Sixty One Stones in the Back Acre

A Half Gallon of Porch Paint

I live four blocks from my mother. My husband, Jeff, was running the grain cart for his brother that month, which meant he was gone before five and home after dark, and I was doing the books at the co-op through harvest, which meant about the same. I walked over to her house at half past six the next morning with my coffee still in my hand.

She was on the porch in my father’s old canvas barn coat, pouring white paint out of a half-gallon bucket into the coffee can. It was the exterior white left over from when she did the porch rail.

“What are you doing?”

“Thinning this. It skinned over.”

“Mom.”

She stirred it with a paint stick. Beside her on the step sat the trowel, a two-inch brush, a jar of black enamel, a stenographer’s notebook with a green cover gone soft as cloth, and my father’s tile probe, which is a steel rod about four feet long with a T handle on top.

“I’m going out to the cemetery,” she said. “I’ll be back by supper.”

“To do what?”

“What I told them I’d do, if they had listened to the end of the sentence.”

She had a child’s red wagon by the steps, the one Kayla used to ride in. In it were four rough fieldstones the size of bread loaves. I knew them. They were the border off her peony bed. My father had picked those rocks out of the north quarter himself, every spring for forty years, and she had laid them around her peonies one by one.

“You can’t pull that wagon a mile.”

“I’m not going to. I’m going to put it in the trunk.”

“You can’t lift those into a trunk.”

“I already did it once, to see.”

I helped her load the car the way you help a person do a foolish thing, and I let her see that on my face.

She saw it. She drove off at twenty miles an hour.

I went to work. I lasted until noon.

Row One, Place One

Carrow Cemetery sits on a rise a mile north of town, with a line of old cedars along the west fence. The front is the part everybody knows. The good granite, the family names, the flag pole the Legion put up. Behind the last row of stones there is a strip of plain mown grass, about an acre, running back to the corner where the fence meets a cornfield.

My mother was in the far northwest corner of it. Her car was on the lane with the trunk open, and the red wagon was beside her in the grass with the four stones in it.

She was not on her knees. She was sitting flat on the ground with her legs out in front of her like a little girl’s. Next to her was a square hole where she had cut out the sod.

I ran the last of it.

“Are you hurt?”

“No. I’m waiting.”

“For what?”

“For my knees to decide.” She said it calmly. “It’s been about twenty minutes. They’re coming around.”

I got her up. I walked her to the car and sat her down on the edge of the open trunk. And then I said all of it, with the wind coming across the corn stubble.