A Biker Blocked The Door And Wouldn’t Let A 9-Year-Old Girl Into Her Own Father’s Funeral — Her Whole Family Called Him Heartless Until They Saw What He Did Inside
Part 2
I need to tell you about Wyatt. So you understand why I couldn’t let her see.
I met Wyatt Pennington in 2010. He was twenty-eight. He walked into the New River Riders clubhouse on Robert C. Byrd Drive with a beat-up Sportster and a grin and asked if anybody knew how to fix a leaking primary.
I did.
We spent four hours in the parking lot with that bike. By the end of it, he’d told me his whole life story and I’d told him more than I’d told anybody in ten years.
That’s what Wyatt did. He got inside you. Everybody.
I was forty-six then. Twenty-six years underground. Roof bolter, then section foreman. I’d been on the mine rescue team for Raleigh County for fifteen of those years.
When there’s a fire or a roof fall or an explosion underground, the rescue team goes in. To get the men out.
Sometimes they come out walking.
Sometimes they don’t.
In 2009, a roof fell at a mine near Eccles. Four men. We went in. It took us nineteen hours to reach them.
I carried them out. I helped get them ready for their families. Because somebody has to. Because the families shouldn’t have to see.
After that, I quit. Retired early. Couldn’t go back down.
Wyatt never asked me about any of it. He just knew. He’d sit with me on the clubhouse porch on bad nights and not say anything.
Wyatt married Brandi in 2006. Harper was born in 2007.
That girl was his whole world.
He hung her drawings in his locker at work. He did her braids every morning, badly. He drove her to school in his old Ford every day even though the bus stopped at the end of their road.
And every Saturday morning, he put her on the back of his Harley in the driveway with the engine off, and set his helmet on her head.
It came down to her nose. She had to tip her head back to see out the visor.
He’d sit in front of her and twist the throttle and make the engine noises with his mouth, and she’d hold onto his vest and lean into the pretend curves and scream with laughter.
“When you’re twelve,” he’d tell her. “When you’re twelve, we’ll go for real.”
Here’s what I didn’t know about that helmet.
When Wyatt bought it in 2013, he wrote her name on a piece of paper and tucked it into the liner.
He told nobody. Not Brandi. Not me.
I only found out from his brother, years later. Wyatt had told him once, around a campfire.
Figured if she can’t ride with me yet, I’d take her with me every time.
October 9th, 2016. Sunday afternoon. WV-16, south of Mullens.
Sun coming through the trees. Leaves just starting to turn. Wyatt in front of me, maybe a hundred feet. He was laughing at something I’d said at the gas station in Pineville. I could see his shoulders shaking.
The coal truck came around the curve at Herndon. Wide. Too fast. In our lane.
I’ll spare you.
I laid my bike down in the ditch. I got to him in maybe thirty seconds.
He was conscious.
I held him. I kept his helmet on, because you don’t take a helmet off a man in a wreck. I talked to him. I told him help was coming. It was. It just wasn’t going to come in time.
He looked at me through that face shield.
“Harper,” he said.
“I know, brother.”
“Harper.”
“I’ll take care of her.”
He said it four more times. Then he stopped.
I knew exactly what had happened to his body. I’d seen it. I’d held it.
And I knew what my job was now.
Part 3
The funeral home was Lilly & Sons. It’s been on Kanawha Street in Beckley since 1946. Three generations. The grandfather buried my father.
That week, the father, Ray Lilly, was in the hospital in Charleston after a stroke. His son Tyler was running things. Twenty-five years old. Two years out of mortuary school. Trying his best.
The man who usually handles restoration, the careful, slow work of preparing someone who’s been badly hurt so the family can see them, had a family emergency in Ohio. He’d left Wednesday. He’d planned to finish Thursday morning before the viewing.
He didn’t make it back.
Tyler didn’t know what to do.
Brandi had asked, on Monday, for a private family viewing before the service. Open casket. She wanted to see him. She wanted to say goodbye.
Nobody had told her what the crash had done. Nobody had checked.
And Tyler, twenty-five years old and alone and terrified, had opened the casket at noon the way the schedule said, and then gone into the office and sat with his head in his hands, trying to figure out what to tell her.
That’s how I found it at 12:40.
I won’t describe it.
I’ll tell you that I stood in that doorway and I wasn’t in Beckley anymore.
I was in Logan County. February 1982.
My father was killed in a methane explosion at a mine near Holden when I was nine years old. Him and two other men.
The funeral was at a little funeral home on Stratton Street in Logan. They had an open casket. Nobody checked. The family just walked in.
My mother walked in holding my hand.
I was the first one to the casket. I was nine. I was short. I was right there.
I saw what the explosion did to my father.
For thirty-four years, that’s the face I see when I think of him. Not his laugh. Not his lunch pail. Not the way he used to whistle walking up our holler at the end of a shift.
That.
Nobody stood in the door for me.
I heard the car doors in the front lot.
I saw Harper through the window. White dress. White ribbon. Yellow rose. First one out of the car. First one to the porch steps.
I ran.
I got to the front door at the exact second she reached for the handle.
I stepped out onto the porch. Pulled the door shut behind me. Stood in front of it.
Put my arms out.
You already know what happened next.
Dusty Pennington, Wyatt’s younger brother, came up those steps with his face red and his fists balled. “Dewey, get out of the way.”
Pauline, Wyatt’s mother, came up behind him. Sixty-eight years old. Barely five feet tall. She jabbed her finger at my chest.
“How dare you. How DARE you. That’s her daddy. You get out of that door.”
Brandi stood at the bottom of the steps. She didn’t say anything. She was in shock. She’d been in shock for four days.
The pastor came over. Wyatt’s coworkers. An aunt from Bluefield. Somebody said, “Is he drunk?” Somebody else said, “I always knew those bikers were trouble.”
And in the middle of all of them, Harper.
Nine years old. Standing on the porch with her yellow rose. Looking up at me.
Crying without a sound.
I couldn’t tell them.
Not in front of her. Not on that porch with her standing right there. If I said one word about what was in that room, she’d hear it, and she’d carry it the way I’d carried mine.
So I did the only thing I could think of.
I got down on one knee in front of her.
I put my mouth right next to her ear. So nobody else could hear.
And I said:
“Harper. Your daddy left something for you. Something real special. He asked me to make sure it’s ready. I need twenty minutes to get it ready. Can you guard this door for him? Don’t let anybody in. Not even Grandma. Can you do that for your daddy?”
She pulled back and looked at me.
Her eyes were red. Her nose was running.
She looked at me for a long time. Like she was trying to decide if I was telling the truth.
Then she nodded.
She wiped her face on the back of her hand.
And she turned around.
She stood in front of that door with her back to it, in her white dress, and she spread her own little arms out wide. Exactly the way I’d been standing.
Dusty stopped on the top step. “Harper, honey, come on—”
“Mr. Dewey said nobody goes in,” Harper said. Her voice shook. But she said it. “He’s getting something ready from Daddy. Twenty minutes.”
Dusty looked at me.
I looked back at him. I didn’t say anything.
But he saw something in my face. I don’t know what.
He stepped back.
I went inside alone.
And locked the door behind me.
Part 4
I found Tyler Lilly in his office with his face in his hands.
He looked up when I came in. He’d heard the shouting on the porch.
“I didn’t know what to do,” he said. His voice broke. “I didn’t know how to tell her. Dad always does it. Dad would know.”
I’ve been in a lot of rooms with a lot of young men who didn’t know what to do. Underground. In the dark. With the roof coming down.
“Son,” I said. “Get up. I’ll show you.”
Twenty minutes.
That’s how long I had.
That’s how long I took.
I won’t tell you all of it. Tyler and I did what needed doing. Quietly. Carefully. With the respect Wyatt deserved.
When it was done, we closed the lid.
I stood there with my hand flat on top of that casket for a minute. Polished cherry wood. Cold.
“I’m sorry, brother,” I said. “Sorry it had to be me. Sorry it had to be like this.”
Then I went to work on the rest.
There’s a thing families don’t know about funerals. The room matters. Where the light falls. What the eye sees first when you walk in the door.
Tyler brought every arrangement in the building into that viewing room.
The New River Riders’ white roses. Brandi’s family’s lilies. A spray of red carnations from the Walmart distribution center. Purple mums from Harper’s school, from her third-grade class. Every single bouquet.
I covered the entire top of the casket.
Every inch. Roses on roses. Lilies at the head. The purple mums in the middle, right where Harper would see them first. Carnations spilling down the sides.
You couldn’t see the wood anymore. Just flowers.
Then I went through the photographs the family had brought for the memorial table. Forty or fifty of them. In frames. In a shoebox.
I found the one I wanted.
Wyatt on his Harley in the driveway. Summer. No helmet, just sunglasses pushed up on his head. Laughing so hard his eyes were squeezed shut. Somebody off-camera had just said something funny. Probably Harper.
I put it on an easel at the head of the casket. In a silver frame. Right in the middle of the flowers.
So it’d be the first thing she saw when she walked in.
His laugh.
Not what I saw.
His laugh.
Tyler stood at the back of the room watching me.
“How did you know how to do all that?” he asked.
I wiped my hands on my jeans.
“Somebody should’ve done it for me once,” I said.
I looked at my watch.
Nineteen minutes.
I went to the front door. I unlocked it. I opened it.
Harper was still standing there. Arms out. Twenty minutes, on that porch, in her white dress, guarding the door.
Nobody had gotten past her.
Behind her, the whole family stood on the steps and in the yard, silent now. Watching.
Brandi had come up onto the porch. She was standing right behind her daughter.
She looked at me.
I looked at her.
And something in my face must have told her. Because her hand went to her mouth. And her eyes filled. And I saw her understand.
She didn’t say anything.
She just nodded once.
Part 5
Harper walked in first.
She walked slow. Holding her yellow rose. Down the center aisle of that little viewing room.
She stopped at the casket.
She looked at the flowers. All those flowers. Every color. Purple mums in the middle, from her own class.
She looked at the picture of her daddy laughing on his Harley.
She stood there a long time.
Then she reached up and laid her yellow rose right in front of the picture, in the middle of all the others.
“Hi, Daddy,” she said.
Brandi came in behind her. Then Pauline. Then Dusty. Then all of them.
Nobody said a word.
They looked at the flowers. They looked at the closed lid. They looked at the photograph.
And they understood.
Pauline turned around and found me in the back of the room, by the wall. She walked straight over. Five feet tall. Sixty-eight years old.
I thought she was going to slap me.
She put her arms around me instead. As far as they’d reach. And held on.
“Thank you,” she whispered. “Oh, God. Thank you.”
Dusty came over after. Wyatt’s little brother. He didn’t hug me. He just put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed so hard it hurt, and walked away to stand by his mother.
Then I went out to my bike and got the gift bag.
The purple one.
I brought it back in and knelt down in front of Harper by the casket.
“Your daddy left you something,” I said. “Remember? This is what I was getting ready.”
I opened the bag. Pulled back the tissue paper.
She saw what it was.
His helmet.
Flat black. Polished till it shined. The little flag sticker on the side. The face shield so clean you could see yourself in it.
She took it in both arms. It was almost as big as her torso.
She hugged it.
“It’s Daddy’s,” she whispered.
“It is.”
“It’s not broken.”
“No, sweetheart. It’s not broken. It took care of him as long as it could.”
Then I showed her the inside.
I lifted the foam liner. Very carefully.
There was the piece of paper. Folded small. Right where I’d put it back at four in the morning.
I took it out and unfolded it and held it so she could see.
HARPER
And a heart.
In her daddy’s handwriting.
She looked at it for a long time.
“He wrote that?” she said.
“Yep.”
“When?”
“When he bought it. Three years ago.”
She looked up at me.
“Why?”
I swallowed.
“So you could ride with him,” I said. “Every time. Even when you were too little to go for real. You were right there. On top of his head. Every mile.”
Harper put the paper back in the liner exactly where it had been.
Then she put the helmet on.
It came down past her nose. She had to tip her head back to see out the visor.
She stood there by her father’s casket in her white dress and her daddy’s helmet, looking up at his laughing picture through the polished face shield.
Brandi made a sound and had to sit down.
Every person in that room was crying.
Except me.
I went outside to the porch and sat in one of those rocking chairs nobody ever uses and looked at Kanawha Street until I could breathe again.
Part 6
The New River Riders made a rule after that.
It’s not in our bylaws. Nobody voted on it. Nobody wrote it down.
But every member knows it. And every member does it.
When there’s a death in a club family, or in the family of anybody we know, somebody from the club goes to the funeral home first.
Before the viewing. Before the family gets there. Before the kids walk in.
To check.
To make sure the room is ready. That nothing’s there that a child shouldn’t see. That if something’s wrong, there’s time to fix it.
Most of the time, nothing’s wrong. Most funeral directors are careful, good people.
But once in a while, there’s a reason.
And somebody’s there to stand in the door.
In ten years, we’ve done it more than sixty times.
Funeral homes all over Raleigh County know us now. When a family’s got a New River Rider in it, the funeral director calls the clubhouse. “When do you want to come in?”
Tyler Lilly started calling us first. Without being asked.
He changed his own policy too. Before any viewing at Lilly & Sons, a senior staff member walks the family’s path into the room. Every time. And if there are children coming, the director meets the family on the porch first.
He told me he wrote it on a card and taped it to the inside of his office door.
Somebody should’ve done it for me once.
Harper kept the helmet.
She slept with it the first year. Brandi told me. Every night. Under her arm, like a teddy bear.
When she turned twelve, the age Wyatt promised he’d take her for real, I took her instead. Brandi said yes. Just once around the block. Slow.
She rode on the back of my Road King wearing her daddy’s helmet. It fit her by then. Almost.
She held onto my vest.
At the end of the street, she leaned into the curve the way he taught her. The pretend way. In the driveway.
And she laughed out loud.
His laugh.
Part 7
Harper’s nineteen now.
She lives in Pittsburgh. She’s in her second year at a school there that trains funeral directors.
When she told me, I didn’t say anything for a long time.
“Why?” I finally asked.
She looked at me like I was being slow.
“Because somebody has to stand in the door,” she said.
Her daddy’s helmet sits on her desk in her apartment on Penn Avenue. She sent me a picture. Right next to her textbooks and her laptop and a coffee mug that says WEST VIRGINIA: ALMOST HEAVEN.
Flat black. Little flag sticker. Still shines.
The paper’s still inside the liner. She’s never taken it out again.
Last summer, she came home and worked at Lilly & Sons as an apprentice. Under Tyler. Who’s thirty-five now, and runs the place, and is very good at it.
In July, a young lineman from Glen Daniel died in an accident on a utility pole. Thirty-one. He had a little boy. Seven.
I went to the funeral home early. Like always. Like the rule says.
When I got there, Harper was already inside.
She’d been in the viewing room for an hour. Checking. Arranging. Making sure the light fell right. Making sure the first thing a seven-year-old saw when he walked in was his daddy’s smile.
She came out to the porch when she heard my bike.
Black dress. Her hair in a braid. She looked so much like Wyatt I had to stop at the bottom of the steps.
“It’s ready,” she said.
I nodded.
The family’s cars pulled in a few minutes later. A little boy got out of the first one. Holding a single flower.
He came up the porch steps first.
Harper knelt down in front of him. At the door.
She whispered something in his ear.
I didn’t hear what.
I didn’t have to.
He nodded. And she opened the door for him.
She goes in first now.
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