My husband Iverson built every pew in Ivy Junction Community Church with his own two hands, and I found that out meant nothing to the board six years after I buried him, when I pulled into the gravel lot on a Monday morning in April and found a salvage truck backed up to the fellowship hall doors with its ramp already down.
I want to tell this slowly, because it did not happen all at once to me. It happened the way water gets into a barn, low and quiet at first, until one morning you step in and the whole floor gives.
I am seventy years old. I have lived in Ivy Junction, Iowa my whole life except for four years in Cedar Rapids when Iverson and I were first married and he was learning finish carpentry from a cabinet shop there, and even those four years he talked about coming home to a town small enough that everybody’s church still had a bell you could hear from the feed store. We came home in 1974. He opened Wickham’s Woodworking on the corner of Route 9 and Second, in the same building the co-op uses now for tractor parts, and for the next thirty years there was not a barn raised, a porch rebuilt, or a casket made in this county that did not have his hands somewhere on it.
Ivy Junction is the kind of town where the whole county still runs on the same clock: the feed store opens at seven, the diner on Second Street fills up with cap-wearing men at six-thirty for coffee before chores, and everybody who isn’t at the Methodist church or the Catholic one down the road is at ours. We are not a big congregation. On a good Sunday we fill maybe eleven of the fourteen pews. But we are the kind of small where everybody’s grandfather built something in this town that is still standing, and everybody’s grandmother’s name is on a hot dish somewhere in the church kitchen’s recipe box, and you cannot walk into the VFW hall on a Friday fish fry without somebody asking after your family three generations back. That is the town Iverson and I came home to in 1974, and it is the town I have never once thought about leaving, not even after he was gone and there was nothing left holding me here but a house too big for one and a pew with my name nowhere written on it that anybody could see.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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