“Doug, I am sitting right here,” I said, from my wheelchair, in the center aisle of First Methodist, and the words went out over the pews like a stone dropped in a pond. “And I would be glad if you would stop telling people that I am dead.” A sound rolled through the sanctuary, a gasp, a squeak, a sob, and the clatter of a hymnal falling to the floor. In the front pew, Reverend Hill stood with his hand over his heart. At the podium, my son Doug clutched the edges of the wood. The color left his face in a single motion, like a curtain coming down. Behind me, Kesha, the young woman who had wheeled me in, gave a quiet, triumphant sniff.
Nobody spoke. Four hundred people stared at me with the expression of folks who have just watched the dead sit up in a coffin. I raised my voice. “Good afternoon, friends. I am Walter James Ross. I carried your mail for thirty three years. I am very touched to find so many of you here.” An old man in the fourth row, a fellow I had delivered to on Elm Street, laughed out loud, a short wild bark, and clapped his hand over his mouth.
Reverend Hill came down the aisle. He knelt in front of my wheelchair, an old man himself, seventy nine, and took my hands in both of his. “Walter,” he said. “I buried your wife. I sat with you at the hospital. I read the notice in the paper and I wept in my study.” His voice shook. “What in the name of God has been going on?” I looked at the podium. Doug had not moved. A line of sweat ran from his hairline down the side of his face. “Reverend,” I said, “I believe my son has some explaining to do. And I believe it would be better done out loud.” The whole church turned.
A printed obituary read aloud by a nursing aide drove one living mailman to his own memorial service and out again.
Doug seemed to shrink in that spotlight. He was fifty two years old and had never, in my memory, been caught. He had been a charming, evasive boy, a clever and careless young man, a middle aged fellow who was always between opportunities. And now he stood at a pulpit under a stained glass window of the Good Shepherd with four hundred eyes upon him. “Dad,” he said, into the microphone, and the microphone squealed. He jerked back. “Dad, I did not mean for it to go this far. The nursing home called. They told me the doctors thought you would not recover. I panicked.” He was lying again. I saw it in his jaw.
“Doug,” I said, gently, “the nursing home never called. I asked. The director told me she had called you twice to say I was recovering well. You told her not to give me the phone.” I let that sink. “I do not know all of what you did, son. But I know you took thirty one thousand dollars from my friends, and you put my face on a page, and you let your father believe he was losing his mind.” My voice broke. “I raised you in a house on Lovell Street. I walked this town for thirty three years. I would have given you the shirt off my back, if you had asked.”
The legs of Doug seemed to give way. He sat down on the pulpit steps, in his dark suit, holding the microphone loosely in one hand, and he began to cry. He cried the way he had at five years old, with his mouth open and his face scrunched. “I owe money,” he sobbed. “A lot of money. To people who do not wait. I thought if I could just. I was going to put it back.” Someone in the back pew began, softly, to hum. It took me a moment to recognize it. Amazing Grace. Others joined. It spread through the church like warmth through a cold room, until four hundred voices were singing for my son.
I do not know why I did what I did next. I was very tired. I had spent six weeks in a bed in a strange town, and I had not seen a friend. But I looked at the people in those pews, my neighbors, and I thought, what do I want them to remember of me? I said, “Friends, may I say something?” They quieted. “I am not going to ask you to forgive my son. That is a matter between each of you and God. But I will tell you what I will do. I will return every dollar. And I will ask Reverend Hill to open a fund, in my name, for any person in this town who needs a hand.”
A great cheer went up. The Reverend wiped his eyes. Kesha, behind me, was weeping openly. Over the next month, my lawyer returned the money to every donor who asked, and nearly all of them asked that it be donated to the fund. Within a year, the Walter Ross Neighbor Fund had paid for forty two roof repairs, nine wheelchair ramps, and a winter of heating oil for sixty families. Doug was charged with fraud, but I spoke at his hearing. I asked the judge for probation, on condition of restitution and counseling. She agreed. He wept again, in the courtroom, and thanked me.
The nursing home director, who had followed the instructions of Doug, lost her license. The home was fined. I moved back to my house on Lovell Street, with Kesha, whom I hired as my home aide, at a good salary, and who cooks like an angel. She comes in at eight in the morning and reads me the paper. Every day she reads the obituaries aloud, because I like them, and when she gets to the end, she looks up and says gravely, “Mr. Ross, I do not see your name today.” I say, “Good. Keep checking.” And we both laugh, and she pours the coffee.
Doug visits on Sundays. He has a job now, driving a delivery van for a lumberyard. He is thinner and quieter. He sits at my kitchen table and does the crossword with me, and sometimes, when Kesha is not looking, he slips a hand over mine. Last month, he asked me a question I will carry with me always. “Dad,” he said, “what was it like, to see me up there, and know what I did?” I thought about it. I said, “Son, it was like seeing the day you were born. I was so afraid. And so glad you were alive.” He bowed his head. He did not need me to say more.
