The Word Missing From His Headstone

The proof sheet was at the bottom of the shoebox where I kept the sympathy cards, and my husband’s name on it was short by more than I saw at first.

I did not see that at first. I saw the drawing. A gray rectangle with a plain cross at the top, our family name across the middle in letters as tall as my hand, and two names beneath it, one on each side.

Roy’s was on the left. Roy E. Tisdale, then two years with a dash between them.

Mine was on the right. Eileen M. Tisdale, then 1956, then the dash, then a blank where the rest of me would go someday.

I read it standing at the sideboard with a card from the Methodist women still in my other hand. I read it again. Then I sat down on the dining room chair, because my knees had made the decision for me.

Roy E. Tisdale.

That was all. Not one thing more.

It was a Monday, the twenty-eighth of September, a little before five. The light came in low across the table where Roy had eaten his oatmeal every morning for fifty years.

At the bottom of the sheet, in a box, somebody had typed a note. Cutting scheduled Wednesday, September 30. Deposit received. Signed, K. Tisdale.

Kim.

I want to say right here that I did not get angry. People hear a story like this and expect me to say I shook. I did not shake. What came over me was cold and very clear, the way a pond goes clear in January.

Let me back up and tell you who Roy was, because the whole thing turns on it.

Roy Eugene Tisdale Junior. That was his name, all of it, and he wrote all of it. On checks, on the feed invoices, on the church pledge card, on the back of every photograph he ever labeled. Roy E. Tisdale Jr., with the period and the capital J.

He owned Tisdale Feed & Seed on Main Street in Maryville for forty-nine years. Feed reps came and went. Every new one asked him once whether he would like to drop the Junior, since his father was long gone and there was nobody to confuse him with.

Roy always gave the same answer. He said it so often it had worn smooth.

“Somebody’s got to still be Junior.”

I asked him once what he meant by it, in the first year of our marriage, when I was twenty and thought a man could be explained.

We were doing dishes. He dried, I washed. He held a plate a long time before he answered.

“My dad was Roy Senior,” he said. “He ran the leg at the co-op elevator. In October of 1966 a belt fouled and he went in to clear it and the leg started when it should not have.”