One last promise
For decades, carpenter Asa Groves said that someday he'd find a use for that cherry wood. Then it became his most meaningful work.
By AMY WIMMER SCHWARB
Published November 7, 2004
BROOKSVILLE - Asa Groves weighs 110 pounds after a big meal. He walks with one shoulder hanging lower than the other. Since his wife, Dollie, died last summer, the folks from hospice check in on him at least once a week.
But even at 94, he can bend over to pick up his toy poodle, Dot, and put her on the chair beside him, which is where she usually likes to be.
Asa and Dot didn't used to get along this well. He would tease her, and she would yip, and he would fuss at her for yipping. But then Dollie, who loved that dog so much she smuggled her into family portraits and fed her in a highchair pulled up to the kitchen table, would fuss at her husband for agitating the dog, and he'd stop the teasing.
Those were the days before Dollie died, before her flowers withered out back. Before he started spending all that time in his honey-house-turned-woodshop, just because he promised Dollie he would. Before he started marking time more grandly than he ever had before, mostly because he had more of it.
Asa grew up in a time and place where he learned to hold onto things as disposable as a plank of wood, never sure when he might need it. He couldn't bear to discard anything beautiful or meaningful, not a plank, and certainly not a promise.
But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Before there was a Dot, or a highchair or a hospice or a honey house, or a low-hanging shoulder and a promise and a new way to mark the time, there were two teenagers on a mountain in West Virginia.
Asa Groves was the oldest of 12. Dollie Feather was the youngest of eight. They both grew up in homes without running water or electricity. Their families say she was the baby, accustomed to being taken care of, and he was accustomed to taking care, so they fit together nicely.
They met when Asa was 18, and Dollie 17, at an end-of-the-school-year celebration at the schoolhouse in Preston County, W.Va. He was a skinny kid ("Asy never weighed more than 120 pounds, even when he was fat," said his baby brother, Junior Ray Groves), but he impressed Dollie by hamming it up in a play that night.
That was in the late 1920s, and a boy with a car offered Dollie a ride. But the offer she accepted that night was from Asa, the boy who quit school after ninth grade and had to walk her through the mud to escort her home. "And that's what started the ball rolling," Asa said.
Asa's daddy was a timberman in the days of the crosscut saw, when finding a horse to lug the logs off the mountain for you was a luxury. The timberman's son fell in love with the wood his father cut. Black walnut, ash, red oak, all first-cut American hardwoods. Unlike his father, who cut trees and worked in the coal mines, and his mother, who ran a farm just big enough to keep her large family fed, Asa was going to be a carpenter.
He was still courting Dollie when her father got sick, and Asa took over the farming at her place. It was 1933, and by then, the stock market crash of 1929 had filtered from Wall Street to the farmers and coal miners of Briar Mountain.
"Those were rough days," Asa recalled. "We didn't have one dollar to rub against the other. We just done the best we could."
Around that time, Dollie's father sold 40 or 50 acres of timber for mine posts, used to build scaffolding inside a cavernous coal mine to keep the deep holes secure and navigable. Asa and his brother Virgil cleared the land, felling enough trees for 50,000 posts. They carried the logs by hand through territory too rugged for a horse to maneuver, with one man on one end and one on the other.
Which explains why, to this day, one of Asa's shoulders droops lower than the other. "I'm crooked," Asa said. "It never bothered me much."
Asa thought it a shame for all that pretty cherry wood to end up in the belly of the earth. So he asked his buddy at the sawmill to set aside a few planks and fantasized about what he could do with that beautiful grain and rich color, if he ever found the time.
One day, he figured, he'd make something nice.
Asa married Dollie in 1936, the same year her father died. He craved carpentry that honed his finishing skills, but he took any job that paid: remodeling houses, working in factories. During World War II, he built plywood seats for B-29 bombers at a factory in Norfolk, Va.
In 1950, when land in Florida was cheap and work for carpenters was plenty, he put a down payment on 10 acres east of Brooksville that he had never seen. He bought it through the mail.
When he did see it, he knew Dollie and their two children, Betty and Jim, couldn't live on it. Ten acres of thorns and scrub oak, with no roads, water, electricity or neighbors. He sacrificed his down payment and the first payment.
"I told them if they'd've given me the land," Asa said, "I wouldn't've paid the taxes on it."
He bought 8 1/2 acres closer to town, set up a tent for the family between two oak trees on the property, and went to work building a house.
Except the house was never really finished. He started off with one room, then added a couple of bedrooms, and a breezeway, and one bathroom, and then another. When Dollie started cooking for community gatherings down at Brooksville's Teen Hall, he built her a second kitchen.
Two of his brothers followed him to Florida, just as they had followed him into the carpentry business. Together they formed Groves Brothers Inc., and they worked into the 1970s building houses and remodeling kitchens in Hernando County.
"Asy was never much on power tools. He liked a hatchet," said Junior Ray, 69. Twenty-five years younger than his oldest brother, he was often confused for Asa's son when they worked together. His family calls him by his first name, Junior, but he doesn't much care for it and introduces himself as Ray. J.R. is a good compromise, too, he says.
J.R. took to calling Asa "the hatchet man." He was accurate enough with a hatchet to use it for more than rough-cutting, and he kept it sharp enough to cut the hairs on his forearms. "If he was doing carpentry work, he had a hatchet," J.R. said. "It was kind of like his right arm."
Asa was precise with his trim work, and persnickety about using the right nails for each job.
"I never had the patience to sit in the shop, myself," J.R. said. "I'd rather do rougher stuff. He was a real precise carpenter."
On Sunday mornings, Asa would drive through rural Hernando County, picking up children who didn't go to church and inviting them to his house for Sunday School. The little Sunday morning gatherings ballooned into a new church in Brooksville, the Church of the Nazarene.
Sometimes, amid raising two kids and building other people's houses and passing the GED test and working with his brothers and teaching Sunday School, Asa found time for his hobby, keeping bees. He built a honey house in the back yard and had 160 colonies.
Eventually beekeeping became a profitable hobby, a second business. But one time, when he was hauling bee colonies down a curvy road near Beverly Hills in Citrus County, he flipped the truck. The escape of 27 colonies of bees, stacked double-decker on the truck, stopped traffic. "Everybody was afraid of the bees," Asa said.
And that was the end of his honey business.
His honey house became a home for all that spare timber, the special cherry from Dollie's farm, the spare fence posts from an old park in Brooksville and some California redwood he bought from the widow of a man like him who held onto wood pieces.
"Wood like that is pure gold," Asa said.
In August 1990, his monthly Woodsmith magazine arrived with a picture of a grandfather clock on the cover. It was intricately made, with pages of measurements and router details inside the magazine. Dollie thought it would look pretty in cherry.
Asa agreed, set the plans aside and started dreaming on that grandfather clock, but promptly lost the magazine.
He turned 80, then 85. He found time for cobbling around, turning redwood into a magazine rack and napkin holders. Asa and Dollie tracked down the date on that Woodsmith magazine, and reordered it.
"He has saved so many things," said Betty Brabham, 67, Asa and Dollie's daughter. "And when he needs something at the house, instead of going and buying it, he'll look in his shed, in his storage shed, and he'll put little pieces of this and that together, and he'll build what he needs."
Asa and Dollie weren't children of the Depression; they were grown up by then, old enough to feel it. They're from a generation that reused bread bags once the Wonder was gone.
That's how Dollie got her sun porch. Asa used some planks from the shed, and some spare glass panels his brother had at his house.
"That was one thing that she wanted that he figured out a way to do without a lot of expense," said Betty, a retired teacher who lives in Gainesville. "Up until she got sick, they would eat breakfast out there and eat lunch out there sometimes."
After the reordered Woodsmith arrived, he picked out the pieces still suitable for the clock - that cherry wood had been waiting for him for 70 years by then - and started working steadily on it. It would be the most detailed project this hatchet man had ever created.
But no hatchet would touch it. "Nah, that would ruin his image with that clock," J.R. said. "That was some high-class finish work."
Dollie was 91, with congestive heart failure. She slept in a hospital bed in the enclosed breezeway. Asa spent less and less time with his clock and more and more time with his wife. "I asked the Lord to let me live long enough to take care of her," Asa said, "because she was failing."
In the days before Dollie died, Dot wasn't herself. She snapped at family and friends who stopped by to visit. She yipped and growled, and Asa wasn't even teasing her.
Dollie wanted to know what Asa would do with her dog once she was gone. "I'll take care of her," he told her.
She had one more request for Asa, the man who walked her home and farmed her family's land and built her a house and agreed to take on her dog. She wanted him to finish that clock.
"She said, "Well, I won't be here,' " Asa recalled. "And I said, "Anyway, I'll finish it for you, because I told you I was going to."'
Asa was confident he would finish the grandfather clock. He wasn't so sure he and Dot would learn to coexist.
He used to pick up Dot with gloves, so conditioned was he to her attempts to bite him. But these days, more than a year after Dollie's death, Dot stays close to Asa, yipping incessantly until he picks her up, bare-handed.
"When Dollie lived, you didn't dare touch this dog, hardly," Asa said. "I wasn't near as popular then."
The clock stands in the breezeway, taller than Asa, just a few feet from where Dollie's hospital bed used to be.
"I did it for Dollie because that wood, it come from her home, where she was raised," Asa said, "and I just had the desire."
He took the advice of his brother J.R., who told him to take his time and work at that clock as long as he felt like it, then come back and work a little more the next day.
Asa finished this summer, then set the clock chimes to sound every 15 minutes. He recoils at the suggestion that the chimes remind him of Dollie. "I don't need to hear it," he said, "to think of her."
He moved his own bed to the breezeway. From there, even as his ears fail, he can hear the chimes clearly, and often.
- Amy Wimmer Schwarb can be reached at 352 860-7305 or wimmer@sptimes.com