemical cough. “With the lumber.” 
          The employee looked the plank over with conspiratorial distrust then radioed in a clandestine string of coded numbers before disappearing into the fluorescence. Abandoned once more, Sonny stood about and waited for new instruction. Others moved about him with palpable irritation. To avoid their ire, he returned to the lumber aisle. There, he found a new employee, some desperately old and fragile creature, wheeling about an oxygen tank, back bent in the shape of a question mark. 
          “Was it you in need of a price check?”
          He nodded bashfully. The employee withdrew a corporate smartphone, encased in a bulky orange protection box, heavy in her hand and threatening the feeble buttress of her bony wrist. She searched the price on a laggy connection and within a caustic minute she informed him that a four-by-four of Brazilian cherry wood retailed for thirty-four dollars, eighty-six cents. 
          “That can’t be right,” he said. 
          She took the phone back and refreshed it. She showed him the unchanged price. 
          “Used to get cherry wood for four-fifty. Not long ago, neither. Few years back.”
          “Before Covid?” she asked. “Price of lumber’s been high ever since.”
          “I know it, but ... hmm. Well, who can really tell the years?” 
          She smiled. “What you need the lumber for?”
          “A coffin.” 
          “Friend or relation?”
          “It’s for me.”
          “Sorry.”
          “I wouldn’t worry yourself about it.”
          “Told my nephew to just toss me off in a ditch when my number called.” She wheezed with delight. 
          He withdrew a faded yellow envelope and fingered the damp and feeble twenty-dollar bills which amounted to just under three hundred dollars. He performed some simple arithmetic as Andrew Jackson stared past him, daydreaming of slaughter along new accursed trails. Sonny folded the envelope back in his pocket, then picked up a slab of pine wood, and inspected it. Coarse as chalk dust, feeble as twigs in a shallow glen.
          “How much this go for?”
          The woman searched for the price. She rested her hand on her hip, moaning weirdly. The search came up and she raised the phone: sixteen-twenty-six for pine. 
          “More honor among creek bandits.” He sighed, verging on a tantrum. “This world has no top shelf for cruelty. I just wanted a cherry coffin to match my skin tone. Go out the goddamn in-door ...” He rapped his fingernails across the lesser pine board to expedite his annoyance, when a glob of saliva sprang loose from the woman’s mouth, falling south atop the scuff-pocked floor. Embarrassed by her leaky faculties, she rubbed out the spittle with her weathered shoe. “I could get my supervisor to maybe call another store.”
          Customers passed by quickly to avoid their seeming contagions. 
          “That’s okay ... preciate it.”
          She nodded.  He coughed a black industrial cough. She perked up. “Hey. You got a cigarette?” He shook his head and left. 

          Sonny brought the rusted toe of an axe perpendicular to a coarse Shumard oak tree. Its radiant, vengeful leaves, yellow in the apex of their season, bulwarking the creatures below from the nippy November wind. He felt confident of his footing though the axe’s lug wiggled loosely on its hilt. He raised it high and swung. As the blade neared its object, his strength vanished completely. The axe dropped from his grip, missing its mark. But on its fall it chipped a bit of rough bark, gently. A violent coughing fit brought him to his knees, disturbing every local animal. Once the fit subsided, he felt for the flip phone in his pocket. After making a call, he rested his back dizzily against the trunk, embraced by the tapestry of hard root. 
          The trees of this pleasant forest, which had long ceased to speak to him, whispered once again. A red leaf swooned down atop the perfect water of a nearby pond and the disrupting ripple carried him faraway to a select summer clime (bold greens, ripe eves) catching walleye and white crappie with his faceless mother, cooking them unvarnished over a two-minute campfire, served with butter corn and pickled squash. Native summer. The kind you chase the rest of your days. His older siblings are coming down the grassy slope now. Soon they will surround him and teach him how to fish. 

          A lanky Cherokee named Howard arrived with an electric chainsaw and helped him to his feet.           Together, they brought the tree down, cleaned it, and took it back to Howard’s trailer to turn into boards. 
Sonny’s brow sweat so he unfocused his eyes and allowed himself to take in the fragments of his labor. A makeshift table upon a dirt patch. Tree rings like warbling halos. Future tools shearing bark in the present. Curious clouds arching down to watch the hum and drag of their works. The release of tension. The bounty of every cycle. And then Howard, stealing pale-faced glances in his direction. 
          “What’s waggin your dog, Howard?”
          “Nothing. Nothing.” Sonny sniffed, suddenly conscious of each dust spec in his nostrils. “It’s mine, if you was wondering. This here coffin’s for me.” 
          Howard stopped but Sonny continued working.
          “When?”
          Sonny paused. “Soon-ish, maybe. Who’s to say?” He resumed. 
          Howard’s face trembled, red and wet and weak as a burbling baby. Sonny found it unbecoming and queer so he walked a few paces and spit. There were no handkerchiefs around so Howard dried his raindrop tears with the loose cotton of his sleeve. 
          Sonny sighed. “Let’s go to Freddie’s.”
          Sonny bought a banquet of onion burgers, Spanish fries, okra fried to charred pebbles, gob-cups of strawberry custard, and a pot’s worth of coffee stored in a makeshift carafe, which they shared in Howard’s truck bed. Howard remained distant to Sonny, spooked to be breaking bread with a fleshy ghost. 
          It was cooler than the morning’s forecast. Sonny raised his face to the sun and merrily took in its gentle rays. He placed some greasy jalapeños beneath his burger bun, merging flavors for a final bite, liberated beyond reproach of law or congress. 

          Alone to an orange evening, Sonny sanded the boards in the dim expanse of his garage. The gentle, whooshing scrapes were pleasing to the ear and he forgot himself entirely. With the corner brackets installed, and the frame plugged and screwed, he found that the heavier oak made for a pleasant compromise between cherry and pine. He began to shape the lid when a tinny ring chimed from his phone, alerting him to the final, taller task on the day’s docket. He leaned the lid against the frame, got in his truck, and headed for Dunwell’s Birdhouse off Interstate 51 near Wagoner. 
          Inside the so-called bachelor’s club, the dancers vastly outnumbered the clients. An assortment of reservation girls covered only in glow-in-the-dark strings, huddled together for warmth in the VIP lounge, texting phishing links to rubes both foreign and domestic, occasionally taking bored sips of aspartame sodas and awaiting command from any of the drooly Johns. The humid smoke made hot blue by the lights tickled Sonny’s lungs, forcing them to eke out giggly little chestnut coughs. He took on a plastic stool at the bar. The bartender, a portly kid, face drowsy and crunched from a Texas Tea headache leaned before him.
          “Drink?”
          “A water and a Miller Lite.”
          The bartender nodded and went about procuring the beverages. 
          “Y’all still got the Legs-N-Eggs special?” Sonny asked.
          “Sure.” The bartender removed a pencil from his ear and jotted the order down on a slip. “How you want them cooked?”
          “Scrambled.”
          “With the fixins?”
          “Okay.”
          “Go ahead and find a girl you like and come back with her name.”
          “Actually ... I’m looking for a girl named Berry. She here?” 
          “She comes in for the late shift. Why don’t you pick another girl?”
          “I don’t mind waiting.”
          The bartender paused. “Hey, you’re not the stalker, is you?” 
          “No, I ain’t,” Sonny said, stonily. The bartender grinned and turned away.
          While waiting, Sonny watched the stage, opening himself to a foreign opera of motion and sound. His meal arrived with a side of ketchup and a cup of country gravy. He doused the eggs with cheap black pepper and picked at them out of obligation. The beer was making him nauseous, so he left the bar and took a seat on a lounge sofa beside the stage. Before long, the loud stimulation coalesced to a warm bath and he thought about how the price of lumber might change thereafter, how it would continue to climb and expand and eventually engulf its victims in a grasping, anxious oceanic hug, the mass of which would pull them down, down, through the earth’s core, below hell and past the point of peaceful rest. The room spun so he spat on a point of the floor between his feet to fix himself to something solid. A security guard appeared from the margins and told him he would not have a second warning. Sonny apologized but before long his body reneged and he was thrown out onto the purple asphalt. 
          She stood before him. Finally. She was dressed in civilian clothes and barefaced. Her shrewd eyes and wide mouth barbed by schoolhouse braces took on a wizened symmetry as though a posed icon under moonlight. She removed a snub-nosed revolver from her plastic purse. The gun’s dime-sized barrel watched him with the mannered patience of a darkened star. 
          “Wait ... I can explain.” He softly raised his hands beneath the omni-colored glow of domestic beer signs.           The girl watched him, holding the gun with composure. 
          “We can go straight to the courthouse if you’d like,” she said, more annoyed than alarmed. 
          “Berry. I do not wish to upset nor disturb you.”
          “You’re in violation of your order.”
          “I know it. I do not do such a thing lightly.” 
          “What do you want?”
          “In my pocket.” 
          Berry approached him slowly, pressed the gun beneath his jaw, and retrieved the envelope from his worn denim. She backed away and with enough distance, stopped, and inspected the contents: a folded card and the remainder of his cash amounting to just over two hundred dollars.
          “I want you to have that.”
          “Why?”
          “I’m dying.”
          “Who could care?” He grimaced. “You bastard. Trying to avail yourself to me with money.”
          “I have made mistakes.”
          “What you done to my mother was no mistake.”
          He pursed his lips then frowned. “No, I suppose not. But if you don’t take that money, it’s gonna go to waste with me in the red dirt.”  
          She stowed the cash in her purse. Inside the card was a note. She burned it with a cheap bic flame and tossed the envelope in a bin overflowing with trash. He winced. As the embers disintegrated, she put the revolver in her purse.
          “I won’t never apologize for trying to be a father to you—”
          “She never spoke your name to me, not once. Know that.”
          He felt a sharp pain in his chest. “You know I ain’t meant nothing with them pictures,” he said, sheepishly. 
          “You’re nothing.”
          “But—” 
          “Get gone.”

          Aubergine clouds rolled steadily above as he walked down the narrow shoulder of a quiet nighttime road, lit only by the lazy light of straggling fireflies. He was never one for prayer, but he sent his will to the heavens, hoping that someday she might, if not forgive him, be able to unburden herself of the hate in her heart he sowed with his transgressions.
          Returning to the dim expanse of the garage, he inspected the half-finished coffin’s lid and resumed sanding it down. After a few moments, he felt weary and decided to leave it for the first task of the following morning. Before turning in, he felt a curious twinge, so he dragged a stepping stool up to the table hosting the coffin’s frame. He inserted himself in the box and lay down. His finger traced the oak grain rivets which rose and fell like a forest tree line, and in the dark, he heard comely songs that trees might sing, songs of nascent time, concerning the origins of malady and pleasure.