The Stranger Who Tended Roy’s Grave

I asked Pastor Vogt. He said the church had a little fund for the old section, but it didn’t stretch to flowers for one grave, and he would have remembered. I asked both florists in town. Each told me the same thing: whoever it was paid cash and gave no name, and had asked them not to say.

Craig told me to leave it alone. “Somebody’s being kind, Mom,” he said. “You don’t have to catch them at it.”

And I thought about that for a long time. I thought a person who brings flowers in the dark, who leaves no card, is a person who does not want to be thanked. So I did not sit in my car and keep watch. I did not put up one of those cameras. I just came on Sundays and said a little thank you out loud to the air, and I went home.

But two years is a long time to be tended by a ghost. And that morning, with the frost on the grass and the sun just coming up red over the Hartleys’ soybean field, I could not stand it another minute. I got out of the car. I shut the door harder than I meant to.

He heard it. His shoulders went tight, like a boy who has been caught, and he turned around on his knees.

He was about fifty. Big through the shoulders, a gray beard cut close, a ball cap with the name of a trucking outfit on it. Work boots. His face was weathered and plain, and I did not know it at all. I would have sworn on a Bible I had never seen him in my life.

“Mrs. Hendricks,” he said. He took off the cap. “I’m sorry. I didn’t think anybody would be out this early. I’m sorry.”

“You’re sorry,” I said. My voice came out smaller than I wanted. “I have been wondering for two years who to thank.”

He looked at the ground.

“Ma’am,” he said, “I think I’d better sit you down. There’s something I’ve owed you and Mr. Hendricks a long time, and I don’t know how to start it standing up.”

There is a stone bench about thirty feet from Roy’s plot, put in by the Garden Club years ago. He walked me to it, slow, the way you walk a person you are afraid of breaking, and he did not take my elbow, which I appreciated. He waited until I had settled my cane against my knee.

Then he walked back to his pickup, which I had not even noticed parked down by the cedar trees. He opened the passenger door and came back carrying something folded in a clean feed sack, held in both arms the way you would carry a baby.