The Stranger Who Tended Roy’s Grave

The frost was still on the grass at Sugar Creek Cemetery when I saw him, and my first thought was that somebody had come to steal the flowers.

That is a foolish thing to think about a man on his knees. But it was twenty minutes to seven on the fourth of October, the second anniversary of the day I buried my husband, and I had not slept. I had lain there in the dark listening to the furnace tick until I gave up, put on my church coat over my housedress, and drove the eleven miles out County Road 14 with the heater rattling. I had never come that early. I had never come on a Saturday morning at all. I came on Sunday afternoons, after dinner, when the light was kind.

The man was kneeling at Roy’s stone with his back to me. He had a pair of hand clippers, the old kind with red handles, and he was working them along the base of the granite, one careful snip at a time, cutting the last stubborn clumps the mower never reached. Beside him on the ground lay a small bunch of yellow mums wrapped in brown paper, wet from a bucket in his truck bed.

Yellow mums. They had been on Roy’s grave the first Sunday of every month for two years, and every month I had stood there with my hip aching and wondered who in the world.

I want to tell you how that started, because it matters.

The first one came in the December after the funeral. I drove out on my usual Sunday and found a little bunch of yellow flowers in the metal vase that sits in the ground by the stone, the one I had been filling with silk roses from the dollar store because I could not stand to see it empty. I figured it was Craig, my son. Craig lives in Springfield and calls every Sunday evening, and I thought he had come down on the sly.

“Wasn’t me, Mom,” he said on the phone. “I wish it was.”

Then the next month there were fresh ones again. And the grass around the stone was cut so close it looked like a barber had been at it. I had been out there on my hands and knees myself in the summer with a kitchen knife, hacking at the crabgrass, and I had never gotten it half so neat.

I asked Larry Fenner, who has kept Sugar Creek for nineteen years and mows it twice a month in the growing season. Larry shook his head. “I do the lanes and the rows, Reba. I don’t get down on the stones. I figured that was you.”