The Funeral Money My Brother Moved

Myron Severson still keeps his office the way his father kept it, a rolltop desk and a green banker’s lamp and a framed photograph of the three generations of Seversons who have run that funeral home since 1931, and when Dennis and Ruth walked in Monday afternoon with a cashier’s check for eleven thousand, two hundred and forty dollars, Myron did not ask a single question about why it had been missing or where it had been. He had known our family fifty years. He set up what he called an irrevocable pre need trust, the kind the state insurance board actually requires funeral homes to keep separate from their own operating funds, the kind that by law cannot be touched by anybody, not the funeral home, not a family member, not even Myron himself, except to pay for the services it is meant for. He walked Dennis through the paperwork himself, slow and patient, and at the end of it he shook Dennis’s hand and said, your mother did right by her family thirty years running, and it looks to me like today you did too, son, which is the kind of thing a man like Myron says instead of forgiveness, because in a town this size, the undertaker has learned exactly how much weight a sentence can carry without ever raising his voice.

I did not go to that meeting. Ruth told me about it afterward, over coffee at her kitchen table in Volga, the same table where I had sat as a girl shelling peas with her every August. She said Dennis cried in the truck on the way home, not loud, just steady, the kind of crying a man does when he has been carrying something heavy long enough that putting it down costs him something too.

“He’ll be all right,” Ruth said. “He’s not a bad man, Peg. He’s a scared one who did a bad thing, and there’s a difference, same as there was a difference the Sunday he put those two fives back in the plate. The difference is whether he does it again.”

I asked her how she knew he wouldn’t.

“I don’t know it,” she said. “I believe it, because he’s going to have to look his own boy in the eye about this for the rest of that boy’s life, and because I intend to ask Myron every single January, until the day I die myself, whether that trust is still whole. Some promises hold because a man’s good. Some hold because somebody’s watching. I’ll take either one, so long as it holds.”

**

Dennis did sit his son David down, out on the porch of their own house, two days later, and told him the whole of it, start to finish, and David told me himself, months on, at Christmas, a little awkward about it the way sixteen year old boys are awkward about anything that touches feelings, that his dad had looked him in the eye the entire time and hadn’t tried to make it sound smaller than it was. I think that was its own kind of consequence, maybe the realest one, harder in its way than any bank or badge could have handed him. A man can survive being corrected by his aunt. What stays with him longer is having to be honest in front of his own son.