Thirty Christmas Eves in the Poor Box
Dale,
Father Ted will give you the line. I’m sorry I couldn’t say it myself. I tried a number of times and it came out wrong.
I never wanted it to be yours. I wanted to carry it so you wouldn’t have to. But I won’t be here to start the truck, and somebody’s got to, and I’d sooner it be you than nobody.
You don’t have to do it my way. Do what’s right. You always did.
Your dad
I read it twice.
I remembered then the last thing he said to me, which I’d told no one. It was around two in the morning, the night before he died. He woke and looked at me clear as day. He said, “Is it near Christmas?” And I said, “It’s the middle of November, Dad.” And he said, “Somebody’s got to start the truck.” And I said, “I’ll do it, Dad. Don’t worry,” because that’s what you say.
I sat through the Mass in the third pew, on the aisle, where we have always sat. I had left my father’s place empty on the other side of me, and nobody in Tabor Creek was fool enough to take it. Karen sat on my left. She’d come straight from her shift with her badge still clipped on, and she’d squeezed my hand when I slid in, and she had not asked.
Across the aisle sat my uncle Herb.
He had come up from Grand Island for the funeral and stayed on with us through Christmas, because he’d been a widower four years. He’s seventy-eight. He has my father’s jaw and none of his reticence; he talks to every dog, child, and checkout girl he meets. During the homily he looked over at me and winked, the way he’d done since I was small. Don’t take any of this too hard, kid.
Father Ted gave the homily. It was five minutes long, and I wouldn’t have sworn to a word of it. Near the end he stopped and rested both hands on the pulpit and said, “Some of you have been carrying something this year. You know who you are. Put it down for one night. It will wait for you in the morning, and it will be lighter.” He did not look at me. But I felt it land.
Karen put her arm through mine at the sign of peace, and then she did something she had never done in church. She leaned her head on my shoulder in front of everyone.
When the last hymn ended, I did not go down to the hall for coffee. I walked to the back of the church.
The poor box stands inside the main doors, under the little plaster statue of Saint Anthony. It’s a newer box than the one Father Ted told me about, steel with a brass slot, bolted to the wall in 1991 after somebody pried the old one. I had walked past it a thousand times. I had never once looked at it.
I stood in front of it with my father’s envelope in my hand.
I thought: I’m a propane driver, and my father was a better man than I am, and I do not know the prayer. And then I heard, behind me, the slow shuffle of a man in good shoes stopping.
“That the thing Bert used to do?” my uncle Herb said.
I turned around.