Sixty One Stones in the Back Acre

One Picture

I never did find out who called the paper.

It was the same paper that had told her in September that a notebook was not a record. But a young woman named Kim drove out the second Tuesday with a camera, and I suppose a woman on her knees setting a stone is a thing you can print without swearing to anything. Kim asked if she could take a picture, and my mother said she supposed so, as long as she did not have to stop.

It ran that Wednesday, the twenty-first, on the front page under the fold. One picture. My mother on her knees in my father’s barn coat, the coffee can and the red wagon in the grass beside her, and behind her a row of seven white stones.

There was no story with it. Only the caption.

Wilma Krause, 79, sets a marker in the back acre of Carrow Cemetery, where she says the county poor farm buried 61 people between 1887 and 1931. The city council voted Oct. 12 to sell the acre.

By Thursday noon there was a pickup on the cemetery lane I did not know.

An old man was being helped out of it by a boy of about sixteen. He had a cane and a seed corn cap, and he came across the grass a few inches at a time.

“Walt,” my mother said.

“Wilma.” He was ninety-one. His people had farmed the section next to the poor farm ground. “I saw the paper. I told the boy, drive me out there.”

“They were white,” he said. “The crosses. My dad and I came by here with a team when I was little, and I asked him who they were, and he said, those are the ones who didn’t have anybody.” He pointed with the cane, at the corner, exactly at the stub of the hedge post. “First one was right there.”

My mother did not say I told you so. She did not say anything. She just let him stand there and be right with her.

On Friday, Tom Yoder came.

Tom has the monument works on the highway, the one his father had. He walked the row with his hands in his jacket pockets. He crouched down and ran his thumb over my mother’s lettering.

“Paint will give you two winters, Wilma. Maybe three.”

“I know it.”

“I’ve got a stack of gray granite remnants behind the shop. Ends off bigger jobs. I could cut you flush markers out of those, eight by sixteen, name and year.” He stood up. “Forty-five dollars apiece. That’s my stencil and my sand and the saw blade. I’m not charging for me.”

My mother did the multiplication without paper. “Twenty-seven hundred and forty-five, for sixty-one.”

“I can’t cut sixty-one by the fourteenth of November. I’m one man and I have paying work promised.” He looked down the long strip of grass that had nothing on it yet. “I can bring you a dozen a week from tomorrow, working nights. The other forty-nine you’ll have by spring. You have my word on it.”

“A dozen is a dozen more than they’ve got,” my mother said. “Kayla will type you the names.”

By Saturday there was a coffee can on the counter at the cafe, next to the register, with a strip of masking tape on it that said Back Acre. When Darlene Voss, who had voted aye, came in for pie on Monday, she put a twenty in it without looking at anybody.