text: Epilogue
  
  August 8, 1926
  
  The day of the funeral, there must have been at least 200 people standing behind us in the hot sun as we watched Rory, Luke, Samuel and my husband, Brock, carry Papa's casket from the hearse to the grave. All the people were there to pay tribute to a man who helped almost every one of them in one way or another.
  
  At the funeral, which had concluded about a half hour before, Pastor Bartholomew Wilcox had spoken eloquently of death and the resurrection for those who'd lived a Christ-centered life, but the real story of Papa's life was told by several other speakers who knew him well or who had been touched in various ways by his magnificent spirit.
  
  Uncle Paulie told of how Grit and he had worked in a sandstone quarry in Ohio and had come west together.
  
  "He took me, a homeless boy, as his partner, and he always treated me as an equal even though he was older and knew so much more than me. When we started making money he turned it all over to me to take care of it. I was the bookkeeper for our partnership."
  
  Uncle Paulie told about the boxing match where Papahad whipped the professional pugilist and won $2,000. "Then Grit had promptly taken $3200 of our hard-earned money and plopped it into a Yankton bank account. "
  
  "That's for you to go to college,' Grit told me.
  
  "'I don't wanna go to college,' I told him.
  
  "'Well, it'll give you a much better life, so you think about it,' he said.
  
  "A year later, I went off to the University of Nebraska and he'd convinced me that I'd made the decision when the truth was it was all his idea. I stayed for four years and graduated. Then when I was done, he gave me the purse strings again, and I became the accountant for our business for the next 48 years. We remained friends all our lives since, and all that time, we never had a single argument."
  
  The next speaker was one of Papa's most loyal employees, Willie Abbott. As we went through the list of those to speak, the pastor suggested we could eliminate Willie Abbott, and Mama said, "No, he's a good friend. I want to hear what Willie has to say."
  
  Willie stood, one of the few negroes attending the funeral, and said, "The bank was gonna foreclose on my house, and somehow Mister Grit found out and paid it off. When Miss Asa gave me the deed to my house, I had tears in my eyes. I had no other place to live, and Mister Grit knew that and took that worry right off my shoulders. Then he gave me the lumber to fix up the house and make it secure against the winter winds. He said the lumber was just excess, and he'd be giving it away anyway, but I knew it was the finest lumber he had in the yard.
  
  "During the hard times of the 1890s, he kept paying employees like me when he shoulda let us all go because the lumber yard wasn't making any money. Instead, he kept us on and paid us. If he hadn't, my family and I would've gone hungry. So I'm here today to pay tribute to a big man with an even bigger heart."
  
  A widow, Fanny Penrod, arose and limped to the front with her cane. She was aged, and her head canted a little to the side. She said in a shaky voice, "Years ago, when my husband died, I started getting these deliveries from the grocery store, every week they came, and if I hadn't gotten those, I don't know what I would have done. My house was a little south of the lumber store, and most times a boy from the store would deliver the package, but one morning I couldn't sleep, and I looked out the window and there was Grit Milburn delivering the bags of groceries himself. Only that time, the package also had a $20 bill in it. And I put two and two together and knew who'd been responsible for getting me those groceries all those years. And he wanted nobody to know it was him. I learned later that lots of widows had been getting regular grocery deliveries from an anonymous donor.
  
  "Later on, I got a leak in my roof, and I went down to the lumber yard and asked if there was anybody who could fix it. The very next day, there was a crew there that put new cedar shakes on the whole house, and I never got a bill."
  
  All in all, eight people spoke before Samuel arose and looked out at the congregation of the church until everyone was a little uncomfortable, wondering when Samuel would say something. Finally, he said with a smile, "I was Papa's best buddy. He told me so lotsa times, and it always made me feel good. All of you know I'm disabled, not smart enough to go to college. I asked Papa why I was different from my sister and two brothers.
  
  "Papa said he didn't know, but that I'd always be his best buddy. He said, 'Maybe some people are just meant to be workers like you and me.' My brother Lukie, when he was done with college, said maybe it was Papa's turn to go to college, but Papa told Lukie that he and I were workers. I think Papa did it because if he'd graduated from college, I woulda felt bad being the only one that didn't go.
  
  "I'm gonna miss Papa... a lot... but I have my memories, sweet memories of how he always treated me. Papa loved all of us, but I know he gave up more for me than any of the others. I don't have a single bad memory of him, not even one, and he was my best buddy for nearly 50 years."
  
  When Samuel finished, I had tears rolling down my cheeks, and I looked down the aisle and everyone else did too. Then I saw Rory and Luke get up to speak, and I didn't know what to think.
  
  Rory walked to the podium and said, "Everything that Samuel has said is true, and I don't wanna take away from anything he said, but I wanna say that Papa never neglected his other children. He was intimately involved in our lives. He'd come into our bedrooms almost every night and want to know what we were studying in school and how he could help.
  
  "He took us on lots of hunting and fishing trips, often with Uncle Paulie. And in winter, he'd haul us up into the hills north of town so that we could sled down the hills, and we always cut our own Christmas tree every year. It was a family picnic in the middle of December that we usually did with Uncle Paulie's family. And he took me and Luke up into the woods and gave us lessons in how to fell trees, passing along his hard-won knowledge. We worked with him one summer in his logging camp, and I never worked so hard in my entire life. It gave me an appreciation for how hard things were for Papa in the early years. He was a great father closely involved in our lives, and we loved him for it.
  
  "And Papa had the best helpmate ever. Our sweet mother was the mainstay for all of us, Papa included. She comforted us and loved us and served us every day of our lives. She was right by Papa's side in helping all of us achieve our dreams. We never wanted to disappoint her, and I don't think any of us did."
  
  When Rory sat down, Luke stepped up and said, "I echo everything Rory said. From the time he could talk, Samuel has always called me 'Lukie,' and when we were little, we played together all the time. We've always loved Samuel, and we all tried to help take care of him. Papa made us partners in looking after him and helped us feel special about it. Papa devoted a lot of time to Samuel, but he didn't neglect us in any way, and I know my sister would say the same thing.
  
  "Papa has 13 grandchildren, and they all felt of his love. We have family reunions almost every year, and he played games with the grandchildren like he was half his age. He'd play baseball and run the bases with the best of them.
  
  "Now I don't want anybody to think Papa was perfect. He had times when he was a little grouchy and when things weighed him down, but those times were few and didn't keep us from looking up to him. I asked him one time why he'd never whipped any of us children like some fathers did, and he said. "I was always afraid I'd hurt one of you, as strong as I am, and I never thought beating a child did any good. If I couldn't get you to see the light by reasoning with you, my cause was lost anyway."
  
  Mama said later she was so proud of Samuel because his little talk had captured the very essence of Papa, but she also appreciated Rory and Luke talking about how Papa loved all his children and grandchildren so much.
  
  And so, we buried him that afternoon, a man whose own mother had given him up to an orphanage, but by sheer strength of will, he'd made it all come out right. When life gave him and Mama a little orphan girl whose parents had died in a winter blizzard, they took me in like I was their very own, and I became their very own. When life gave him and Mama a disabled child, Papa made that come out alright too because he loved that child just like the rest of us, if not more. And if it was more, it was only because Papa saw that Samuel needed it more.
  
  Astrid Milburn Templeton, 1926