The young man in the hard hat set the small hat down on the casket, right beside the big white one that my stepmother had placed there that morning, and the two sat side by side like a father and a son. The small one was painted with a cartoon shark, its grin full of teeth, its eye drawn by a child. The young man was perhaps twenty five, thin, in a clean work shirt with a refinery patch on the sleeve. “My name is Trey Boudreaux,” he said. “My daddy died at the Calcasieu plant on the third of June, 2008. I was nine years old.”
A sound went through the pews. I was in the front row, forty one years old, in the same black suit I had worn to every funeral since my twenties. I had spent all morning angry. My stepmother Ruth had insisted on driving the old truck of my father to the cemetery, the Ford with the dent in the door, and I had told her, in front of the whole family, that it was not her truck. “The explosion took eleven men,” said Trey. “The company paid my mother a check. The union sent a ham. And a man in a white hard hat came to our front door.”
“He stood on the porch, with his cap in his hands. He said, Son, I worked beside your daddy for nine years. I want to take you fishing. I thought it was a kindness he would forget. But he came back. Every Friday, at four, in that truck, for thirteen years. He took me to Calcasieu Lake, and he never talked about my father unless I asked. He taught me to bait a hook. He taught me to tie a bowline. He taught me that a man who loses someone keeps their shape in his hands.” Trey held up the shark hat. “He brought me this the second summer.”
A small hard hat painted with a cartoon shark was set beside a white one by a young refinery inspector and gave one son the morning to bring his stepmother back to the truck.
“He said, It is a hard hat, for when you are big enough. I painted a shark on it because you told me you wanted to be a marine biologist. I said I had changed my mind. I wanted to work at the plant, like my daddy. He did not laugh. He said, Then you will need a bigger hat.” Trey touched the white one. “When I turned eighteen he walked me into the personnel office himself. He stood behind me in the line. I am a safety inspector now. I walk the lines at the very unit where my father died, and I check every valve twice, because of what your father taught me.”
I did not know where to look. The truck. All week I had said terrible things about the woman who was trying to bury her husband. I turned in the pew, and there was Ruth, a small gray woman in a navy dress, sitting alone at the end of the row with a tissue pressed to her lips. She was not surprised. She was nodding slowly. She had known. For the last six years, when his eyes went bad, she had ridden along every Friday and driven the truck home, and she had waited two hours in the passenger seat, listening to the radio, and never said a word to me.
“Mrs. Ruth,” said Trey, turning to her, “I want you to know that you drove him to me for six years. I watched you through the window. You never came inside. I did not know if you wanted to. But I will tell you what he said, the last time. He said, Trey, when I am gone, make sure Ruth keeps the truck. It carried the best of me. And it is hers.” He swallowed. “He said it twice.” Ruth began to cry without a sound. In the pew in front of me, a woman I did not know leaned over and took her hand.
I got up. I do not remember crossing the room. I knelt in front of my stepmother and took both of her hands, and I said, Ruth, I am so sorry. I said the truck was hers, and I had no right, and I had been a fool. She touched my face. She said, Derek, you were grieving. You did not know. Your father wanted you to find out when you were ready. I said, I am ready now. She smiled with her whole wet face. She said, Then come here. And I put my arms around the second mother that I had never thanked.
Trey Boudreaux made one more announcement. The refinery, he said, had agreed to start a program in the name of my father, the Calcasieu Fridays. Every worker with twenty years of service would be given paid time to mentor the child of a coworker who had been lost, one afternoon a week. “It is not a big idea,” he said. “It is exactly what he did.” The men of the refinery, standing along the walls in clean work clothes, hats in their hands, nodded all at once, like a field of wheat in a single wind.
At the cemetery, Ruth drove the truck behind the hearse, with me in the passenger seat and Trey in the middle, between us, in the hard hat. Nobody remarked on it. The little shark hat sat on the dashboard, grinning into the windshield. At the grave, the men of the plant stood in two long lines, white hats and yellow hats and red hats, and as the casket went down they lifted them, all together, one great sweep of color against the gray Louisiana sky. Then, one by one, they put them back on.
This Friday at four, I sat on the porch of the house of my father and watched the old truck pull up the drive. Ruth was at the wheel. In the passenger seat, grinning, was a boy of about ten, the nephew of a man lost on the Gulf last year, with a tackle box on his knees. Ruth lowered the window. She said, Derek, we are going to Calcasieu Lake. She said, Get in. I did. The boy handed me a rod. And on the dashboard, the shark smiled the whole way there.
