Sixty One Stones in the Back Acre

“It’s an empty acre, folks,” Mayor Dick Farris said. “Nobody is buried back there. We have been mowing grass for fifty years for nobody.”

He said it kindly, the way you would explain a thing to a child, and he was looking at my mother when he said it.

There were maybe fourteen of us in the folding chairs at city hall that Monday night. The coffee maker on the back table was ticking. Mr. Stroud, who owned storage units in two other towns in the county, sat in the front row with his cap on his knee and a folder under it.

“Eighteen thousand dollars,” Dick said. “The cemetery fund has twenty-one hundred in it, and the mower is nineteen years old. I don’t know how to make that arithmetic work any other way.”

My mother, Wilma, was 79 and had sat on that council for eleven years. She had her hands folded on the table.

“There are sixty-one people in that ground, Dick,” she said.

“Wilma, with respect, that acre was never platted as cemetery. It came to the town from the county in 1931, when the poor farm closed, as a plain lot. I had the clerk pull the deed. No lots, no burials, not one stone.”

“There’s not a stone because nobody bought them one. The poor farm buried its dead there for forty-four years.”

“Then there would be a record at the courthouse, and there isn’t.”

“The county’s burial register burned with the old courthouse in thirty-four. You know that as well as I do.”

“I know that on paper it is empty ground,” he said. “I can’t run a town on what somebody remembers hearing.”

“I didn’t hear it. I read it.”

“Then I’d have to see it in something official. Is there a motion?”

There was. There was a second. Carrow, Nebraska has six council seats, two to a ward, but Gene Pruitt was up in Lincoln that week with his wife’s hip surgery, so five voted.

“Voss.”

“Aye.”

“Beck.”

“Aye.”

“Timm.”

“Aye.”

“Kolar.”

“Aye.”

“Krause.”

“No,” my mother said.

“Four to one. Motion carries.” Dick tapped his pen on the table. “Let the minutes show Mrs. Krause objects.” He smiled a little. “She usually does.”

Somebody in the back laughed. It was not a mean laugh. It was worse than that. It was the laugh you give a thing that does not matter.

My mother did not turn around. She wrote something on her agenda, capped her pen, and waited for the motion to adjourn.

I had driven her because she gave up night driving after her cataracts. In the car she held her purse in her lap with both hands and looked out at the elevator lights. It was the second week of October and the dryers were roaring. You could hear them through the glass.

“Mom,” I said.

“Not tonight, Beth Ann.”

So I did not say anything else. I pulled into her drive, and before I had the car in park she was out of it. She did not go up the porch steps. She went around the side of the house in her church shoes, with the little flashlight off her key ring, to the shed.

She came out with her garden trowel in one hand and a coffee can in the other, the big red three-pound kind my father used to keep nails in. She set them both on the porch step, side by side, the way you set out your clothes the night before.

Then she went in and turned off the kitchen light.