Jeffrey thinks Mack wore his red and white hat “probably since 1984.” During my visits it rested reliably on his head when he mowed the lawn, walked to the library, and visited friends. Most likely never washed, it’s now crusty, and I considered bringing it home as a keepsake, but somewhere near those open prairies I decided to bury the hat with him.

Before I tossed it atop Mack’s coffin, I asked Keith, “Are you a Republican?”

“Yes.”

“I’m going to show you this anyway.”

I held out the hat and he laughed.

Aren’t all Kansan’s Republicans? Keith has two children, a boy six and a girl three. He told us, “You wouldn’t believe the mouth on her. I didn’t know kids that young could talk like that.” Diane and I had the same reaction, though unspoken. Count your blessings; you might have a Hil B in the making. To make sure there is no misunderstanding, I’m thinking his daughter was assertive, not vulgar.

I flipped the hat onto my father’s coffin, but Peter, the Virgo, had to hop down and center it perfectly over Mack’s head. Afterwards, Diane reminded me it landed near his toes as we’d intentionally positioned the casket so Mack’s feet pointed east.

With Mack in the box, in the ground and the lid lowered, I walked up to Keith. I thanked him for helping bury my father, and I held out two folded bills. He recoiled like the last honest politician turning down a bribe. Keith’s arms went straight down with his palms flat out and fingers pointed towards me. “I can’t take that. I get paid by the hour,” he said.

He caught me unaware, but I can’t say I was surprised. I live in a region where you feel guilty if you don’t tip the shopper holding the door for you at K-Mart. The further from the east you travel, the more civilized the country becomes. People are friendlier, they feel more honest, and you know your first stop, when you get back home, won’t be at an ATM.

However, I knew the winner of this friendly dispute and it wasn’t the man standing in front of me. Not this day. I dug as deep as I could as fast as I could.

“Look, my father was a generous man.” I said. “He’d want you to have the money.”

Keith watched us drive up with the casket in our car, worked hard to get it into the ground, wondered aloud where the funeral directors were, waited while Diane said the last words, and turned away as we hugged. We’d become friends and he wasn’t taking money from us, but how could he argue with my father?

The truth about my father is more ambiguous. He was generous in certain areas. He’d tip waitresses like Brian, at about thirty or forty percent, and if one of his kids needed money, he provided it. But shuffling through his checking account, I found one donation, to my new favorite charity, for ten dollars.

Diane wrote my father’s obituary and she ended our odyssey with a graveside reading of “After Apple-picking” by Robert Frost.

My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still,
And there’s a barrel that I didn’t fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn’t pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now.
Essence of winter sleep is on the night,
The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.
I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight
I got from looking through a pane of glass
I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough
And held against the world of hoary grass.
It melted, and I let it fall and break.
But I was well
Upon my way to sleep before it fell,
And I could tell
What form my dreaming was about to take.
Magnified apples appear and disappear,
Stem end and blossom end,
And every fleck of russet showing clear.
My instep arch not only keeps the ache,
It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.
I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.
And I keep hearing from the cellar bin
The rumbling sound
Of load on load of apples coming in.
For I have had too much
Of apple-picking: I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired.
There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,
Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.
For all
That struck the earth,
No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble,
Went surely to the cider-apple heap
As of no worth.
One can see what will trouble
This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.
Were he not gone,
The woodchuck could say whether it’s like his
Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,
Or just some human sleep.

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