because what was wrapped in that shop rag was not the kind of thing you brace yourself for.
It was an urn. A small brass urn, heavy for its size the way they are, and taped to the bottom was a folded paper from a funeral home in Ohio. A cremation record. A womans name, Eleanor, eighty-eight years old, and a date only a few weeks before that Impala came in off the county road with its door hanging open.
I have cleaned out cars at this Marshalltown lot for eight years and I have found things I still think about. I never found a person before. I knelt there in the door of that car with an old woman in my two hands and I had to get up and go stand out in the lot a while before I could think straight.
Somebody had been carrying their mother home. That is what the wrapped-up rag under the seat was. Not hidden out of shame. Wrapped careful, tucked where it would not slide, the way you protect the most precious thing in the car. And then the car had broken down or been left, and somebody had lost their mother twice.
Inside the funeral home paper was a line the family must have chosen for the service.
Take me back to the farm, Eleanor always said. Bury me where I can hear the corn.
I did not run this one through the office. I did not want it to be paperwork. That funeral home in Ohio was still there, and the director remembered the family, and after a few careful phone calls I had a son, down in Kansas now, who had been sick about this for a month. His mother had passed, and he had been driving her ashes back to the family farm in Iowa to bury her like she asked, and his car had died on a county road outside Marshalltown, and in the mess of getting home he had left more behind than he could stand to think about. He thought she was gone for good.
I met him at the farm. It is still in the family, a nephew works it. We buried Eleanor at the edge of the corn on a Saturday, the whole scattered lot of them come in from three states, and her son read that line off the funeral paper, where she can hear the corn, and I stood at the back with my hat in my hands, a stranger who just happened to clean out the right car.
I could have called it lost property and moved on to the next auction. Eight years I told myself you get a strong stomach in this job or you find another one. Turns out you can keep the strong stomach and still stop, just once, and carry a woman the last mile home. I am keeping this job. But I look a little harder now, under the seats, at what people could not bear to lose.