The Gate on the Cemetery Lane

The next morning I did the sensible thing, the thing I knew people would ask about. I called the county attorney’s office at the courthouse in Minden and got a young man I have known since he was in the third grade and I was the secretary in the elementary school office.

He was kind about it, and he was plain. He told me the law gives a family the right to reach its graves, gate or no gate, and that the cemetery acre was not Leland’s and never had been. He said a landowner can ask for reasonable notice but he cannot lock a family out, and that his office would be glad to send Leland a letter saying so that very afternoon.

“He’d have to open it, ma’am,” he said. He still calls me ma’am, as if I might send him down the hall to the principal.

“I expect he would,” I said. “No, thank you. Not yet.”

I thanked him and hung up, and I sat at the table with my hand on the phone.

I was not going to have that letter sent. I knew it before I finished the thought. His mother lies forty feet from mine on that hill. I would not have an envelope from the courthouse be the first thing that passed between two cousins over the ground where both their mothers are buried, and then stand next to him at the next funeral. A letter from the county could make him open the gate. It could not make him family again. I would rather he saw me walk.

And I was not going to call.

I turned that one over all day Friday and most of Saturday, because it sounds like plain stubbornness, and some of it was. It was one phone call. He would have come down and unlocked it. I believed him about that.

But if I called once, then visiting my mother was a thing Leland allowed. And the next time, and the time after. And it would not only be me. It would be every cousin, and Aunt Vera at ninety, ringing a man’s telephone to ask whether it suited him for her to go and sit with her husband. Twenty-three people on that hill never asked anybody’s leave to be there. I could not be the one who started asking for them.

So I would not cut his lock, and I would not call his house, and I would not let the county write him a letter.

That left walking.

Sunday I went to church, and I came home and ate a sandwich standing up, and I did not change my clothes. I kept on my navy church dress and my gray cardigan and my good black shoes with the low heel. I got the mums off the back porch, where I had been watering them for three days.

“You want me along?” Ron said.

“Not this time. If there’s two of us it looks like a fight.”

“What does it look like with one?”

“It looks like a woman going to see her mother.”

I parked on the shoulder at his gate at two o’clock. I got out and shut the car door quietly, as you do at a cemetery, and I stood and looked at how the place was laid out.

The pipe gate closed the lane. East of it, four strands of new barbed wire ran along the road ditch as far as I could see. West of it, the woven wire of the house yard tied right into the gatepost. But a farmhouse yard has a front gate. Leland’s was where it had always been, a little wooden one by the mailbox with a horseshoe for a latch, and from the yard there is an opening on the east side onto the lane, where my grandmother used to carry dishwater out to her lilacs.