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Short Stories & Tall Tales
The Hat
By D. L. Chance
He died like he’d lived: In the saddle. A heart attack got him.
I didn’t know the man, but since he was the uncle of a friend’s wife I went along with them to the funeral when they asked. Except for a dozen or so months in the army in his late teens, he’d spent his whole life on his ancestral ranchlands way out on the Eastern Colorado prairie, and the drive out to the town closest to his spread took us almost two hours.
The little church was already packed when we got there.
Standing room only, in fact. A good crowd for a Tuesday afternoon in late summer. Considering how few houses I saw on the way in, I wouldn’t have bet there were so many people in the entire county.
While my friends joined their relatives on the front pews, I shoe-horned myself into enough space to stand along the back wall and began studying the mourners.
The women were dressed in their finest understated church house outfits, and each had some kind of brooch pinned at the left shoulder. Every man in sight held a clean straw cowboy hat in his hands, and they all wore freshly polished western boots under their slightly outdated suit pants. It made me glad I’d pulled on my own trusty Tony Lamas before leaving home instead of the suede hiking boots I habitually sported as Colorado dress-up wear. But I didn’t bring a hat.
I was looking idly around for a spare hat when I spotted a nice one on the leg-covering end of the open coffin. It was a bright white beaver felt Stetson, and it was sitting where the flowers most deceased usually get would have been if there had been flowers. It was spotless and new and expensive very expensive if I know anything about fine western headwear, and I do and had to go at least 50X in quality. Probably higher. It had never been worn, and was clearly not the sweat-stained straw he must have had on at the time of his passing.
It seemed to me like a waste of a perfectly good hat.
Sure, it probably cost more than the rose blanket that would normally have covered the casket. But who would want to wear it after this? Not me. Not anyone I could imagine.
Not that I’m squeamish about that sort of thing. Wearing dead peoples’ clothes is nothing new to me. I like picking up second-hand outfits and accessories at thrift stores and antique shops, and I do it all the time. I appreciate styles from the past and, even though I don’t wear that stuff at the mall or grocery store, or anywhere else outside a theatrical setting, I enjoy using period duds in my work as an entertainer. I’d be more amazed to learn the original owners of my vintage clothing were still alive than to know without a doubt they were long dead.
But this hat thing just seemed kinda…kinda creepy.
Under the circumstances, I put hats out of my mind as the funeral got underway. It wasn’t until halfway through the eulogy that an epiphany struck, and I understood. No one else would ever wear this guy’s white hat.
Why?
Because it was a white hat.
White.
As everyone knows, only the good guys wear white cowboy hats. At least, that’s what I figured.
Not that I believed there weren’t any other good people at the funeral. They were sturdy, salt-of-the-earth country folks who were respectful and knew when to bow their heads and whisper prayers without being told, and most knew all the words to the dear old hymns without having to consult a songbook. And I’d guess many if not most of them lived lives that were equally white hat-worthy, and would be sporting similar hats on the coffins at their own funerals someday. Not all of them, no; but certainly enough to please the local hat supplier.
But at this funeral, this white hat belonged to this man. This rancher. This cowboy. It wouldn’t surprise me to find he’d picked it out himself years ago and kept it stored away in its own hatbox for just this purpose.
At a signal I didn't catch, those with seats settled into them while the rest of us wall leaners made ourselves as comfortable as possible for the for the sermon.
If the preacher the dead rancher’s longtime pastor and friend could be believed, and I had no reason to doubt him, the rancher definitely earned the right to display the unworn white hat at this funeral.
But, according to the parson, it wasn’t because the rancher broke any attendance records at church. The man hardly darkened the door for weeks at a time during the spring and fall, when calving, branding and doctoring work out at the ranch demanded every available hour of his attention.
No, the preacher explained, the rancher was one of the good guys because of the way he lived his life when others were not watching.
When the big tornado took the church roof a few years back, who quietly paid for its replacement under the condition that the identification of the donor not be revealed? Well…it wasn’t the deceased rancher, the reverend said, though the rancher had done just as much good for the church and the community over the years without anyone ever knowing about it. Same as lots of good people in the area, in fact.
Who could be counted on to help out a neighboring spread when floods or other natural tragedies happened?
Right, the parson said. The late rancher. But so did every other rancher in the region, he pointed out, setting off a chorus of vigorous amen’s around the crowded room.
When his nation called, the preacher continued, the rancher hung up his saddle and willingly went halfway around the world to a country he’d never heard of. He came home from Korea with shrapnel fragments in his thigh, and immediately saddled up to ride the range again as if he'd never left it. Like dozens of other young men from similar ranches all over the West.
By this time I was beginning to wonder why such an ordinary man as the rancher deserved anything fancier than a regular work hat at his funeral when, finally, the preacher gestured at the white hat on the casket.
So why the white hat, he asked the mourners?
Easy: Because the rancher was one of the good guys, who was satisfied with not being one of the great guys.
If the man were any better, there’d be a halo on his coffin instead of the white hat, and that’s just not possible in this earthly vale of tears. Yes, the parson insisted, sometimes being a white hat man was more than good enough.
Wow. That wasn’t bad.
But, the preacher suddenly cautioned, it only works when the good guy has done his absolute best in life and can go to his maker like a man, square-shouldered and confident in his life’s actions, and not crawling or sniveling about how he only wished he’d done better when he could.
This brought on a less spirited round of amen’s, and the preacher let the thought hang still in the air-conditioned sanctuary for a long, silent moment before moving silently to the front of the coffin. There, he removed the hat and handed it to the widow.
She came shakily to her feet and shuffled the two or three steps to where the preacher stood, and reached out for the Stetson. She moved to her husband’s side and gently placed the hat on his chest. Then, laying a tender hand on his cheek, she broke down in tears. The family joined her and closed ranks around the casket.
But I stopped watching. Not because I felt awkward gazing on someone else’s grief, but because the family deserved its privacy.
I was right about the white hat, though. No one else would ever wear it.
On the drive back home, my friend was silent for a long time before he looked over at me and asked if I understood the part about the white hat.
I said I think I did.
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