The Last Ride Across The Ferry

Lyle and the hearse

Along about eleven o’clock, a long black car came down the bottoms road, moving slow, and the whole line of trucks went quiet and let it to the front.

It was Lyle. Lyle Tolliver has run the funeral home in our town for thirty-some years, and he has buried most everyone my father ever carried, including my mother.

He drove the hearse down to the landing. It was empty in the back. There was no one to bury that day. He had brought the hearse on purpose.

For thirty years my father had carried Lyle’s hearse across that river for free. Every funeral on the east side of the county, every grave in the old cemetery across the water, my father had run that cable and waved the dollar away and touched his hat.

Lyle drove the empty hearse onto the deck, and set the brake, and got out. He stood on the steel deck in his black suit next to my father.

He tried to hand my father a dollar. My father, out of forty-one years of pure habit, started to wave it off, because you do not charge a hearse.

And Lyle put the dollar in my father’s hand and closed my father’s fingers around it and held them there, and he said, Harlan, today you take it. Today I pay.

My father could not say anything. Neither could Lyle. Two old men on a steel boat on a brown river, holding onto a one dollar bill between them, neither one able to get a word out.

My father rang the bell. He carried the empty hearse across the Saline and back, with Lyle standing beside him the whole way, and the whole county watching from both banks, and nobody said a single word.

When they came back to the landing, Lyle got in the hearse and drove up the ramp and parked it off to the side. He did not leave.

I understand now that Lyle had something to do that was not finished yet. He was the one the county had picked to tell my father, at the end. He was waiting for the right moment. But I did not know that yet.

I just knew I had watched two grown men break each other’s hearts with kindness, over a one dollar bill, and I had to walk down the bank a ways and get myself together.