The little old woman in the church hat set the coffee mug on top of the casket of my father, and the faded letters on the side read, in red, number one trash man. A thin ribbon of steam rose from the opening. She was very small, eighty or so, with a walker she had left by the door, and she stood a moment with one white glove resting on the lid, breathing through her nose. “My name is Mrs. Odessa Pruitt,” she said, in a voice like a bird. “I live at 412 Collingwood. Your father collected my garbage every Thursday morning for twenty two years. And every Thursday morning, I brought him a cup of coffee.”
She smiled, tipped her chin, and the room leaned toward her. “He took it black, two sugars. He drank it on my porch, standing up, with his orange vest open, and we talked. About the weather. About my grandson. About his boy who played football.” She looked at me, and her eyes were soft. “That would be you, young man.” I could not answer. I had been dry eyed all morning. Now I felt a tide begin to rise in my chest. “When my husband died in 2003,” she said, “your father came to the back door after the funeral and carried every one of the boxes of my husband to the garage. And he did not take a dime.”
There was a sound from the hallway, the scrape of a shoe. My brother had stopped hiding. “Last week,” said Mrs. Pruitt, “I went to my porch on Thursday morning as I always do, with the mug. And the truck did not come.” She patted the lid. “So I brought the coffee here. It is still hot. It is the last cup.” A woman in the third row stood, and put an arm around her, and led her to a chair. The mug sat alone on the casket, in the gray light, steaming. I thought it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.
A number one trash man coffee mug set steaming on a casket by a little old woman brought a brother back to his father and gave one son the morning to forgive him.
A man in an orange vest got to his feet in the aisle. He held his cap in both hands. “Folks, I am Dwight Coleman. I drove Route 9 with Marcus Senior for nineteen years.” He looked at the casket. “I would like to say something about what he did in the back of that truck that no one knows.” He drew a breath. “Marcus found things. Over thirty one years he found a wedding ring, a set of false teeth, a box of letters from a dead soldier, a child retainer, a wallet with four thousand dollars. He returned every one of them. He walked them to the door. He never took a reward.”
“Eleven times,” said Dwight, “he found something that belonged to a person who had died, and he kept it in a shoebox in the cab, until he could find a family. He had forty one items in that shoebox when he passed.” He turned and nodded toward the rear door. A younger man in an orange vest came in, carrying a worn shoebox, and walked up to the front and put it beside the mug. “This is for the family. These are his strays. If anyone here recognizes something, it is yours.” He lifted the lid slightly, and a gleam of old gold showed. “Three of us have already gone through it. We think we know where each one goes.”
People began to rise. An old man in a tweed jacket pressed forward with tears on his face and took out of the box a silver pocket watch. “My father,” he said, “1961. I lost it in a bin in the fall of 1996. I looked for it for months.” He held it against his cheek. A young mother took out, with trembling fingers, a baby shoe, a tiny blue knit one, and burst into sobs. “I thought it was gone forever,” she whispered. “Two years ago. I thought it was in the dump.”
He stood in front of the casket and put his hand on the mug. The steam curled between his fingers. “Dad,” he said, finally, in a ragged voice, “I told my friends you worked in waste management.” A small gasp from the pews. “I did not have to be ashamed.” He turned toward me, tears running down his handsome face, his country club tan, his good suit. “Marcus, I am sorry. I was not at the football games. You were. You were in the stands in your uniform, with the dirt still on his hands, cheering. I was too embarrassed to sit with you.” I opened my arms.
We held each other for a long time, his arms around my back, my face against his collar. I had not hugged my older brother since I was nine. He smelled of cologne and a trace of cigar. Over his shoulder I could see the mug, still warm, still steaming a little, and the old woman in her church hat, wiping her cheeks with a lace handkerchief, and the line of garbage trucks outside, eleven of them, washed clean, parked end to end down Monroe Street, their yellow lights flashing in silent salute. The minister had come forward quietly and was waiting with his hands folded.
After the committal, they let Mrs. Pruitt pour the coffee. She had brought a thermos in her tote. She filled the mug a second time, carefully, and carried it herself, with both hands, to the grave. She set it on the earth at the head. “For Thursday,” she said, and she touched the cold ground with two fingers. The wind lifted the edge of her hat. My brother, beside me, offered his arm, and she took it, and the two of them stood for a moment, an old woman in a church hat and a rich man in a gray suit, looking at a cup of coffee going cold in the winter light.
Every Thursday since, my brother and I have gone to 412 Collingwood at seven in the morning. We bring the coffee. Black, two sugars. She waits on the porch in her good coat. We stand there for twenty minutes, drinking, saying nothing important, and at eight the truck comes by, with a new driver who waves to her, and she waves back. Last week, as it rolled past, she lifted the mug in a small salute. And the driver, a young man with a gold tooth, tipped two fingers off the brim of his cap. He did not know why. He only knew that someone had to.