The Funeral Money My Brother Moved
So I did not call the bank again. I called Aunt Ruth.
**
Ruth is our mother’s younger sister by three years, eighty one years old this past August, and she still lives alone on the home place outside of Volga, still drives her own Buick into town for church and groceries, and still puts up forty quarts of tomatoes every August whether anybody eats them or not. She buried her own husband, our Uncle Carl, twenty two years ago and never once talked about remarrying, not because nobody asked, two men from the Lutheran Men’s Club did, over the years, but because she said once was plenty of heartbreak to risk in one lifetime.
There is a story in our family, the kind that gets told at Thanksgiving until it’s worn soft at the edges, about the summer Dennis was fourteen and got caught taking folding money out of the collection plate at Trinity Lutheran during the second verse of the offertory hymn. He’d slid two fives out from under the stack and into his jacket sleeve, smooth as anything, and he’d have gotten clean away with it except that Ruth was sitting directly behind him and saw the whole thing over his shoulder.
She did not tell Pastor Odegaard. She did not tell our parents, not that day. She waited until Dennis was alone in the church basement after the potluck, rinsing a coffee urn, and she walked up behind him and said, in a voice our mother still imitates to this day, Dennis Oland, you are going to put that money back in the plate yourself next Sunday, in front of the whole congregation if I have to stand you up there myself, or you are going to tell me exactly why a boy who has never missed a meal in his life thinks he’s owed something that belongs to God and everybody else in that room.
He put it back the next Sunday, white faced, and Ruth stood two pews behind him the whole time to make sure he did it, and to this day, thirty eight years later, my brother is more afraid of disappointing Ruth than he has ever been of our own mother or father. I think it’s because our parents’ disappointment always came with love wrapped around it, soft at the corners, and Ruth’s disappointment has never once come with anything wrapped around it at all. It is just itself, plain and square, and somehow that is what Dennis respects.
I called her that Wednesday afternoon and told her everything, and there was a long silence on the line, long enough that I thought the call had dropped.
“Eleven thousand dollars,” Ruth said finally. “For her funeral.”
“Yes.”
“And he told you she wouldn’t need it.”
“Yes.”