One More Line on Elmer’s Stone

“I’ll give you till that stone is in the ground,” she said. “After that I’m seventy-eight years old and I’ll say what I please.”

“That’s fair.”

It was a long winter.

Debra sent a Christmas card. It had a cardinal on it and it was signed “Debra, Jeff and Tyler,” and it was addressed to Nadine Novak, with no Mrs. I stood it on the piano next to Joan’s picture.

She did not come down for Christmas. She said the roads were bad, and they were.

It is one thing to do a decent thing on a Tuesday morning in your church scarf. It is another to live with it through a Nebraska February, feeding forty cows alone, with twenty-seven hundred dollars gone and the propane man due.

Suppose she saw those three words and thought I was trying to buy her, or shame her. Suppose I lay down someday in some other cemetery, by myself, and the stone at Zion Hill told everybody who drove past that Elmer Novak had one wife.

What I came back to, every time, was that the line was right whether she ever thanked me for it or not. Joan was that girl’s mother. Somebody ought to have said so in stone a long time ago. If it cost me my place, then it did, but the line was still right.

In March I went out to the shop to see it.

Mr. Blaha had it standing up by then, on blocks, under a work light. The wheat was cut up both sides, deep and clean, every beard on every head. The name stood across the top.

Joan on the left. Elmer on the right. And under Joan’s dates, in smaller letters, the line.

I had only ever seen her name on a marker you had to pull the grass back to read.

“It centered,” I said.

“I made it center.” He stood with his arms crossed, looking at his own work. “I’ve seen every kind of family there is come through that front door, Mrs. Novak. I had not seen this.”

Debra called him the second week of May. He telephoned me that same evening.

“She wanted to make a payment,” he said. “She’d sent me two hundred in January and a hundred in March, and she wanted to know what was left.”

“You’ve been holding her money?”

“In an envelope in my desk, with her name on it. I didn’t know what else to do with it. I told her the balance was paid.”

I sat down on the stool by the telephone.

“What did she say?”

“She said, ‘Paid by who?’ That’s a straight question, so I gave her a straight answer. I said her stepmother paid it in full in November and signed the permit.”

“And?”

“And she didn’t say anything for about as long as it takes to pour a cup of coffee. Then she said, ‘What did she change?’ I told her there was one line added. She asked me what it said.”

“Did you tell her?”

“I told her we’re setting it Thursday the twenty-first at ten o’clock, weather permitting, and that if I were her I’d come read it for myself.” He cleared his throat. “She thinks it’s your name, Mrs. Novak. I could hear it. She thinks you had me squeeze you in.”

“I expect she does.”

Thursday the twenty-first was clear and warm, with meadowlarks on the fence posts. The peony bush at home was in tight bud, three or four days from opening. It always knew when Memorial Day was.