Sixty One Stones in the Back Acre

“You are going to hurt yourself out here, and nobody will find you till dark. You are seventy-nine years old. You have one hole dug. There are sixty-one. At one a day you would be done at Christmas, and Mr. Stroud closes on the fourteenth of November, and he wants his rock down before the ground freezes. You can’t win this with a trowel.”

“I know what the arithmetic is.”

“Then call somebody. Call the state. There have to be laws about this.”

“I called Lincoln in August, when Dick first floated it. A very nice young man told me to put a request in writing and they might get somebody out to look in the spring.” She brushed grass off her coat. “Spring is after November.”

“Then get a lawyer.”

“With what, Beth Ann? And to say what? The dead are not a legal question.”

“Then what are they?”

“They’re a question of whether anybody remembers.”

I was angry enough by then to say the next thing.

“You have a book. I saw it on the step. Why didn’t you just show it to somebody before it ever came to a vote?”

“I did.”

That stopped me.

“I took it to the county clerk in August. She was polite. She said the county’s register burned in thirty-four and she could not enter a handwritten copy of a book nobody can produce. Then I took it to the paper. They said they couldn’t print sixty-one graves on the strength of a notebook.” She looked at her hands. “A notebook is not a record. I was told that twice, by two nice people, before Dick ever said it.”

“Then what good is a rock?”

She nodded back toward the corner.

“Nobody argues with a stone that has a name on it. They have to walk out here and stand in front of it first. I can’t make them vote right. I can make them look.”

“And if nobody comes?”

“Then on the fourteenth of November there will be thirty-some names he has to drive his gravel truck across. I’d like to see the man who can do it.”

She reached behind her into the trunk and handed me the green notebook.

It was her handwriting, but younger, round and careful, in blue ballpoint. The first page said, at the top: Burial Record, County Poor Farm. Copied from the Superintendent’s book, June 1968. W. Becker.

Becker was her name before she married my father.

“I was twenty-one,” she said. “I was the junior girl in the county clerk’s office. The superintendent had kept his own book at home, apart from the county’s. When his daughter died that spring, her family carried his papers into the courthouse in apple boxes. They thought the county would want them. The county did not. That book was going to the dump. The cover had come off and the mice had been at it.”

“You copied it?”

“Over my lunch hours. It took nine days.”

I turned the pages. Every entry was the same shape. A number. A name. An age. A date. A cause. And at the end of each line, a row and a place.

No. 1. Peter Hale, laborer, aged 66. Died November 4, 1887. Lung fever. Row 1, place 1.

No. 2. Mrs. Anna Novak, widow, aged 71. Died January 1888. Old age. Row 1, place 2.

It went on like that for six pages, through No. 61, dated 1931.

“They had wooden crosses once,” she said. “Painted white. A grass fire took most of them in the fifties and nobody put them back. After that it was just lawn.”

“Mom, how do you know they’re where the book says? It’s been a hundred and forty years.”