The Men in Leather

The funeral home smelled like lilies and floor polish, and I hated both of those smells for the rest of my life after that day.

My father, Raymond Cole, lay in a plain oak casket at the front of the room.

Sixty-eight years old.

Heart attack in the garage, a wrench still in his hand, the radio playing the same country station he'd played my whole childhood.

My mother found him.

She was the one who called me.

She said four words and then she couldn't say anything else.

"Daniel.

Your dad's gone."

Now I sat in the front pew in a navy suit I'd bought two days earlier, my wife Emma's hand warm on my knee, and I stared at the box that held a man I'd loved without ever really understanding.

My father had been a quiet man.

That's the word everyone used at the viewing, over and over, until it stopped meaning anything.

Quiet.

He fixed things.

He paid his bills in cash.

He kept a hardware store on Miller Avenue for three decades, and when the big chain opened out by the highway and drove him out of business, he just closed the doors, shook every regular customer's hand, and started fixing cars out of our garage instead.

He never complained.

He never explained.

When I asked him once, as a teenager, why he never talked about growing up, he'd looked at me for a long second and said, "Nothing back there worth carrying forward, son.

Hand me the three-eighths."

And that was the end of it.

I was giving the eulogy in twenty minutes.

I had it folded in my breast pocket, three index cards I'd rewritten four times the night before.

It talked about his patience, his steady hands, the way he'd taught me to change a tire in the rain when I was twelve, kneeling in the mud in his good church trousers because he said a man should never be stranded and helpless.

It was a good eulogy for a man I thought had lived a small, good, ordinary life.

I never got to read it.

At 10:52 in the morning, I heard the thunder.

It started low, like a storm coming up over the hills, a vibration I felt in the soles of my dress shoes before I understood it as sound.

Then it got louder, and louder, until the windows of the funeral home were humming in their frames and the flower arrangements were trembling on their stands.

Emma's head turned toward the back doors.

My mother's did not.

I noticed that later, when I had time to notice things, and it bothered me for weeks.

My mother did not turn to look.

She just closed her eyes, and her lips moved, and I thought at the time she was praying.

The sound outside cut off, engine by engine, a long ragged dying-down, until there was silence again.

A worse silence than before.

And then the double doors at the back of the room swung open, and the morning light poured in around them.

They came in three at a time.

Men in leather vests.

Black leather, worn soft as skin, covered in patches and pins.

Gray beards and bald heads and forearms sleeved in tattoos gone blue-green with age.

Some of them limped.

One of them walked with a cane and an oxygen line taped to his cheek, and the younger man beside him carried the tank without being asked.

They were old men, most of them, but they came into that room like they had every right to it, and the whole congregation of my father's church friends and hardware customers went dead silent and pressed themselves back into their pews to let the strangers pass.

I counted, because I didn't know what else to do with my hands or my eyes.

One group of three.

Then another.

Then another.

Thirty.

Thirty men in leather, filing down the center aisle of my father's funeral in two solemn columns, and I did not recognize a single one of them.

At the front walked the biggest of them.

A mountain of a man, easily seventy years old, with a gray beard that reached the middle of his chest and eyes the pale, flat color of river ice in January.

His vest said one word across the back in curved white letters.

I'd read it clearly later, in the parking lot.

IRON SAINTS.

Beneath it, a lower rocker that said just one thing.

PRESIDENT.

He walked straight to the casket.

He did not look at me.

He did not look at my mother, or at the priest frozen by the lectern.

He put one enormous, scarred hand flat on the oak lid, spread his fingers wide, and bowed his head.

And I saw his lips move in something that was not quite a prayer, more like a conversation, the way you'd murmur to someone lying in a hospital bed.

I stood up.

"Excuse me."

My voice cracked on the second word.

I cleared my throat and tried again, louder.

"Excuse me.

Who are you?"

The big man didn't answer.

He didn't even lift his head.

I turned to my mother, and it came out of me louder than I meant it to, loud enough that the whole room heard, loud enough that Emma's hand tightened hard on my arm.

"Mom.

Who are they?

What is this?

Who are these people?"

My mother reached up and took my wrist.

Her grip was stronger than I'd ever felt it, stronger than a grieving seventy-year-old widow's grip had any right to be.

She pulled me back down into the pew beside her, close, and I smelled her powder and her grief, and she whispered the two words that cracked my whole life open.

"Sit down."

"Mom—"

"Daniel."

She wasn't crying.

That was the strange part, the part I kept circling back to.

Her eyes were dry and very far away, focused on something that wasn't in the room at all.

"Sit down.

Let them take him."

"Take him?

Take him where?"

I heard my own voice climbing and couldn't stop it.

"Mom, we're burying him in an hour.

The cars are outside.

The plot is paid for.

Take him where?"

The big man with the gray beard finally turned around.

He looked at me for a long, long moment, and something moved behind those ice-colored eyes, something that was almost tenderness and almost grief and almost fear, like he was seeing a ghost he'd been waiting half his life to meet.

"You look just like him," he said.

His voice was gravel dragged over gravel, low and worn.

"When he was young.

Before all of it."

"Before what?"

He didn't answer that either.

He held my gaze one more second, nodded once, to himself, as though I'd confirmed something, and then he turned and gave a small motion of his hand to his men.

Two of them stepped forward and took up positions at the head of the casket, feet apart, hands folded, an honor guard for a man I'd thought had no honors to guard.

Through the open doors at the back, past the two long columns of gleaming motorcycles parked in the sun, I could see one bike set apart from all the others.

Older than the rest.

Candy-black and deep chrome, immaculate, every inch of it cared for by somebody's hands over a lifetime.

It sat by itself at the edge of the lot, catching the morning light like something alive, like it was waiting for a rider who was late.

"Whose bike is that?"

I said.

I don't know why, of everything, that was the thing my mind snagged on.

The chaos, the strangers, my mother's hand on my wrist, and all my splintered attention narrowed down to one lonely motorcycle in the sun.

"Mom.

Whose bike is that?"

My mother followed my eyes to the door.

And for the first time all morning, a single tear broke loose and ran down the powder on her cheek.

"It was your father's," she said.