“Mr. Rick Dunbar,” the man in the gray suit said, and his voice carried to the back of the room, “my name is Daniel Harlan. I own Harlan Green, the largest landscaping company in the state of Indiana. Four hundred trucks. Eleven hundred employees.” He laid one hand flat on the red gas can. “In the spring of 1983, I was twenty two years old, with a borrowed pickup and a used mower that would not start. A man in a garage on Kilgore Avenue looked at it for ten seconds, filled this can with gas, and told me to pay him when I could. I never forgot him. I came to say thank you.”
Uncle Rick had been holding a folded program, and his fingers began to bend it in half, and in half again. “Mr. Harlan,” he said, “my father did not have any business.” Daniel Harlan smiled, not unkindly. “He had a garage. That is all a man needs, Mr. Dunbar, if what comes out of it is trust.” He looked out over the room, at the farmers and the old women with the sheet cake, at the line of trucks still arriving through the window. “Nearly every one of these people owns a mower that your father fixed for less than it was worth. Some of them own companies because he lent them a tool and waited.” Nobody coughed. Nobody moved.
I stood at the back by the guest book, thirty four years old, in my one black dress, and I felt my whole chest fill like a sail. All my life I had heard that my grandfather never went anywhere. I had believed it, a little, the way a child believes weather. But he had gone to every one of these people. He had gone to them in a pickup with a toolbox, one engine at a time, for forty years, and he had never said a word about it at Thanksgiving. Daniel Harlan peeled the manila envelope from the side of the can. “This is addressed to the family,” he said. “I would like it read aloud.”
A red gas can with a manila envelope taped to its side was set on a casket and gave one granddaughter the morning to bring her uncle back to the garage.
The funeral director, a gentle man named Meeks, took the envelope and slit it carefully. Inside were three things. A cashier check, a single sheet of cream paper, and a faded index card in blue ballpoint. He read the paper first, in a low and steady voice.
“To the family of Walter Dunbar. The undersigned, on behalf of the Indiana Landscape Contractors Association, have established the Walt Dunbar Fund, to train young mechanics in small engine repair, free of charge, at the Muncie vocational center. Initial gift, two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.” He stopped. “The check is for the funeral. All of it. Whatever the family wishes.”
A sound went through the room, a low murmur that rose and rose, and then someone at the back began to clap. It was one of the farmers, an enormous man in a seed cap, and then the old women on Kilgore Avenue clapped with their sheet cake held up in front of them, and the landscapers, and the dealer from John Deere. They clapped for a long time. Uncle Rick stood at the window with his hand flat against the glass, as he had earlier, but now it looked like a man holding himself up. He said nothing for a minute. Then he walked slowly to the front and stood before the casket.
“Dad,” he said. His voice cracked on the single syllable. He cleared his throat and tried again. “I was going to buy ham sandwiches for nobody.” The room was silent. “I said it on the phone. I said, you get what you earn.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “I owe him nine thousand dollars. He lent it to me in 2011 when my business failed, and I never paid it back, and he never once asked.” He turned to face us all, his round face red and wet. “I thought he was poor, because I never looked. I only counted what he kept, not what he gave.”
Daniel Harlan handed him the index card. Rick read it aloud, haltingly. It was a list in the careful block capitals of my grandfather, a dozen names, each with a dollar figure and a date. At the bottom, in the same pencil, he had written: Do not collect. Rick lowered the card. “He kept a list of what we owed him,” he said, “and he wrote do not collect.” He covered his eyes. The old woman nearest me, a tiny one in a purple coat, put a hand on my arm and whispered, “Honey, he fixed the oxygen machine of my husband for nothing. Forty minutes before the ambulance came.”
They moved the visitation to the Elks lodge on Walnut Street. The Landscape Association paid for ham, scalloped potatoes, and four hundred slices of pie, and the line of mourners went on until nine at night. Rick stood at the door and shook every hand, and when the people said how sorry they were, he said, in the plain hoarse voice of a man who had changed his mind, “Thank you for coming. He would have wanted you to eat.” I saw him slip away once, to the parking lot, and stand beside the old Ford Ranger, one hand on its dented hood.
We buried Grandpa Walt on a Saturday under a tall oak in Beech Grove Cemetery, with the red gas can set on the grave beside the headstone. The inscription, chosen by my uncle, reads only: He fixed it. In April, the Walt Dunbar Fund opened its first class in the vocational center, twelve students, in a garage bay with his old workbench bolted to the floor. I stood in the doorway watching a boy of sixteen take apart a carburetor with careful fingers. “Miss,” he said, looking up, “who was this guy? They keep saying his name.” I smiled and said, “He was my grandfather. He never went anywhere. Everyone came to him.”