Part 2: My Uncle Left Me His Harley In His Will When I Was 12 Years Old — On The Morning I Finally Rode It To His Grave At 17, A Woman I Had Never Seen Before Walked Up And Told Me A Secret He Had Kept For 53 Years
PART 2
I want to tell you who Doyle Hardwick was before he was Uncle Doyle.
Doyle was born in 1949 in a small farm town called Choteau, Montana, ninety miles north of Helena on Highway 89, in the lee of the Rocky Mountain Front. His father had been a hay-and-cattle rancher on a small section of land east of town. His mother had been a one-room-schoolhouse teacher at the small rural elementary on Old Schoolhouse Road for twenty-eight years.
Doyle had one younger brother named Gerald who had been killed in Vietnam in 1968 at the age of nineteen.
Doyle had enlisted in the Navy in May of 1969, four months after Gerald’s funeral, at the age of twenty.
He had served three years on the USS Coral Sea in the South China Sea.
He had come home to Choteau in 1972 at the age of twenty-three.
He had moved to Helena that same summer for the construction work at the Anaconda Smelter.
He had met Doris Whitfield, the woman whose name was on the inside of his right forearm in old-school cursive, on a Saturday night in late July of 1972 at a small dance hall called the Aero Inn off Custer Avenue in East Helena.
She had been twenty.
He had been twenty-three.
He had asked her to dance.
They had been together for two years and one month and three days.
They had been planning, by the small handwritten count Doris kept in a leather journal that I am only now telling you about, to be married in the fall of 1974.
In August of 1974, Doris had been accepted to a graduate-level music conservatory program in Lyon, France, on a scholarship from the Fulbright program. She had been a flute player at Carroll College in Helena. The scholarship had been for two years.
She had told Doyle, on the back porch of his small rental house on Custer Avenue at six forty-three p.m. on a Tuesday in August of 1974, that she was going to go.
She had told him she was going to come back.
He had told her, in his exact words by Doris’s own quiet account to my daughter at her kitchen table on a Tuesday afternoon in October of last year, Doris. Go. I will be here. I am not going anywhere.
She had gone.
She had met a man at the conservatory in Lyon in October of 1975 — a French cellist named Henri Marchand, four years older than her, who had asked her to marry him in February of 1976.
She had said yes.
She had written a letter to Doyle in March of 1976 to tell him.
The letter — Doris kept the carbon copy, on onionskin paper folded in quarters, in the back of the leather journal she would eventually show my daughter — the letter said in eleven sentences that she was so sorry, that she had loved him with everything she had, that she could not come back to Helena, that she hoped he could one day find another woman who could give him the things she could not, and that she would think of him every Tuesday afternoon at six forty-three p.m. for the rest of her life.
Doyle had received the letter on a Friday afternoon in late March of 1976 at the Helena post office.
He had walked home with it in his back pocket.
He had read it on the back porch of his small rental house at six forty-three p.m. that night.
He had folded it in half.
He had put it in the inside front pocket of his cut.
He had carried that letter, by his own quiet admission to my late husband Daniel at the kitchen table of our small house on Cannon Street in Helena on a Saturday afternoon in October of 1996 — twenty years after he had received it — Doyle had carried that letter on the inside front pocket of his cut for twenty-three more years.
He had carried it for forty-three years total when he passed at the VA in 2020.
Two weeks after the letter arrived in 1976, Doyle had ridden his Shovelhead — which was at the time still a new bike, only seven months out of the factory in Milwaukee — Doyle had ridden it to a small tattoo shop on Last Chance Gulch in downtown Helena and had asked the tattoo artist there, a forty-eight-year-old man named Earl Brennan, to ink the cursive name DORIS on the inside of his right forearm with a small banner underneath.
The banner read, in small block letters Earl had inked in the same session: 1972 — 1974.
The dates were the dates Doyle and Doris had been together.
Doyle had never had the tattoo covered, lasered, or modified.
He had never married.
He had dated, by my late husband Daniel’s count at the kitchen table that October of 1996, four women in the twenty-two years between Doris and Daniel’s death. None of those four had lasted more than fourteen months. He had remained, by Daniel’s report and by my own observation over the next eleven years, a kind man who had decided sometime in his late twenties that he was going to do brotherhood and uncle-hood and pipefitting and the Shovelhead, and that he was not going to do another wife.
He had been doing that for forty-eight years on the morning he signed the codicil.
PART 3
I want to tell you what happened on the morning of Tuesday, August 12th, of last year.
Lily woke up at six-fifteen a.m. that morning. She made herself a piece of buttered toast and a glass of orange juice. She ate at the kitchen table where her father had eaten his last bowl of cereal sixteen years earlier in February of 2009.
She put on a pair of dark blue jeans, a clean black t-shirt, her father’s old denim jacket that I had kept in my closet for sixteen years and that I had given her on her sixteenth birthday, a pair of dark leather riding gloves she had bought herself with her summer paycheck from Helena Honda, and the heavy black engineer motorcycle boots that had been Doyle’s, that I had set aside for her at twelve and that had, by the time she was sixteen and a half, fit her perfectly.
She walked out the kitchen door of our small house on Cannon Street at nine-thirty-three a.m.
She walked across the small concrete patio of our back yard to the detached single-car garage where the 1979 Harley-Davidson Shovelhead had been parked under a fitted canvas cover for five years and three months and ten days.
She pulled the canvas cover off.
She folded it carefully on the work bench against the back wall.
She walked once around the Shovelhead with one hand on the chrome handlebar and one hand on the seat and her father’s denim jacket smelling of the cedar closet where I had kept it for sixteen years.
She started the bike on the first push.
The engine — by my own count standing at the open garage door in my bathrobe with a cup of coffee in my hand — the engine of a 1979 Harley-Davidson Shovelhead that has been polished every Saturday morning for forty-one years and has been started by its current eleven-year-old caretaker at the cemetery once every Saturday morning at ten-fifteen for two years to keep the engine warm — that engine settled into the deepest, lowest, most settled idle a V-twin has ever made in my driveway.
Lily looked at me from the saddle.
She did not say anything.
I did not say anything.
She pulled out of the garage at nine fifty-six a.m. on a Tuesday morning in mid-August in Helena, Montana, at twenty-two miles an hour, with her father’s denim jacket buttoned at the throat and her uncle’s brass key in the ignition.
She rode the four and a half miles to the Helena Memorial Gardens on West Highway 12.
She turned in at the wrought-iron gate at ten-eleven a.m.
She rode the access road to section D.
She parked the Shovelhead on the grass three yards from plot 47.
She cut the engine.
She walked the three yards to the polished granite headstone.
She read the carved letters.
DOYLE REED HARDWICK. 1949 — 2020. PIPEFITTER. BROTHER. UNCLE. SAILOR.
She sat down on the small concrete bench under the cottonwood tree next to the stone.
She did what her uncle had asked her to do.
She sat there for one hour.
She did not say anything for the first forty-six minutes.
At ten fifty-eight a.m., she said, in a voice that nobody else was supposed to hear: “Uncle Doyle. I came. I can ride. I did it.”
At eleven-eleven a.m., a 75-year-old woman with carefully styled silver hair, a small floral cotton sundress in pale blue with small white flowers on it, a soft white cardigan, and a small bouquet of fresh white tulips wrapped in pale green paper in her left hand walked up the gravel path from the visitors’ parking lot.
She had not, by Lily’s later account, seen the Shovelhead from the parking lot, because the parking lot is on the far side of the cemetery office and the access road dips behind a small rise before it reaches section D.
She walked up to plot 47.
She saw the Shovelhead on the grass.
She stopped.
She looked at the Shovelhead.
She looked at Lily on the bench.
She looked at the headstone.
She did not move for about four seconds.
Then she said, in a voice that was careful and quiet and trembled at the edges: “Sweetheart. Whose grave is this.”
Lily said: “Ma’am. This is my Uncle Doyle. He left me the bike.”
The 75-year-old woman set the small bouquet of fresh white tulips down on the grass at the foot of the polished granite stone.
She sat down on the concrete bench next to my daughter.
She put her small careful hands flat on her own knees.
She said, in the same voice: “Sweetheart. I loved your uncle in 1972.”
PART 4
Lily was, in the next eleven minutes on the concrete bench under the cottonwood tree at section D plot 47 of the Helena Memorial Gardens, told a story she had not, in seventeen years of knowing her uncle, heard one word of.
The woman’s name was Doris Marchand.
She had been born Doris Whitfield in Helena, Montana, in 1949.
She had dated Doyle Hardwick for two years and one month and three days between 1972 and 1974.
She had left him in August of 1974 for a Fulbright scholarship to a music conservatory in Lyon, France.
She had met a French cellist named Henri Marchand in October of 1975.
She had married Henri in May of 1976.
She had lived in Lyon for the next forty-three years. She and Henri had two daughters who were now grown and who lived in Paris and in Geneva respectively. She had three grandchildren. She had played the flute professionally with a small chamber ensemble in Lyon for thirty-one years. She had retired from the ensemble in 2014.
Henri Marchand had passed of a stroke in November of 2019, three months before Doyle had been diagnosed with the pancreatic cancer that would kill him.
Doris had moved back to Helena in March of 2020 to be closer to her younger sister Beverly, who still lived in the old family house on Beattie Street.
She had moved back two weeks before Doyle had passed.
She had not known he was sick.
She had not known he was dying.
She had heard about his funeral on the local KBLL morning radio show on a Monday morning in May of 2020 — a brief mention of a memorial service for a longtime Helena pipefitter named Doyle Hardwick, age seventy, that had been held the previous Saturday morning at Helena Memorial Gardens.
She had driven to Helena Memorial Gardens that same Tuesday afternoon at one p.m.
She had asked the cemetery groundskeeper, a sixty-one-year-old man named Wendell, where a Doyle Hardwick had been buried the previous Saturday.
Wendell had walked her out to section D, plot 47.
Doris had stood at the polished granite stone for forty-one minutes.
She had not had any flowers with her.
She had driven home that afternoon.
She had returned to Helena Memorial Gardens at eleven a.m. every Tuesday morning for the next five years and three months and ten days.
She had brought a small bouquet of fresh white tulips — the flower Doyle had given her on their first date at the Aero Inn in July of 1972, which she had told him then was her favorite flower — every single time.
She had not told her sister Beverly.
She had not told her grown daughters Madeleine and Camille.
She had not told anybody.
She had been the woman who had been laying fresh white tulips on Doyle Hardwick’s grave at section D plot 47 of the Helena Memorial Gardens at eleven a.m. every Tuesday morning for the entire time my daughter Lily had been waiting in the garage on Cannon Street for the day she would be allowed to start his engine.
PART 5
I want to back up to the small banner under the cursive name DORIS on Doyle’s right forearm.
I told you in the second part that Doyle had had the tattoo inked in March of 1976 at a small tattoo shop on Last Chance Gulch in downtown Helena by a forty-eight-year-old tattoo artist named Earl Brennan.
I told you the banner under the name read 1972 — 1974.
I told you those were the dates Doyle and Doris had been together.
What I did not tell you in the second part — because I did not know this until Doris told it to my daughter and me at the small kitchen table of her sister Beverly’s house on Beattie Street in Helena six days later, on a Sunday afternoon in mid-August — is the small specific reason Doyle had asked Earl Brennan to leave a small space at the end of the banner before he had finished the tattoo.
He had asked Earl to ink the dates 1972 — 1974, and then to leave half an inch of bare skin after the second four, with a small dash already inked after the four.
He had told Earl, by Earl’s later account to my late husband Daniel at a charter Christmas dinner in 1998 that I am only learning about now because Daniel had written the conversation down in a small spiral notepad I found in his garage workbench last week — Doyle had told Earl in 1976 that he wanted the dash there because he did not know what year the second date was going to be.
He had assumed, in 1976, that there was going to be a second date.
He had not known whether Doris was going to come back from Lyon, or whether she was going to write a letter, or whether she was going to be married to a French cellist named Henri Marchand, or whether she was going to live in Lyon for the next forty-three years, or whether she was going to move back to Helena two weeks before he died of pancreatic cancer at the VA in Fort Harrison, or whether she was going to bring white tulips to his grave every Tuesday at eleven a.m. for five years and three months and ten days after he was buried.
He had inked the dash because he had not known what year the dash was going to close.
He had carried the open dash on the inside of his right forearm for forty-eight years.
He had not, in those forty-eight years, gone back to Earl Brennan or to any other tattoo artist in Helena to have the dash closed.
He had not, in those forty-eight years, told a single person in his charter or in his union or in my late husband Daniel’s family why he had asked Earl to leave the bare skin in 1976.
The bare skin had still been there on the morning Doyle had passed at the VA at six twenty-three a.m. on a Tuesday in March of 2020 with no one in the room.
Doris was, on a Tuesday afternoon in May of 2020, the second date.
She has been carrying it ever since.
PART 6
I want to tell you what has happened in the fourteen months since the morning at section D plot 47.
My daughter Lily called me from the cemetery at twelve-oh-six p.m. that Tuesday afternoon. She said into the phone: “Mom. I’m okay. But you have to come.”
I drove the four and a half miles to Helena Memorial Gardens in the same Subaru I had owned for eleven years.
I parked next to the Shovelhead.
I walked across the grass to the concrete bench.
I sat down next to Lily and Doris under the cottonwood tree at section D plot 47.
Doris was crying quietly with the small careful posture of a 75-year-old woman who has held in fifty-three years of feeling at the back of her chest. Lily was holding one of Doris’s small careful hands on her own seventeen-year-old denim-jacketed lap. The small bouquet of fresh white tulips was on the grass at the foot of the stone.
We sat there for an hour and twenty-three minutes.
I drove Doris home in the Subaru at one-fifty p.m. that Tuesday afternoon. Lily rode the Shovelhead home behind me to Cannon Street.
Doris invited us to her sister Beverly’s small house on Beattie Street the following Sunday afternoon for tea. We went. The three of us sat at the small kitchen table at the back of Beverly’s house from two p.m. until eight-thirty p.m. We did not stop talking. Doris told us everything I have told you. We told Doris everything we had of Doyle — the letter, the codicil, the Shovelhead, the small wooden box on top of my dresser with his brass key, the small spiral notepad I had found in Daniel’s garage workbench.
Doris did not cry again that night.
She made us a casserole.
We left at eight forty-five p.m.
She has called Lily twice a week on Lily’s flip phone every single week since.
She has taught Lily, by my best count over the last fourteen months, how to knit a basic scarf, how to knit a cable scarf, how to make a roasted chicken with lemon and rosemary, how to read a recipe in metric, how to identify three Montana wildflowers that grow along the Continental Divide Trail, how to play four bars of Debussy on a flute Doris had given her in October, and how to sit on a concrete bench at a cemetery for one hour without saying anything.
Lily calls her Grandmother Doris.
Doris answers to it every single time.
PART 7
Two weeks ago, on a Tuesday afternoon at four-fifteen p.m. at Doris’s sister Beverly’s kitchen table on Beattie Street, over a cup of strong English Breakfast tea, Doris told my daughter the eight words I am not yet ready to put on the internet.
She told Lily she was going to leave the small leather journal — the one with the carbon copy of the 1976 letter folded in quarters in the back of it, in onionskin paper — Doris was going to leave the journal to Lily when she passed.
She told Lily she had spoken with her two daughters Madeleine in Paris and Camille in Geneva and had explained the arrangement.
She told Lily what she wanted on the small bronze plaque she was going to have mounted at the foot of Doyle’s headstone at section D plot 47 in the spring of next year.
The plaque is going to be five inches by seven inches. It is going to be mounted at the bottom right of the polished granite stone, two inches above the grass line. It is going to have a single line of carved text on it.
The line is going to be the eight words Doris said to my daughter at the kitchen table at four-fifteen on a Tuesday afternoon in October.
The eight words are:
1972 — 2025. The dash is closed now, Doyle.
Lily is going to ride the Shovelhead to the cemetery on the morning the plaque is mounted.
Doris is going to ride in the small wicker sidecar that Doyle had bought for the Shovelhead in 1981 and that has been bolted to the right side of the bike for forty-four years, that I had not, until last month, ever once seen used.
Lily has, by my own quiet observation in the garage on Cannon Street last Saturday morning at ten-fifteen, been practicing the turns into Helena Memorial Gardens with the sidecar attached for the last six weeks.
Follow the page for more stories about the bikers America thinks it knows — and the small bare half-inch of skin they leave at the end of a 1976 tattoo for forty-eight years waiting for a second date.
