Sixty One Stones in the Back Acre

Row Four, Place Nine

She would not let me carry it.

It was the last of the four peony stones. She had held it back from the first day, and painted it white at her own kitchen table. She carried it against her chest in both arms, and I walked beside her with the towel and the trowel and my hands out, the way you walk beside a child on a bicycle.

She got down on her knees. It took a long time. Forty people found something else to look at.

She cut the sod herself. She bedded the stone, and she had Kayla hand her the little brush, and she lettered it there.

Ida Marie Becker. 1930.

“My father’s mother,” she said.

I got down beside her.

“They lost the place in twenty-eight. Dad was seventeen. He went up to Saunders County to hire out, because that’s where there was a man paying. She had a bad heart and nobody to keep her, so the county took her in.” She pressed the edge of the stone with the heel of her hand. “He was sixty miles off when she died. By the time the letter found him she had been in the ground two weeks.”

“He never told you.”

“He never said her name. Not once in my hearing. I found her in an apple box when I was twenty-one years old, in a book the mice had been at.” She looked at the notebook in my hand. “I didn’t copy sixty-one names because I was a good girl, Beth Ann. I copied the first forty-seven so I could keep the forty-eighth.”

And then I remembered something, all at once, the way you remember a smell.

I was seven or eight. It was Decoration Day. We had done my father’s people up front, the coffee cans of iris wrapped in foil, and then my mother took my hand and walked me back past the last row of stones into the plain grass. She had a Mason jar of peonies off her own bushes. She set it down in the lawn, in no particular place I could see, and stood there a minute.

“Who’s that for?” I had asked her.

“Whoever’s out here,” she said.

She did it every year. I had seen her do it forty times. I thought it was just one of her ways.

“The peonies,” I said.

“Fourth row, nine down from the north. I paced it off in 1968.” She almost smiled. “I was off by about a foot and a half. The rod says so.”

I put my arm around my mother in front of half the town, and she let me, which she does not always.

That is how we were, the two of us on our knees in the grass, when a clean white pickup with a company name on the door pulled up at the end of the lane.

The Man Who Was Going to Buy It

Mr. Stroud got out slowly. He was by himself.

It went quiet down the rows, one crew at a time, the way a field goes quiet when a hawk crosses it.

He did not come to my mother first. He stood at the edge of the back acre with his hands in his coat pockets and looked at it. Close to sixty white stones, twelve gray ones, and forty people with dirt on their knees. Then he started down row one, reading.

He read every one. He did not skip any. It took him the better part of ten minutes to get to row four.

I knew what was there. I had set that stone myself the Saturday before. I had known the name for two weeks and four days, and I had not said a word about it to anyone but my mother, and she had said, “Let the man find his own.”

He passed place one. He stopped at place two.

He stood there. Then he took his cap off.

“Mrs. Krause,” he said, not loudly. “Where did you get this name?”

My mother held out her hand to me, and I got her up, and she walked over with the green notebook and opened it to the fourth page and turned it around so he could read it himself.

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