The Funeral Director Told Me My Husband’s Old Coonhound Had To Wait In The Car Because “This Is A Dignified Service.” Then Six Retired Firefighters Set The Casket Back Down At The Door

My husband, Merle Crane, carried a lot of things out of burning buildings in thirty-one years with the Selwyn Falls Fire Department. He carried out a grandmother in a quilted housecoat in 1987. He carried out a cash box from the hardware store on Front Street, which the owner cried over more than he cried over the building. He carried out a parakeet in a cage, a box of wedding photographs, and once, by his own count, eleven cats from a single trailer on Route 9.

The last thing he ever carried out was a puppy.

It was the spring before he retired. A hay barn went up on the Hochstetler farm east of town, and the farmer’s redbone had whelped in the back stall two days before. The firefighters got the mother out and five of the pups. Merle went back in for the sixth because he heard it crying under a feed bin. He came out with that pup tucked inside his helmet like an egg in a basket, the little thing not even singed, just wet and furious and red as a brick.

The Hochstetlers had more dogs than they needed. Merle came home that night smelling like smoke and wet hay and set the helmet on my kitchen table. The puppy looked up at me out of it.

“Bett,” he said, “this is Ranger.”

“We are sixty years old,” I told him.

“He doesn’t know that,” Merle said.

That was eleven years ago. Ranger grew into a long-legged, long-eared coonhound with a voice like a church organ and a nose that could find a dropped cracker under the refrigerator from the far end of the yard. He was never much of a hunter. He was Merle’s dog, through and through. When Merle retired, Ranger retired with him. They walked to the fire hall every morning at seven for coffee with whoever was on shift. They walked back at nine. Ranger slept under the kitchen table while Merle did the crossword, and when Merle napped in his recliner, Ranger slept on his feet.

In January Merle went out to clear the front walk before church. I heard the shovel stop. By the time I got to the door, he was sitting down in the snow with his back against the porch post, and Ranger was lying across his legs, howling like the world had cracked. The doctor at the hospital said it was his heart and that it had been quick. I have decided to believe him.

I am sixty-nine years old. I had been married to that man for forty-six years.

Purdy and Sons, Under New Management

There has only ever been one funeral home in Selwyn Falls. It sits on Ashgrove Street in a white house with four columns across the front and a porch that the Purdy family has painted every other spring since 1958. Old Lucius Purdy buried my mother and my father and Merle’s brother Augustin. He used to stand on that porch in a gray suit and shake every hand that came up the steps, and he knew every name.

Lucius is eighty-seven now and lives with his daughter in Harrisburg. Two years ago his grandson Ansel came back from a corporate funeral company in Pittsburgh to take over the business. People said he had modern ideas. He put in a flat-screen television in the parlor for slideshows. He got rid of the candy dish by the guest book. He started wearing a headset at services, like a man directing traffic at a concert.

I met with Ansel two days after Merle died. My daughter, Tilda, had flown in from Phoenix and sat beside me with a legal pad. Ansel was polite in the way a hotel clerk is polite. He had a tablet with packages on it. Bronze, Silver, Heritage. He said the word “celebration” several times.

The fire department wanted to do a full honors service, the way they do for anyone who served. The engine in the procession. The bell at the graveside. Six pallbearers from the men Merle had worked with. Ansel nodded at all of it and typed it into his tablet.

Then I said, “And Ranger will walk in with me.”

He looked up. “Ranger?”

“Merle’s dog.”

“Ah.” He smiled with only the bottom half of his face. “I’m sure he’s a wonderful animal, Mrs. Crane. But we don’t permit pets in the chapel during services. We find it can be disruptive for other mourners.”

“He’s not a pet at a funeral,” I said. “He’s the one who found Merle.”

Tilda put her hand on my knee. Ansel tilted his head the way people do when they’ve been trained to tilt their heads. “I understand completely,” he said, which is what people say when they do not understand at all. “Perhaps he could be part of the visitation at home, or a photo in the slideshow. We want the service itself to be dignified.”

I did not argue. I was too tired to argue. I had not slept more than three hours a night since the snow on the front walk. I said fine, and we went on to the music.

In the car, Tilda said, “Mom, you can bring the dog anyway.”

“I’m not going to make a scene at your father’s funeral,” I said.

“Dad would have made a scene,” she said.

That was true. But Merle was not the one who had to stand in that white house and shake everyone’s hand.

The Morning of the Service

It snowed again the night before. Not much, just enough to make the town look clean. I got up at five because I couldn’t do anything else, and I found Ranger lying in the front hall with his nose against the bottom of the door, the way he had every morning since January. He was waiting for the seven o’clock walk.

I sat down on the hall bench and put my hand on his head. His ears are as long as a pair of dish towels and as soft as a baby’s blanket. His muzzle has gone gray. He looked up at me with those wet brown eyes, and I made a decision I had not exactly decided to make.

“You’re coming,” I told him. “You can wait in the car. But you’re coming.”

Tilda drove. Ranger rode in the back seat of my Buick on Merle’s old barn coat. I wore my black wool coat and the silver pin Merle gave me for our twenty-fifth. We parked across the street from Purdy and Sons at a quarter to ten. The engine was already there, washed and gleaming in the gray light, with a black ribbon tied across the front bumper. Men I had known for forty years stood beside it in their dress blues, some of them with canes now, some of them with bellies they did not have in 1990.

I got out of the car and took Ranger’s red leash in my hand. I had not planned to. My hand did it. He jumped down onto the snowy curb and stood beside me with his nose working at the cold air, and when he caught the smell of the engine and the men around it, his tail went slow and wide.

Cas Kowalczyk saw us first. He was Merle’s lieutenant for nineteen years and his best friend for longer than that. He has a white mustache now that he waxes at the ends, and he walked across the street with his hat under his arm.

“Bett,” he said, and hugged me. Then he crouched down, slower than he used to, and took Ranger’s face in both of his hands. “Hey, partner,” he said. “Hey, buddy. I know.”

We walked up the steps together. Ansel was on the porch between the second and third column, in a charcoal suit with his headset clipped to his ear.

“Mrs. Crane,” he said. “Good morning. I’m so sorry for your loss.” Then his eyes went down to Ranger, and the morning stopped being good.

“This Is a Dignified Service”

He stepped in front of the door. Not rudely. Just squarely, the way a man stands when he’s decided where a line is.

“I’m afraid the dog will need to wait in the vehicle,” he said.

“He’ll lie at my feet,” I said. “He won’t make a sound.”

“Mrs. Crane, we discussed this.” He lowered his voice so the people coming up the steps behind us would not hear, but they heard. “There will be more than two hundred guests today. The mayor is here. The fire chief. This is a dignified service. I really can’t have an animal in the chapel.”

I felt my face get hot. Behind me, someone on the steps said, “Oh, for heaven’s sake.” I did not turn around to see who.

Cas said, “Ansel, that’s Merle’s dog.”

“I’m aware,” Ansel said. “And I’m sure Captain Crane loved him very much. That’s exactly why we’ve included three photographs of him in the slideshow.” He looked at me, and his voice went soft and practiced. “Please. Let’s not make today harder than it already is.”

I want to tell you I said something sharp. I didn’t. I stood on that porch with two hundred people coming up the steps behind me and my husband lying in a bronze box twenty feet inside the door, and I did the thing women my age were raised to do. I did not make a scene.

“Tilda,” I said. “Would you take him back to the car.”

Tilda looked at me like she wanted to argue. Then she took the leash. Ranger did not want to go. He planted his front feet on the porch boards and looked through the open door into the dim front hall where the flowers were, and he let out one low sound, not a bark, just a question. Tilda had to pull him down the steps. I watched them cross the street, and I watched her open the back door of the Buick, and I watched Ranger climb in onto Merle’s barn coat and then turn around and put his nose against the window, facing the white house.

Ansel said, “Thank you, Mrs. Crane. That’s very gracious.” He touched his headset and said something about the family being ready.

Cas did not say anything. He looked at Ansel for a long moment, and then he put his hat back under his arm and went inside to stand with the other pallbearers. I saw his jaw working under the waxed mustache. I knew that look. Merle used to say that when Cas went quiet, somebody was about to have a very long afternoon.

Twenty Minutes Into the Eulogy

The chapel was full. People stood along the back wall and out into the hall. There was the fire chief, and the mayor, and three of the Hochstetler boys, now grown men in farm jackets. There was the woman from the hardware store whose cash box Merle saved in 1994. There was the grandmother’s granddaughter from 1987, who is now a nurse in Allentown and drove two hours. I sat in the front row with Tilda on one side and an empty space on the other, where, at every concert and graduation and Christmas pageant for forty-six years, Merle had been.

The pastor spoke. The chief spoke. Then Cas got up to give the eulogy, and he told the story of the barn and the helmet and the pup, and the whole room laughed the way you laugh at funerals, that wet, grateful laugh.

He was at the part where Merle came home and said, “He doesn’t know that,” when it started outside.

A coonhound’s bay is not a bark. It is a long, rising, bottomless sound that goes on longer than you think anything alive could hold a note. It comes from the bottom of the chest and the back of the throat at the same time. It is the sound those dogs were bred to make when they have found what they were looking for and cannot reach it.

Ranger was in the car across the street, with the windows cracked an inch for air, and he was baying for Merle.

The room went still. Cas stopped talking. You could hear it plainly through the old windows of that white house, going on and on and then breaking off and starting again.

I saw Ansel at the side door. He had his hand on his headset. He was speaking quietly and fast, and a young man in a dark suit, one of his staff, slipped out the side door toward the street. I found out later what Ansel said into that headset. Tilda heard it from the young man. Ansel had said, “Get that dog moved down the block where we can’t hear it.”

Cas stood at the lectern for a long moment with his hand on the wood. Then he said, “That’s Ranger. I guess he wanted to tell that part himself.” He finished the eulogy. I don’t remember a word of the rest of it. I sat in that front pew with my hands folded so tight in my lap that my wedding ring left a mark, and I listened to my husband’s dog howl for him through the walls, getting farther away, and then gone.

Six Men and a Doorway

When the service ended, the pallbearers came forward. Six of them, all from Engine 4. Cas, and Stosh Bartek, and the two Ruggiero brothers, and Yancey Corliss, who has a new knee, and Tobiah Zook, the youngest, who was a probationary firefighter under Merle in 2008 and is now a battalion chief. They took their places along the bronze casket. Cas gave a nod, and they lifted it together, and they turned it toward the center aisle.

Ansel walked ahead of them with his hands clasped in front of him, the way funeral directors do. Tilda and I followed behind the casket. The whole room stood. We walked up the aisle and through the front hall with its flowers, and Ansel opened both of the big front doors onto the porch and the four white columns and the snow.

The engine was idling at the curb with its lights going slowly round. The hearse was parked behind it with the back open. Across the street, the Buick was gone. The young man in the dark suit had moved it, with my daughter’s keys, down the block where nobody could hear.

Cas stopped at the threshold.

The other five stopped with him, because that is how pallbearers work. You do not move unless the man at the front moves. They stood there in the open doorway with the cold coming in around them and Merle on their shoulders.

Ansel turned around on the porch. “Gentlemen,” he said quietly. “The hearse is just there.”

Cas said, “Lower him.”

And they did. Six old firefighters bent their knees together, slow and careful and perfectly even, the way they had once lowered stretchers down ladders, and they set my husband’s casket down on the wheeled stand just inside the door. Then they straightened up and stood beside it with their hands at their sides.

Ansel’s face went pale and then pink. “What are you doing?”

“Captain Crane went into a burning barn for that dog,” Cas said. He did not raise his voice. He did not have to. Two hundred people were standing in that front hall and on that porch and on those steps, and every one of them could hear him. “He doesn’t go out this door without him. We don’t carry the captain out without his partner.”

“Mr. Kowalczyk, this is highly inappropriate.”

“So’s hiding a grieving dog down the block so he won’t embarrass you,” Cas said.

Ansel looked around for help. Nobody gave him any. The fire chief was standing at the bottom of the steps with his white gloves on and his arms folded. The mayor was looking at his shoes. One of the Hochstetler boys said, loud enough to carry, “Go get the dog.”

Tobiah Zook was already moving. He came down the steps two at a time, a fifty-one-year-old battalion chief in dress blues, and went jogging up Ashgrove Street through the snow toward the Buick, with Tilda right behind him holding up the spare key from her purse.

Ranger Walks Him Out

I heard Ranger before I saw him. Not the bay. Just the jingle of his tags and his toenails on the frozen sidewalk, going fast. Tobiah had the red leash, but he was not holding it so much as following it.

Ranger came up the steps of Purdy and Sons the way he used to come up our porch steps when Merle whistled for him, all legs and ears. Two hundred people moved out of his way without being asked. He went right past Ansel. He went right past me. He went straight to the bronze casket on its stand just inside the door, and he put his nose against the side of it, low, near where Merle’s hands would be.

He did not bay. He did not whine. He just stood there with his nose against the metal and breathed in, slow and long, the way he breathed in the air outside every morning at seven before they started down the street.

Then he lay down beside the casket on the floor of that front hall and put his chin on his paws.

I have no other word for the sound the room made. It was not crying, exactly. It was two hundred people letting go of something at the same time.

Cas looked at Ansel. Ansel looked at the dog. Then, and I will give him this, Ansel Purdy took off his headset, folded it, and put it in his jacket pocket. He stepped back from the door and stood against the wall.

“Whenever you’re ready, Lieutenant,” he said.

Cas bent down to Ranger. “Okay, partner,” he said. “Let’s take him home.”

They lifted the casket again, all six of them together, and this time when they walked out through the door, Ranger walked beside them, on the left side, close to the front corner, with the red leash hanging loose from Tobiah’s hand. They went down the porch steps slowly, one at a time, and Ranger went down them one at a time too, looking up at the casket and back at Cas and up at the casket again. When they slid Merle into the back of the hearse, Ranger sat down on the snow beside the rear bumper and did not move until the doors were shut.

Then I came down the steps and took the leash, and he leaned his whole long body against my leg, and we rode in the procession together behind the engine, the two of us in the back of the family car, all the way out to Larkspur Hill.

The Bell at Larkspur Hill

When a firefighter dies in Selwyn Falls, they ring the last alarm at the graveside. It is an old brass bell they bring out on the engine, and the chief strikes it in a pattern, five and five and five, the signal that a firefighter has completed his duty and is coming home. Merle rang it himself for more men than I can count. He used to come home quiet after those, and sit on the porch, and Ranger would lie across his feet.

The chief struck the bell. Five. A pause. Five. A pause.

On the third set, Ranger lifted his head and bayed. Once. Long and rising and clear across that whole cold hillside, all the way down to the river. Then he stopped, and lay back down against my boots, and was quiet.

Nobody said anything for a while. There was nothing to say that would have been better than that.

What Came in the Mail

Two weeks after the funeral, a cream envelope came to the house with the Purdy and Sons return address. I almost didn’t open it. I thought it was the bill.

It was a handwritten note from Ansel. It was not long. He said he had been taught that a dignified service is one where nothing unexpected happens, and that he had been wrong about what dignity was. He said his grandfather had called him from Harrisburg after hearing about it from three different people and had told him a story about burying a farmer in 1966 whose mule stood at the cemetery fence for the whole committal. He said Purdy and Sons would be changing its policy, and that families would be welcome to bring the animals who loved the person they were burying, with a little notice. He enclosed a framed photograph that one of his staff had taken from the porch. It is Ranger lying beside the casket in the front hall, with six pairs of black shoes standing around him.

I don’t know that I would have forgiven him if he hadn’t written. I’m not sure I’ve forgiven him all the way now. But I hung the photograph in the front hall, right above the spot where Ranger still lies every morning at seven with his nose against the bottom of the door.

Cas comes by most mornings now. He doesn’t knock. He opens the door and says, “Come on, partner,” and Ranger gets up, slower than he used to, and they walk to the fire hall together for coffee with whoever is on shift. They walk back at nine. Cas told me the young firefighters have started keeping a box of biscuits on the shelf by the coffee maker, with a strip of masking tape on the lid that says CAPTAIN’S DOG.

Ranger sleeps under my kitchen table now while I do the crossword. I am terrible at the crossword. Merle was the one who was good at it. But I do it every morning anyway, in pen, the way he did, and when I get stuck, I read the clue out loud to the dog, the way Merle did, and he thumps his tail on the floor.

Sometimes I think he knows the answer.

If you have ever been told that the love in your life was too loud or too messy for a dignified room, maybe share this with someone who needs to hear it. Some of the most dignified things I have ever seen were six old men refusing to take one more step, and a dog who would not be sent away.

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