The Funeral They Said Was For Family

“Floyd Benson,” he read, “was a man of simple pleasures. He loved his garden. He loved his church. He loved his truck. And he loved, above all, the family he built.” He paused where the script paused. “He is survived by his beloved wife of twenty-seven years, Marcy, and by his devoted church family, who stood by him to the end. In lieu of flowers, the family asks for donations to the Fairbury Methodist ladies’ guild.”

That was the entire list of survivors.

Not a daughter. Not one word. In lieu of flowers, give to her guild.

I felt Doyle’s hand close around my elbow, hard enough to leave a bruise.

“Not yet,” he whispered.

Pastor Marv came to the end. There was a rustle of tissues in the pews. Jean played a few chords, softly, to cover the shift, and the pastor looked toward the side door, and I nodded through the gap, though he could not have seen it.

“Thank you, Jean,” he said.

“Before we go to the cemetery,” Pastor Marv said, “Floyd asked me to read some words he wrote himself. He asked that nobody be allowed to stop me. I am going to honor that.”

A chair scraped in the front row.

“Marv.” Marcy’s voice, sharp as a dropped pan. “That is not on the program.”

“No, Marcy. It is not.”

“I did not approve it.”

“I know,” said Pastor Marv. “I did not ask you to.”

There was a silence in that chapel that I will hear when I am ninety. I pressed my eye to the narrow gap at the edge of the door and I saw my stepmother half out of her seat, one gloved hand gripping the pew in front of her, and the folded yellow paper rising into the light. I saw her look at it. I saw the exact moment she recognized my father’s handwriting, the block capitals he used on every feed-store receipt for sixty years, and I saw her smile go out of her face as if somebody had turned a switch.

What Dad Wrote

I could hear every word. I am going to give them to you as Pastor Marv read them, because I have read the original so many times since that I know it the way you know a prayer.

“To whoever is in this room. This is Floyd Benson. If Marv is reading this, then I am dead and Marcy has done what I was afraid she would do, and I want to say a few things before they put me in the ground, because I did not say them while I could.

“I was married to Marcy for twenty-seven years. I want everyone to hear that I loved her. I mean that. She was good company when I was a lonely man, and she made me laugh when I had forgotten how. But I want to say something that will not be easy to hear, and I am going to say it anyway, because it is true. I let my wife make my daughter feel like a guest in her own father’s house. I saw it. I saw it at Christmas and at graduation and at every church supper. I saw it, and I told myself it was easier to keep the peace than to stand up and be a man about it. That is my sin. I want it written down that it was mine and not hers.

“Because I am the one who should have stopped it. And I did not.