The Gate on the Cemetery Lane

That was fair. That was more than fair. I said so.

All Saints Sunday came in clear and still, one of those days Nebraska gives you at the start of November as a kind of apology in advance. I picked Vera up at half past one. She had a new hat.

When we came over the rise I had to slow down.

There were nine cars and pickups along the county road, pulled well off onto the grass, both sides. Cousins I see at funerals. Kim and her husband. Jeff. Eleven cousins, when I counted them, and Pastor Dan in his black shirt and collar with a folded paper in his hand, and Ron with his planks.

Nobody honked. Nobody was loud. They stood along the ditch in their church clothes holding grocery store flowers and a coffee can of late marigolds, talking low, as people do in a vestibule.

Pastor Dan went first, alone. He let himself through the little gate and went up and knocked on Leland’s front door, and the door opened, and he stood there with his hat off for perhaps two minutes. I could not hear a word. Then the door closed, and Pastor Dan came back down the walk and held the yard gate open.

“He knows why I’m here,” he said. “He didn’t say yes and he didn’t say no.”

So we went in. One at a time through the horseshoe gate, Vera first on her walker, because nobody would have dreamed of going ahead of her. Up the heaved walk. Across the mown lawn. Fifteen people in their Sunday shoes, and the only sound was the walker’s wheels.

Past the picture window.

The recliner was empty.

Around the house, through the lilacs, onto the lane. At the cattle guard, Ron swung the first plank down off his shoulder and bent to set it.

The back door of the house opened.

Leland came down the steps with his cap in his hand. He had on a white shirt and his good boots. He had shaved. He walked straight down the lane to Vera, past every one of us, and not one person said a word.

He looked at the steel rails. He looked at her walker.

“Aunt Vera,” he said, and he reached for it.

She let go of the grips. I do not think she would have let go for anyone else alive.

He picked that walker up in one hand, carried it across the cattle guard, and set it down on the far side with the brakes on. Then he came back across the rails and stood in front of her and crooked his elbow.

“Those boards aren’t fit for you,” he said. His voice was not steady. “Take my arm.”

She took it. He walked her across the planks at her pace, a few inches at a time, his other hand out behind her back, not touching, just there. When she was settled behind her walker again he did not go back to the house.

“I’ll go up with you,” he said. “If that’s all right.”

“It’s your mother’s hill too,” Vera said.

He walked beside her the whole way. When she turned the walker around to sit, he stood on the downhill side of her to block the breeze. The second time she sat, he said, low, “I pinched those mums back. On Mother’s. I’ve been going up Wednesdays.”

“I know you have,” Vera said. “Marcia told me the dirt was wet.”

I had told her no such thing. She just knew.