Chapter 4: Two Funerals
My mother died in the spring of 2015, in a hospital room with a window that faced a parking garage, so that the last view she got of the world was other people coming and going. She would have had opinions about that.
She had been ill a long time in the way that lets a family pretend. There were good months arranged like stepping stones, and we stepped on them carefully, all of us, and did not look at the water. I was twelve. I did my homework in that hospital room and she checked it with a pencil she could barely hold, and she still caught my spelling. Read it honest. She was reading me honest, I think, the whole time. She knew the size of what was coming and she spent her strength the way she spent everything — on the books being right and the people being fed.
She died on a Thursday morning with my father holding her hand and me holding the other one, and the room was very quiet, and that is all I have ever needed to say about it, and it is all I am going to say now.
The town came to her funeral in its hundreds. The shop closed for three days. My father stood in the receiving line in a suit that Bear had to bully him into and shook every hand like a man signing for a delivery he had not ordered. Afterward, in our kitchen, he sat at the table with his head in those scarred hands, and I made him tea, because it was the only machine I knew how to run, and he drank it like I'd saved his life.
He worked after that. The shop ran, the club rode, I grew three inches and learned to do the books in my mother's handwriting, ruled columns, feelings second. We were not all right. We were all right's hardworking cousin, and for three years that was enough to stand on.
Then 2018.
I was fifteen, and it was an October night, and the state patrol came to Lorraine's door because that is where the school bus dropped me on the days my father ran late — and he had run late, permanently, out on the interstate, in weather that wasn't even bad. A crash is a flat word for a thing that is not flat at all. I will not describe what they told us. They were kind, and it did not matter, and then Bear was there — Bear filled Lorraine's doorway and got down on one knee, which for a man his size is a construction project, and held my face in those dinner-plate hands and said, "Breathe with me, little bit. In. Out. Your daddy taught us all how to do this part, and we're going to do it the way he taught us."
Three hundred motorcycles came to my father's funeral.
I counted, because counting was a thing I could do with my hands shaking. They came from every chapter in four states, men and women my father had fixed bikes for, fed, buried people beside, stood up with. The procession took twenty minutes to pass the church. I remember the sound most — not loud, though it was loud, but low, a weather system of engines, idling at the cemetery gates because Eli Calloway's daughter was fifteen and the least the road could do was wait for her.
They buried him with his hands clean. I checked. I looked at his hands in that box like he'd taught me, and they had washed them twice, with the brush, and it undid me more than anything else that day.
The chain was not at the funeral. I know that now, the way you know things later. But I knew about the chain all my life — everybody in the club did. It had come off his first motorcycle, a wreck of a thing he bought at nineteen with money from a summer of other people's hay fields, and he ran that chain a hundred thousand miles and then hung it on the shop wall by the office door, and through every bike and every year after, it stayed. Men touched it coming in, some of them, the way you touch a doorframe in a house you respect. He said it was the part that carried the power from the engine to the road, and that a man who forgot what carried him was a man about to walk.
I was fifteen, and I did not know it was already gone from that wall. I did not know he had taken it down, and sealed it in an envelope, and given my future its instructions.
I only knew the wall looked wrong. I stood in that empty shop a week after we buried him, and the wall by the office door looked wrong, and I could not have told anyone why.