Sixty One Stones in the Back Acre

“Go look inside the fence corner.”

Almost hidden in the brome was the gray stub of a hedge post, cut off a foot above the ground and hard as iron.

“The book says row one starts eight feet east of the corner post. Nobody pulls a hedge post if he can help it.” She pointed at my father’s tile probe, lying in the grass. “Now take that and push it in where nobody is. Over there.”

I leaned on the handle. The rod went in about ten inches and stopped as if it had hit a board.

“That’s ground nobody ever dug. Clay. Now come four feet south of my hole.”

I leaned again.

The rod sank past my wrists.

“That’s a place that was opened once and filled back in,” my mother said. “It never packs the same. Your dad found every tile line on the home place that way. And come look with the sun low. Not now. In the morning.”

I came back the next morning and looked. With the light flat across the grass you could see them, faint, like the dents a heavy quilt leaves in a made bed. Long shallow places, one after another, in rows. Pine boxes do not hold forever. When they give, the ground settles a few inches and stays that way.

That first noon I was still angry. I got down on my knees in my office slacks anyway. I squared up the hole she had cut. I lifted the first stone out of the wagon and bedded it tight, the way you set a stepping stone, and she told me when it was level.

Then she had me help her down beside me, because she would not paint a person’s stone standing over it. She daubed it white out of the coffee can, every side that showed. The grass around it was speckled.

“Peter Hale,” she said. “I’ll letter him tomorrow when the white has cured.”

What I Read That Night

I went back to work and added the same column of scale tickets three times.

That night I could not sleep, and Jeff was sawing logs beside me after sixteen hours in a tractor cab, so I got up and sat at the kitchen table. She had sent the notebook home with me. I had not asked for it. She had just set it on my passenger seat.

I read every line.

No. 19. Infant son of Mary Dolan. Lived two days. Died March 1919. Row 2, place 6.

No. 27. Unknown man, taken off the freight. About 40. Died December 1924. Row 3, place 1.

No. 33. Clara Timm, aged 19. Died in childbed, 1926. Row 3, place 7.

Timm. Larry Timm had voted aye on Monday.

No. 41. Emil Stroud, farmhand, aged 44. Brought from the county jail sick. Died January 1928. Row 4, place 2.

I read that one twice.

And seven lines down:

No. 48. Ida Marie Becker, widow, aged 58. Died March 9, 1930. Heart. Row 4, place 9.

There was a small penciled star in the margin beside it. It was the only mark like it in the whole book.