“Abide With Me,” “The Old Rugged Cross,” and “In the Garden.” He wanted Reverend Mooney’s homily to last no more than ten minutes, and the Rev finished in just eight, ahead of schedule and, I believe, a personal best. Mostly the Rev just listed all the stuff Mr. Harrigan had done for Harlow, like paying to refurbish the Eureka Grange and fix up the Royal River covered bridge. He also put the fund drive for the community swimming pool over the top, the Rev said, but refused the naming privilege that went with it.
The Rev didn’t say why, but I knew. Mr. Harrigan said that allowing people to name things after you was not only absurd but undignified and ephemeral. In fifty years, he said, or even twenty, you were just a name on a plaque that everyone ignored.
Once I had done my scriptural duty, I sat in the front row with Dad, looking at the coffin with the vases of lilies at its head and foot. Mr. Harrigan’s nose stuck up like the prow of a ship. I told myself not to look at it, not to think it was funny or horrible (or both), but to remember him as he’d been. Good advice, but my eyes kept wandering back.
When the Rev finished his short talk, he raised his palm-down hand to the assembled mourners and gave the benediction. Once that was done, he said, “Those of you who would like to say a final word of goodbye may now approach the coffin.”
There was a rustle of clothes and a murmur of voices as people stood. Virginia Hatlen began to play the organ very softly, and I realized—with a strange feeling I couldn’t name then but would years later come to identify as surrealism—that it was a medley of country songs, including Ferlin Husky’s “Wings of a Dove,” Dwight Yoakam’s “I Sang Dixie,” and of course “Stand By Your Man.” So Mr. Harrigan had even left instructions for the exit music, and I thought, good for him. A line was forming, the locals in their sport coats and khakis interspersed with the New York types in suits and fancy shoes.
“What about you, Craig?” Dad murmured. “Want a last look, or are you good?”
I wanted more than that, but I couldn’t tell him. The same way I couldn’t tell him how bad I felt. It had come home to me now. It didn’t happen while I was reading the scripture, as I’d read so many other things for him, but while I was sitting and looking at his nose sticking up. Realizing that his coffin was a ship, and it was going to take him on his final voyage. One that went down into the dark. I wanted to cry, and I did cry, but later, in private. I sure didn’t want to do it here, among strangers.
“Yes, but I want to be at the end of the line. I want to be last.”
My dad, God bless him, didn’t ask me why. He just squeezed my shoulder and got into line. I went back to the vestibule, a bit uncomfortable in a sport jacket that was getting tight around the shoulders because I’d finally started to grow. When the end of the line was halfway down the main aisle and I was sure no one else was going to join it, I got behind a couple of suited guys who were talking in low tones about—wouldn’t you know it—Amazon stock.
By the time I got to the coffin, the music had stopped. The pulpit was empty. Virginia Hatlen had probably sneaked out back to have a cigarette, and the Rev would be in the vestry, taking off his robe and combing what remained of his hair. There were a few people in the vestibule, murmuring in low voices, but here in the church it was just me and Mr. Harrigan, as it had been on so many afternoons at his big house on the hill, with its views that were good but not touristy.
He was wearing a charcoal gray suit I’d never seen before. The funeral guy had rouged him a little so he’d look healthy, except healthy people don’t lie in coffins with their eyes shut and the last few minutes of daylight shining on their dead faces before they go into the earth forever. His hands were folded, making me think of the way they’d been folded when I came into his living room only days before. He looked