The Thousand My Wife Laughed At

And Travis looked at Katie, and Katie looked at me, and she said, “He didn’t tell you?”

He had not told me.

Here is what I learned in that waiting room over the next few hours, from the people who filled it. I learned it in pieces, from Ruth and the Hobbs and Marv Bauer and old Deacon Pruitt and the man who ran the monument shop out on the highway, who I had never met in my life and who drove forty minutes to sit with me because he said he could not stay home knowing.

Travis and Katie Hobbs had lost a baby in the spring. A little girl, born still at thirty-six weeks, and they named her Grace. They had nothing. Rented ground, a bad year behind them, and they buried that baby at Ferris Cemetery with a little metal marker from the funeral home, the temporary kind, a tin frame with a paper card in it that says the name until the family can afford a stone. Most families get the stone in a year or two. The Hobbs could not see how they ever would.

My father found out. I still do not know exactly how, Ferris being Ferris, word gets around. And my father went out to the monument shop on the highway, the one owned by the man who drove forty minutes to sit with me, and he ordered a granite headstone for a baby he had never met. Gray granite, he picked it himself, with a little lamb carved in the corner and the name Grace and the one date, and under it the words he chose, which the monument man told me and which I will carry to my own grave: SHE WAS LOVED THE WHOLE TIME.

The stone cost sixteen hundred dollars. My father had six hundred set by. He put the six hundred down and he told the man he would have the rest within the month. And then he came to my kitchen on Tuesday night to borrow the thousand that would finish paying for a headstone for a stranger’s baby, and he would not say what it was for, because in seventy-one years my father had never once told anybody what his giving was for.

“He made me promise not to say it came from him,” the monument man told me. “Said if the Hobbs asked, I was to tell them it was covered by a fund. There’s no fund. There’s just your dad. There’s been just your dad for thirty years.”

That was when Marv Bauer told me the rest.

My father, it turned out, had an arrangement with Marv going back to before I was grown. Any family in the county that could not cover a burial, Marv was to do it right anyway, a real casket and a real service, and send the difference quietly to Earl Renner. No county boxes. No pauper’s funerals. Not in his county.