Sixty One Stones in the Back Acre

The Rock Pile

I was at her house at six the next morning in my chore boots.

“Becker,” I said, on the porch. “Row four, place nine. Who is that?”

“There were Beckers all over this county.”

“Mom.”

“We’ll get to row four when we get to row four.” She handed me the trowel. “You cut. I’ll find.”

So that is how we did it, every morning before I went to the co-op. She found the place with the book and the rod. I cut the sod and carried the stone and bedded it. Then I got her down beside me, and she lettered yesterday’s name in black enamel with a little sign-painter’s brush and daubed today’s stone white.

I was not angry anymore. I had read the name of a two-day-old baby at one in the morning, and it was gone out of me.

We did one a day. Getting her down to the ground and back up once was all her knees would stand, and she would not have it done without her. I offered to set a second and a third on my own.

“Not until the first one’s lettered. I won’t have a blank white rock sitting on a person overnight if I can help it. That’s what they’ve had.”

On Friday night Jeff came in from the field, ate standing up at the counter, and said, “How many rocks does she need?”

“Fifty-seven more.”

“Then she’s out of flower bed.” He drank his milk. “Dale’s got a rock pile in the fence corner by the creek that’s been there since his granddad. I’ll bring a load Sunday. We don’t run Sunday morning anyhow.”

He brought them after church, in his work pickup, with the tailgate down and the springs flat. He had gone through the pile and picked them for shape. Flat on the bottom, rounded on top. He unloaded every one himself and set them in a line along the cedars, biggest to smallest, and he did not say one word about whether any of it was a good idea.

Before he left he walked out to the corner and read the five names that were down. He took the tile probe, pushed it into the next place, felt it drop, and handed it back to my mother.

“Yep,” he said.

That was his whole speech, and my mother liked it better than anything I had said all week.

Our daughter, Kayla, came home that same weekend. She is twenty and in her second year at the college in Peru, forty minutes off. She showed up Saturday noon with her laundry and a sack of brushes.

Kayla has the handwriting in our family. She lettered two stones that weekend, and then she asked Grandma which one was next in the book.

“Row two, place six. But that’s a week off yet.”

Kayla read the line. She did not say anything. Then she went down the row of Jeff’s stones along the cedars until she found the smallest one, not much bigger than a hymnal.

“This one,” she said. “I want to do it now.”

My mother let her. She painted it white herself. On Sunday before she drove back she lettered it: Infant Son of Mary Dolan, 1919. Then she sat back on her heels and looked at it, and under the year, very small, she painted a lamb. It was not a good lamb. It looked more like a cloud with legs.

My mother stood over her for a long minute.

“He was two days old,” Kayla said. “He ought to have something.”

My mother put her hand on the top of Kayla’s head, the way she used to when Kayla was small enough to stand under it, and left it there.