On Tuesday the twenty-seventh I went to Sycamore Hill to see my grandfather. I had not seen him since August, and I was ashamed of that too. He was in his chair by the window with a plaid blanket, and the aide said he had been asking whether I would come. I sat down on the edge of the bed.
He looked at me a long time. He is ninety-one, and some days the years slide around on him, but that day he was clear as a bell. He said, “You look like your father in that light.”
I said I was sorry.
He said, “A man can sell what has his name on the deed. I told your uncle that.” He waited. “I never said he should do it in the dark.”
I started to tell him about the taxes. I got as far as the letter, and he put up one hand, the way he used to do on the porch when a conversation had gone far enough.
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“I didn’t ask why,” he said. “I figured you’d tell me when you could carry it. Your uncle has the tent up. Next year you come hold a pole.”
I held his hand a while. Then I went out and sat in the parking lot with the engine off until the sun went behind the building.
The Box
I need to tell you about my father, because the rest of this turns on him, and I have not said his name aloud much since I was fifteen.
Orley Penrod was a milk-route driver. He was forty-one, tall, easy, a man who laughed at his own jokes before he got to the end of them. On Tuesday the fourth of November, 2003, he was standing in our yard with a cup of coffee, and he sat down on the grass as if he had just remembered something, and he was gone before the ambulance came out from town. I was fifteen. My mother, Norma, was thirty-nine, and she had a boy and a mortgage and no savings, and in the first week I thought we would lose the house.
We did not. The funeral was on Friday the seventh at Raymer Funeral Chapel in Darrow, and it was full. I remember the hall packed to the doors, the road department trucks parked along the street, and a line of men I did not know holding their caps. I remember that the cost of it never came up. My mother told me, in the car afterward, that the volunteer fire department had taken up a boot drive and the church had given what it could, and that Mr. Raymer had told her the rest was handled. I was fifteen. I did not ask what handled meant. I have thought many times since about how a family that cannot pay for a funeral can walk out of one without a bill, and I was always, somewhere, grateful and unquestioning, the way a boy is.