The Gate on the Cemetery Lane

The third Sunday we came in two vehicles, my car and Ron’s pickup with the planks in the bed. It was a bright afternoon and cold in the shade. Vera had on her good wool coat and her church hat, and she got herself out of the car and behind that walker and looked at the green gate for a long moment, at the chain and the padlock.

“Well,” she said. “Isn’t that something.”

I lifted the horseshoe for her. Leland’s front walk is old concrete, heaved in two places, and she took it a foot at a time. Then the lawn, where the wheels wanted to sink. I walked on one side of her and did not take her arm, because she would not have it. Ron went ahead with a plank on each shoulder.

Past the picture window. The recliner was empty.

He was already out the back, I found, because when we came through the lilacs onto the lane, Leland was standing there at the cattle guard, watching Ron fit the cleats over the rails. He was red to the collar.

“Aunt Vera,” he said. “For heaven’s sake.”

“Good afternoon, Leland.”

“I would have opened it for her,” he said to me. “You know I would. All you had to do was call. You’d bring a ninety-year-old woman across a cattle guard on a board to prove a point?”

“I didn’t bring her,” I said. “She brought me.”

Vera had stopped at the edge of the planks. She set the brakes on her walker, which she does when she intends to say something, and she looked up at him. He is six feet tall. She has never been more than five foot two.

“I have been climbing this hill since 1936,” she said. “My mother carried me up it before I could walk. I came up it to bury my father and my mother and my husband and your mother, Leland. I never called then. I don’t know who I would have called.”

He opened his mouth. Nothing came.

“You were a nice boy,” she said. “You’re a nice man. Now stand aside, please, the wind is cold.”

He stood aside.

She crossed the planks with Ron walking backward in front of her and me behind. Then she started up the hill.

I have never seen anything like that climb, and I hope I have her nerve when I am ninety. She went twenty or thirty yards and then turned the walker around, sat down on its seat, got her breath, and looked out over the country. Then up and on. Four times she sat. Ron had trampled a path through the brome ahead of her, back and forth in his work boots, so the wheels would roll. It took her forty minutes.

I looked back once. Leland was still at the cattle guard. He had not gone in. He stood there with his arms hanging, watching his aunt go up his pasture a yard at a time.

At the top she went to Walt first. She sat on her walker seat beside his stone with her gloved hand flat on top of it and she told him the news, quite ordinarily, the way she must have told him across the breakfast table for forty-nine years. The price of eggs. Who had died. That the Lutheran ladies had changed the funeral lunch from ham sandwiches to those little croissants and she did not care for it.

Then she said, “Marcia. Help me find Dennis.”

I did not know who Dennis was.

“He’s by Walt’s feet,” she said. “A little flat one.”