The Booth by the Window

Sunday

He died on a Sunday in early April, at ten past six in the morning, with Ellen on one side of the bed and me on the other. I had driven up Saturday night after my shift and she had let me stay. The last thing he said, near three o’clock, was “Is the coffee on?”

“It’s on, Uncle Hal,” Ellen said.

“Good,” he said, and slept.

I called Mom from the parking lot at dawn. She drove thirty-eight miles in her church cardigan and sat with me on the bench beside the garden, holding my hand in both of hers.

“Your dad would have taken him fishing,” she said after a while, and we both started laughing, and we kept on until an orderly came out to see if we needed help.

The funeral that was going to be small

Ellen planned a graveside service on the hill outside Tipton Corners, where Maryann was buried. Pastor Greg from the Methodist church would officiate, Saturday at ten. Ellen figured eight or ten people.

On Wednesday I stood at the register of the Prairie Rose and meant to say only, “He passed, thank you for letting me go.” But Vern’s crew was at the round table and the church ladies at the two-top, and Donna had flipped off the radio, and I said it to the whole room.

“Hal passed on Sunday. The man in the window booth. His name was Harold Dressler. He taught shop at Lindell High for thirty-four years. His wife Maryann grew up here. The service is Saturday at ten on the hill, if anybody wants to come. There won’t be many.”

Nobody spoke. Some of them were looking at the booth.

Vern put his fork down. He took off his seed cap, which he never did indoors. “I’ve sat twelve feet from that man every Thursday since June,” he said, to his own hands. “I never once said hello.”

“He said you were busy,” I told him. “He didn’t hold it against anybody.”

Vern nodded slowly and put the cap back on, and that was all of it. Donna walked to the front door and taped a sheet of paper over the glass: Closed Saturday 9 to noon. Funeral for our Thursday regular, Hal Dressler. Come if you can.

The hill

I have never forgotten that Saturday. Bright and cold, a clear Kansas sky and a wind, the grass just coming on the cemetery hill. I wore my father’s suit, taken in at the waist by Mom.

I came up the lane expecting eight people, and there were about forty. Vern in a clean white shirt, holding his wife June’s elbow. Donna without her apron, so that I did not know her at first. Marlene and the church ladies. My mother at the edge, her hand over her mouth.

And a row of men and women in work shirts with shop names on the pocket, some still in coveralls because they had come straight off a job. Dennis had made a few calls, and those had made a few more.

Pastor Greg read the Twenty-third Psalm and a short prayer. Then he said, “I understand some would like to say a word.”

Dennis went first. He stood at the foot of the grave with his cap in both hands, exactly as Hal had stood in the doorway of the Prairie Rose.

“Mr. Dressler taught somewhere around a thousand of us. Every one of us had a night when we were about to quit, and he walked past and said one word. The right one. And then walked on, like he hadn’t done anything.” He looked down at the cap. “That’s all I’ve got. He wouldn’t want more.”