The Gate on the Cemetery Lane

The gate was new, and it was shut.

I saw it from a quarter mile down the county road, a bar of green across the mouth of the lane where there had never been anything but two cedar posts and a sag of wire nobody had bothered with in my lifetime. Then I pulled up to it and it was fourteen feet of steel pipe, painted the green of a new tractor, hung on a post set in fresh concrete, with a log chain wrapped twice around the latch end and a brass padlock the size of a biscuit.

I sat there with the engine running and a pot of yellow mums on my lap.

It was the last Thursday in September, and it was my mother’s birthday. She would have been eighty-seven. I had bought the mums that morning at the grocery store in Minden, the big pot, the nine dollar one, because Mother always said the small ones were a waste of a trip.

The lane ran on past the gate the way it always had. Eighty yards of gravel along the east side of the farmhouse yard, then the cattle guard, then the long pull up through the pasture to the top of the hill, where the cedars stand around one fenced acre that has belonged to nobody but our dead since 1889.

I could see the cedars from the car. I could not get to them.

Leland came out of the machine shed wiping his hands on a red shop rag. He did not hurry. He is my first cousin, five years older than I am, the son of my father’s sister Lois, and I have known the way he walks since I was small enough to follow him around this very yard. He walks like a man carrying something level.

I rolled the window down.

“Marcia,” he said.

“Leland. What is this?”

“It’s a gate.”

“I can see it’s a gate.”

He folded the rag in half and put it in his back pocket. “You should have called.”

“To see my mother?”

“To come on my place.”

I looked at him. He looked at the mums, and then he looked away from them, off toward the road.

“I’m not trying to be ugly about it,” he said. “I’m asking for a phone call. That’s all. You call the house, I come down and unlock it, you drive up, you drive back, I lock it. It’s not much to ask.”

“It’s Mother’s birthday.”

“I know what day it is.”

“Then unlock it.”

He did not move. I want to be fair to him, because I have had a good while to think about that minute, and I do not believe he was enjoying it. His jaw was tight the way his mother’s used to get when she had decided something and did not like what she had decided.

“If I unlock it today because you showed up,” he said, “then it isn’t a rule. It’s just a gate people drive up to. I had eleven pairs out on this road in July, Marcia. Somebody went up to the graves and left the wire down behind them, and that cattle guard’s been silted full since before Hinrichs died, and they walked right across it like a sidewalk. Eleven cows and eleven calves on a county road in wheat harvest.”

“It wasn’t me.”

“It was somebody. I lost a calf to a grain truck. The driver was a kid. He sat in my kitchen and cried.”

“I’m sorry about the calf,” I said, and I was.