The Fifty I Laid On His Desk

The ground had not frozen yet, and the wind came across the bean stubble cold and steady, and Pastor Lund read the committal with his collar turned up.

Afterward everybody went down to the church basement for the lunch. If you have been to a Lutheran funeral in southwest Minnesota you know that basement.

Folding tables with white paper on them, a long counter with the coffee urns, and the church women in aprons bringing out ham buns and potato salad and pan after pan of bars.

I got a plate and sat down with the crew at a table near the back. Nobody was hungry, but you eat at a funeral lunch.

That is just what you do. You eat a ham bun and you say it is good, because some woman got up at five to make them.

That was when I saw Hobart.

He had come in late to the service and sat in the back pew. I had not been sure he would come at all.

He was standing by himself next to the coffee urn, holding a styrofoam cup, not drinking from it, not talking to anybody.

I had worked for Hobart Kvale for twenty-one years. I had never once seen him look out of place anywhere.

In the shop, at a job site, at the bank, the man owned every room he walked into.

In that church basement he looked like he was waiting for somebody to tell him where to sit.

I did not get up. It was not my place, and it was not the day.

I was not going to have one cross word with any man in that basement, least of all over a dead friend’s ham buns.

But Vernon Olson saw him too. Kyla’s dad came across the room in his brown suit with his plate still in his hand, and he walked right up to Hobart by the urn. I was maybe twenty feet away. I heard every word.

“You’re Sully’s boss,” Vernon said. “Mr. Kvale.”

“I am,” Hobart said. “I’m very sorry for your loss.”

“I appreciate that.” Vernon shifted his plate to the other hand and put out his right one, and Hobart shook it. “I wanted to thank you. I wanted to thank your men. I don’t know if you heard.”

Hobart’s face did not change. “Heard what?”

“Your crew took up a collection,” Vernon said. “Eighteen hundred dollars. Those boys bought my son-in-law’s casket.” His voice wobbled a little but he got it back. “Fourteen men. I don’t know any of them hardly, and they bought his casket. You must run a good outfit, to have men like that.”

He meant it kindly. There was not one ounce of meanness in Vernon Olson.

He was a farmer thanking a businessman for his employees, the way you would thank a man whose dog had found your lost calf.

I watched Hobart’s face go still. I watched him look across the basement until he found our table in the back, and I watched his eyes go from one face to the next. Juddy. Pete. Tanner in his borrowed tie. Me.

“I didn’t know that,” Hobart said quietly. “No. I didn’t know that.”

“Well, now you do,” Vernon said, and patted him on the arm, and went back to sit with his wife.

Hobart stood there a little longer. Then he set his full cup of coffee down on the counter next to the urn, and he went up the basement stairs and out the side door. He left before the women brought out the bars.