Sixty One Stones in the Back Acre

Forty Trowels

Fifteen people came that first Saturday. They brought their own trowels and their own kneeling pads, and two of the Legion men brought tile probes, and somebody from the co-op brought a bundle of those little wire flags they use to mark a gas line.

My mother gave up her one-a-day rule that morning. She stood at the corner post with the green notebook and read out row and place, and the men walked it off and probed, and when the rod dropped they pushed a flag in. By noon there were sixty-one orange flags standing in the grass in four long rows and part of a fifth.

Nobody said much. It is one thing to read a number in a notebook. It is another to stand at the end of a field and count the flags.

We set and painted nineteen stones that day. Kayla lettered until her hand cramped. A girl from the high school art class took over.

The next Saturday was the thirty-first, cold and bright, and when I turned onto the cemetery lane at eight o’clock I had to park on the road. I counted forty people before I gave up counting.

Tom Yoder’s flatbed was backed up to the cedars with twelve gray markers on it, laid out on a tarp. Name and year, nothing fancy. Eleven of them were the first eleven in the book. The twelfth was out of order. It said: Unknown, 1924. Known to God.

“I didn’t want that fellow waiting till spring with nothing but a number,” Tom said. “That last line’s on me.”

Each marker went at the head of its place, flush with the ground, bedded in sand. The white fieldstones stayed where they were, at the foot. Nobody wanted to be the one to pull up a stone she had set.

Everybody else got a white stone that day, with a name on it, down to the end of row five.

Larry Timm was there. He came alone and late and stood off by the fence for a while in his feed store jacket. Then he walked down row three to place seven, and he read the white stone Kayla had lettered for a girl of nineteen named Clara Timm, and he stood there with his hands hanging.

“My grandfather had a sister,” he said to me. “We were told she moved off.”

I gave him my trowel.

Somewhere around eleven I realized my mother was not working. She was sitting in a lawn chair somebody had brought for Walt, with something at her feet wrapped in a bath towel.

The crew working row four got to place nine and found it skipped. There was a flag and no stone.

“Wilma, we’re missing one here,” Ron Beck called.

“No, you’re not,” she said. “That one’s mine.”