The Names Carved Inside Dad’s Rifles

The morning of the funeral

I did not see the truck leave. I wish I could tell you I did, that I ran out in my robe and chased it down the lane, because that is the kind of story that makes a clean telling. The truth is messier. I was at my father’s house at seven that morning pressing Dale’s good shirt with an iron that kept sticking, half my mind on the eulogy I still had three lines unwritten in, and I heard a truck pull up the gravel and figured it was more casseroles, more folding chairs for the fellowship hall, somebody from the church doing what our town does when somebody dies, which is show up with food and labor before anybody even asks.

I did see Wade outside around then, in his good funeral pants and an old flannel shirt he hadn’t changed out of yet, loading something long and heavy wrapped in moving blankets into the bed of a truck that was not his. I called out to ask if he needed a hand. He said he had it, that he was just moving some of Dad’s things to the shop for safekeeping so the house wouldn’t sit full of valuables while half the county was at the funeral and the doors were unlocked. It made sense at the time. People do worry about an empty house during a funeral. I went back inside and finished the iron.

We buried our father at ten that morning at Mount Pleasant Cemetery, under a sky so flat and gray it looked like somebody had stretched a sheet over the whole county. Pastor Lonnie Shaw read the twenty third Psalm the way he reads it at every funeral in that church, slow and even, and I stood between my husband Dale and my daughter Mallory and did not cry until they lowered the casket, and then I cried the way you cry when a thing is actually real and not just a thing you’ve been told is coming.

I noticed Wade leave the graveside gathering early, before the last of the dirt was even shoveled in by the men from the funeral home. I thought he was overwhelmed. I did not think anything else of it. Grief does strange things to people, and my brother has never been a man who sits still with a feeling for very long.