The Town That Remembered Walt Kessler
Saturday came in clear and cold, the kind of October morning where the light sits flat and bright across a field of browned cornstalks and your breath shows when you talk. Reuben was at Hartman’s by seven to help set up the overflow chairs we borrowed from the Methodist church basement, and I was there by eight with coffee for anybody who showed up early to help, because that is what thirty one years in this auxiliary teaches you, that the morning of a funeral has its own kind of work that has nothing to do with grief yet.
By nine the small gravel lot beside Hartman’s was full.
By a quarter to ten, cars were parked along the shoulder of Route 9 for a good hundred yards, and I stood at the chapel door in my good black coat and watched people walk up that gravel drive for a man most of them had never once spoken a word to in their lives.
An old man in a VFW cap, leaning on a cane, stood at attention and saluted the hearse the moment it rolled into view, before it had even come to a stop.
Harold Fenn arrived with his daughter driving, and he did not say a word to me, just gripped my hand at the door for a long moment and nodded, and I understood that some things a man his age does not have new words for anymore, and the grip of a hand says it instead.
Mrs. Hale came in with six of her history club students, all of them in their good clothes, trying very hard to look like they understood the weight of where they were, and mostly succeeding. Emily found me at the door and hugged me hard.
“Grandma, none of us thought this many people would come for someone we’d never met.”
“Neither did I,” I told her. “That’s why we called.”
Near the back wall I found Verna Pike standing alone, her coat buttoned to the throat, dabbing at her eyes with a tissue before the service had even started. Verna had buried her own husband Frank in this same chapel only four months before, with considerably more than four mourners but fewer than fifty.
“I almost didn’t come,” she told me. “I thought, what business do I have crying over a man I never met, when I’m still not done crying over my own. Then I thought, somebody ought to be here who knows what it is to lose a soldier, even an old one, even one nobody else remembers was ever young and scared on the other side of the world.” She squeezed my arm. “Frank would have wanted somebody here for this man. So here I am.”