The Grave Beside My Husband
Nobody said anything for a minute. The furnace came on in the cellar.
“I don’t know what to do with this, Mrs. Tolbert,” Ralph said finally. “I’ll tell you plain. I’ve got a mother in a funeral home, and a service Saturday, and the backhoe man coming at nine tomorrow. And I’ve got a receipt for ground that you say is yours.”
“I don’t know yet, either,” I said. “Will you meet me at the cemetery in the morning? At 8, before the backhoe?”
“We’ll be there,” Dottie said, before Ralph could answer.
At the door she held my cake in both hands, still in its dish towel.
“I’ll bring your towel back,” she said.
“Keep it.”
“I won’t. It’s Cal’s mother’s recipe.”
I made my calls after supper, from the kitchen, with a pencil and the church directory.
The Oak Rest board is five people, farmers and shopkeepers and a woman who used to run the scale house at the elevator. They argue about mowing contracts in the Methodist basement. But every one of them has someone buried out there. That is the only requirement.
I called Elwood Boyce first, the president, 81, a retired county road commission grader operator who talks the way a gravel road sounds. His wife Doris lay under the biggest oak in Lot 15, across the lane from Cal. I told him the dates, the numbers, and what the manager had said about the pink slips.
“Well, I’ll be,” he said. “That boy’s been in the job six months.”
“I don’t believe he’s a bad boy, Elwood.”
“No. Just a boy. I’ll be there at 8.”
Then Cora Ness, who ran the scale house for more years than anybody could keep count of and sits on the board because nobody else would read the insurance policy. She buried a husband and a son at Oak Rest.
“I bought mine from Chester on a payment plan too, Iris,” she said. “Twelve dollars a month, for a long time. Did anybody ask Chester?”
“I can’t reach him. It rings out.”
“He’s at his daughter’s near Caro, getting that hip looked at. She’s driving him home tonight. Somebody ought to go sit on his porch. I’ll be there at 8 either way.”
The last was Roscoe Ostby, from the hardware store, who buried his father and a baby daughter in the old section and still goes out every Memorial Day with a brush and a small can of white to touch up the lamb on the little stone. “I’ll go get Chester myself,” he said. “I’ll be on his porch at 6.”
Three calls. I sat in the quiet kitchen afterward with the pencil in my hand and thought that I had lived in that township all my life and had not known I had a county.
Before bed I cut the last orange heads off the frost-blackened zinnias along the machine shed and put them in a canning jar on the windowsill. I did not sleep much. I lay in the dark and told Cal I was sorry if I was making a fuss.
Mark’s car pulled into Oak Rest at 7:40. He had driven the whole way from Lansing in the dark, two and a half hours, and he got out with his good shoes on and his tie in his pocket, and he put his arms around me without a word. Mark is 47 years old. He has a mortgage and a daughter of his own. He held me like a boy.