A man I’d never met signed my mother’s funeral book today.
His handwriting matched the cash envelopes that have kept our church open for NINE YEARS.
Then he sat in the back pew and never once looked up.
I’ve preached at the same church on Delmar for nineteen years, and for nine of them we’ve paid the gas bill with money nobody would claim.
My mother, Brenda, ran the food pantry out of the fellowship hall until her hip gave out. We buried her Saturday in a plot she picked out in 1993.
“Brian, who is that?” my aunt Cheryl said, holding the side door open with her hip.
I didn’t know. Sixty-some people came, and I’ve baptized most of them.
He handed me a sympathy card at the door. Nothing written inside but the date, and he’d crossed the seven with a line through it.
Nobody around here crosses a seven.
The envelopes did. Every one of them, nine years of dates on the back flap, all with that little slash.
During the service he sang all of “It Is Well” without opening a book. He knew the third verse. Almost nobody knows the third verse.
He didn’t come up to the casket.
Cheryl saw him and went out through the kitchen with the ham still in her hands.
At the lunch I asked her twice. She lined up those Kroger bakery rolls she always orders and said, “EAT YOUR LUNCH, BRIAN.”
He was gone by then. So I went to my office and pulled the shoebox of envelopes out of the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet.
Then I opened the guest book to the last signed line.
THE SAME CROSSED SEVENS.
I read the name three times. I stopped being able to feel my hands, and I set the shoebox down on the floor and stayed there next to it.
GARY YOST.
My father. Who died in a wreck outside Sikeston in 1991, whose headstone sits forty feet from the hole we put my mother in that morning.
Cheryl found me on the floor. She shut the office door behind her and didn’t ask what was wrong, which is how I knew she already knew.
“Sit down,” she said. “There’s a reason your mother never once let you visit that grave.”
What Cheryl Had Been Carrying
She didn’t sit herself. She stood by the window that looks out over the parking lot, still in her black dress, and she told me in the flat voice she uses when she’s already cried everything out somewhere private.
Gary Yost didn’t die in that wreck.
He was in it. Badly. Badly enough that the other driver did die, a man named Pollard who left a wife and two daughters in Sikeston. Gary walked away with a broken collarbone and a charge that got pled down to something Cheryl either didn’t know or wouldn’t say. But he walked away.
My mother got a call from a hospital in Cape Girardeau on a Tuesday night in November 1991. She drove down alone. She was gone three days, and when she came back she told her sister, my aunt Cheryl, one thing: “He’s alive and he’s gone and Brian is never going to know.”
I was four years old.
Cheryl said she fought her on it. Said it wasn’t right. Said a boy needs to know his father is somewhere on the earth drawing breath.
Brenda told her, “A boy needs to know his father is a good man. I’m not in a position to tell him that.”
Cheryl went quiet after that part. She turned from the window and looked at the shoebox on the floor and said, “She wasn’t wrong.”
I didn’t ask her to explain. I just sat there with my back against the filing cabinet and my good funeral shoes still on and let the whole nineteen years of my life in that building rearrange itself around a fact I’d never had room for.
The Shoebox I’d Been Sitting On
I’d kept those envelopes because Brenda told me to. She was still healthy then, still running the pantry, and she brought the first one to me herself in the spring of 2015 and said it came through the mail slot on a Thursday. No return address. Just the church’s address in handwriting she didn’t comment on, and inside, four hundred dollars in twenties and a slip of paper with a date written on it.
The date was my ordination. April 14th, 2004. Eleven years prior.
I thought it was a coincidence. Then the next one came in June. Then September. Then they started coming every six to eight weeks, sometimes more, never less than two hundred dollars, and the dates on the back flap were always something: my mother’s birthday, the anniversary of the church’s founding, the date we finally paid off the roof.
Dates only someone who knew us would know.
I asked around. I prayed over it, genuinely, more than once. I put a note in the bulletin two different years asking the donor to come forward so we could thank them properly. Nothing.
Cheryl knew the whole time. Nine years she watched me stack those envelopes in that shoebox and she brought potato salad to every church supper and said nothing.
I don’t know how to hold that yet. I’m not sure I’m supposed to yet.
What the Third Verse Actually Says
I keep coming back to the hymn.
“It Is Well with My Soul” is one of those pieces of music that people think they know because they know the chorus. The third verse is the one about sin. About the full price being paid. About the record being cleared.
My sin, oh the bliss of this glorious thought, my sin, not in part but the whole, is nailed to the cross and I bear it no more.
Gary Yost stood in the back of my church and sang that verse without a book in his hands on the day we put my mother in the ground.
I don’t know what that was for. For her. For him. For me, maybe, except I didn’t know enough yet to receive it.
He’s a big man. I can tell you that much. Broad across the shoulders, white hair cut close, dark sport coat that fit him like he’d had it a long time. He looked like someone’s grandfather. He looked like someone who’d done physical work for thirty years and then stopped. He had my hands. I noticed that when he passed me the card and I didn’t know why I was noticing it, and now I know why.
I keep thinking about the fact that he didn’t look up. The whole service, head down. Whether that was grief or shame or just a man trying to get through an hour without being seen, I can’t say. Maybe all three. Maybe they’re the same thing at a certain point.
What Cheryl Said Next
After the part about my mother and the hospital, after the part about the envelopes, Cheryl picked the shoebox up off the floor and set it on my desk like it belonged there.
Then she reached into the pocket of her dress and put a piece of paper next to it.
A phone number. Missouri area code.
“He called her,” Cheryl said. “Two years ago, when her hip got bad. She didn’t tell you because she didn’t want you going looking. She told me because she needed someone to know in case.”
“In case what?”
“In case she went before she was ready to tell you herself.”
She went before she was ready. She went on a Wednesday at 6:40 in the morning with Cheryl on one side of the bed and me on the other, and she didn’t say anything that last day that I’ve been able to decode into this. Nothing I can go back to now and hear differently.
Or maybe one thing.
Saturday morning, maybe an hour before she stopped being able to talk, she grabbed my wrist and said, “The church is going to be fine.” I thought she meant financially. I thought she was worried about the congregation after she was gone, the way she always worried about the congregation.
Maybe she wasn’t talking about money at all.
Maybe she’d already told him to keep coming.
The Name on the Headstone Forty Feet Away
I went to the grave Sunday morning before anyone else was at the cemetery.
My mother’s plot was still raw dirt with the flowers from Saturday laid over it. I stood there for a minute. Then I walked forty feet east, which I’ve never done in my adult life, not once, because she asked me not to and I honored that the way you honor things when you don’t know the reason but you trust the person.
GARY ALLEN YOST. 1955. No death year. Just the birth year and a dash and nothing after it.
A headstone with a dash and no end date.
She bought it. She must have. She came back from Cape Girardeau in November of 1991 and at some point she bought the man a headstone and put it in the ground next to her own plot and told everyone he was dead and told her four-year-old son he was dead and carried that for thirty-three years.
I don’t know if that was cruelty or protection or just a woman doing the only thing she could see to do. I’ve preached enough funerals to know those three things aren’t always separate.
I took the piece of paper out of my coat pocket. Missouri area code. Cheryl’s handwriting, not his.
I stood there between my mother’s fresh grave and my father’s empty headstone and I looked at the number for a long time.
The Call I Haven’t Made Yet
It’s Sunday night now. Late. The church is dark and I’m in my office with the desk lamp on and the shoebox open in front of me.
I’ve counted the envelopes. Forty-seven. Nine years of them, forty-seven envelopes, and the total if I add it up is somewhere around fourteen thousand dollars. Fourteen thousand dollars from a man I watched sing a hymn this morning and never introduced myself to because I didn’t know I needed to.
He signed the guest book. He didn’t have to do that. He could have sat in the back and left and I’d have noticed him and forgotten him inside a week. But he signed it. Gary Yost, in handwriting I’d been looking at for nine years without knowing whose it was, and he crossed the seven the way he always crosses the seven, and he put the pen down and walked out.
I think he wanted to be found.
Or maybe he just wanted to be there, and the signing was an accident of grief, a man so used to marking dates that he marked one more without thinking.
I’ve been a pastor for nineteen years. I’ve sat with people in rooms like this one at hours like this one and I’ve said things about forgiveness and I’ve meant them. I’ve meant every word.
It’s different when it’s yours.
The number is on my desk. I haven’t touched my phone. The lamp is making a small buzzing sound it doesn’t usually make, or maybe it always does and I never sit here this quiet.
Forty-seven envelopes. A headstone with no end date. A man who knew the third verse.
I’ll call him. I know I’ll call him. Just not yet.
Not tonight.
—
If this one got into your chest a little, pass it on to someone who’d understand why.
For more stories about life’s unexpected encounters, check out She Sat at Table Six for Forty Minutes Before Anyone Noticed Her, or delve into mysteries with The Voicemail Roger Told Me Not to Play at the Courthouse and The Woman at My Mother’s Door Knew What Was Behind the Wall.
