The light comes into Ray Aldous's workshop the way it has for forty years: through a single east window, over the shaving horse, landing on a floor so deep in white-oak curls that walking on it is nearly silent. It is six-thirty in the morning. The coffee is in a dented thermos on the windowsill. Ray straddles the horse the way other men settle into a truck, clamps a length of green oak under the crossbar, and pulls the drawknife toward his chest. The shop fills with a sound like a long, satisfied exhale.
The drawknife is older than he is. His grandfather Harlan bought it secondhand sometime in the 1940s, from a man in Rockcastle County who was giving up the trade, and its handles have gone the color of black tea from eighty years of palms. Ray sharpens it every Saturday whether it needs it or not. The blade is narrower than it once was — steel gives itself up a little at a time, the way everything in this shop does — but it still takes off a curl of oak you can read a newspaper through.
“My grandfather didn't explain much,” Ray says. “He'd set me on the shaving horse when I was seven and say, let the tool do the work, and then not tell me what that meant for about ten years. One day the knife just stopped fighting me. I remember he looked over and nodded, and went back to his own work. That nod was the whole diploma.”
Ray is sixty-one, third in a line of Aldous chairmakers that began when Harlan came home from the war and decided he would rather be poor in Berea than paid in Cincinnati. The workshop is board-and-batten, built by Harlan, patched by Ray's father, wired for electricity in 1974 and mostly forgiven for it. The town has changed around it — the college crowds, the galleries, the studio tours — but the shop keeps its own time, which is the time it takes green oak to dry.
Everything begins with a standing white oak, straight-grained and patient, which Ray fells himself in the woodlot behind the house. He does not saw his stock; he splits it, driving wedges along the grain so the wood comes apart where it wants to. Split wood keeps its fibers running the full length of a chair post, which is why a ladderback that weighs eight pounds can hold a two-hundred-pound man tipping back on its hind legs — which everyone does, and which Ray plans for.
The joinery is a quiet piece of physics. Ray bores his mortises into posts still wet from the tree and drives in rungs he has dried over the woodstove until they are lighter than they look. Then the chair does the rest. The wet post shrinks around the dry rung and grips it the way a hand closes over a coin. No glue, no screws, no fasteners of any kind. “I don't hold the chair together,” he says. “The chair holds itself together. All I do is introduce the parts.”
I don't hold the chair together. The chair holds itself together. All I do is introduce the parts.
He can tell by ear when a joint is right. The rung goes in with a mallet, and the sound climbs in pitch, tap by tap, until it rings instead of thuds — “like the wood clears its throat,” he says — and then he stops. Two taps past that and the post splits; two shy and the chair wobbles in a decade. Nobody taught him the sound so much as he absorbed it, the way you learn the click of your own front door.
Spring is for bark. There are maybe three weeks in May when the sap runs hard enough that hickory bark peels from the tree in long, ribboned strips, and Ray spends them in the woods with a pocketknife and a complaining back, taking bark the way his grandfather taught him — from trees already coming down, never more than the seats will need. The strips come off with a sound like tape pulling, sweet-smelling and slick, and he coils them in a washtub to wait for winter weaving.
“People ask why I don't just buy Shaker tape,” he says. “It's a fair question. The answer is that a hickory seat gets better for fifty years. It polishes where you sit. It takes on the shape of the person. I've rewoven seats where you could tell the man favored his right side, could tell he liked to lean. Cloth doesn't remember anybody.”
The business, such as it is, lives in a spiral notebook on a shelf next to the coffee thermos. There is no website. There is a phone that rings in the house, sometimes. The notebook holds around eighty names, which at Ray's pace of forty chairs a year works out to a two-year wait, and nobody has ever asked for their deposit back — partly because he doesn't take deposits.
“A lady in Ohio waited twenty-six months for a rocker,” he says, and there is a small amusement in him about it. “She sent me a Christmas card the first December that said, no rush. The second December it said, some rush. I moved her up the list. You can do that when the list is a notebook.”
For thirty years, the last decision on every chair was not his. Carol Aldous — schoolteacher, alto in the church choir, a woman who once made Ray return a store-bought pie carrier because “we know people who make those” — chose the finish on every chair that left the shop. Walnut oil or linseed, dark or honey, and on chairs meant for children, sometimes a milk paint the color of a robin's egg. She died three winters ago. The chair on her side of the porch still faces the road.
“I stood in the shop the first week after and could not finish a chair,” Ray says. “Built fine. It sat there white as a bone, no finish on it, for a month. Because that was her part. Finally I just asked her — out loud, felt like a fool — Carol, what does this one want? And I heard her plain as day: honey, it's for a young couple, don't you dare make it dark. So I didn't. I ask her every time now. She hasn't been wrong yet.”
I just asked her, out loud — Carol, what does this one want? She hasn't been wrong yet.
Chairs come back to him now that are older than their owners. A man drove one down from Lexington last fall for a new seat — Harlan's work, built in 1958, the bark worn to a shine like saddle leather. Ray wove it, sent it home, and did not charge for it. He keeps a list of those, too, the returning chairs, in the back pages of the notebook, and it is getting longer than the waiting list.
“Everything I make is going to outlive me, and I think about that at the bench, but not in a sad way,” he says. “A chair is the most human thing there is. It's built to hold somebody. Somebody I'll never meet is going to be held up by a thing I made after I'm gone — rock their babies in it, sit down hard in it the day they get bad news. You can't ask more of your hands than that.”
By evening the light has crossed the shop and gone. Ray sweeps the shavings into a feed sack — kindling for the house stove, nothing wasted — and hangs the drawknife on its nail, where the wall behind it has worn pale in the shape of the blade. Tomorrow there is a post to shave, a rocker to start for a name near the top of the notebook, an opinion to ask for. He turns off the light. Out on the porch, two chairs face the road, and one of them is waiting.
