The Man Who Kept Corey’s Grave

The Thursday habit

Who was kneeling at my son’s grave before I got there?

That was the question I carried out to Culley Springs Cemetery every Thursday morning for the better part of two years. I carried it along with a thermos of coffee and a clean rag for his headstone that I never once needed.

Somebody had always been there first.

My name is Nadine Lassiter. I am sixty-three years old, and I have lived in Culley Springs, Tennessee, my whole life, in the same white house on Tanyard Road where I raised two children and buried a husband. The town has one stoplight, three churches, and a cemetery on a hill behind the Methodist church where nearly everyone I love lies within sight of everyone else.

My son Corey is in the back corner, in the section the town set aside long ago for the ones who wore a uniform.

Sergeant Corey Lassiter, United States Army, 101st Airborne Division, stationed at Fort Campbell on the Kentucky line. He was twenty-four years old when he died. That was on the ninth of March, seven years ago last spring.

His stone is the plain white marble the government furnishes, with a cross cut into the top and his name, his rank, his branch, and two dates.

Arlen, my husband, died of a heart attack in the hayfield when Corey was twelve. So when I say “Gold Star mother,” understand that I wear that little pin on my church coat as a widow too. There was nobody left in my house to hand the grief to.

I chose Thursdays on purpose.

On Sundays the whole congregation drifted up the hill after service to visit their own dead, and every one of them stopped at Corey’s stone to be kind to me. I could not stand being kind to. On Thursdays the hill belonged to me and the mockingbirds. I would park the Buick at the iron gate, carry my thermos down the gravel lane, and sit on the little folding stool from my trunk to tell my son the news.

Mostly I just sat. A mother can sit by a stone a very long time.

That was my whole life on Thursdays, for five years. Then one morning in October, two years ago, something was different.

The flag that stood straight

It was the flag I noticed first.

The cemetery keeps a small flag on a wooden stake at every veteran’s grave. The Veterans of Foreign Wars post puts them out each Memorial Day. By autumn the rain and wind have tilted every one of them like a drunk leaning on a fence post.

Corey’s flag was standing straight as a fence rail.

I stood there with my thermos and thought, well, that’s nice.

Then I looked at the grass.

I had been trimming around that stone myself for five years with a pair of kitchen scissors and a lot of complaining, and I had never gotten it right. The mowers cut the rows but they cannot touch the granite edges. That morning the grass around Corey’s marker had been cut close and square, as if somebody had used a ruler.

And the marble was clean. The green film that grows on the north side of every stone in Tennessee was gone from his name.

I told myself it was Hobart.

Hobart Burchfield has kept Culley Springs Cemetery for twenty-two years. He knows every grave on that hill the way a shepherd knows his flock. I found him that same morning at the equipment shed, eating a sausage biscuit.

“Wasn’t me, Nadine,” he said. “I do the lanes and the rows. I can’t get down on my knees to a stone anymore, not since the surgery. I figured you were the one who kept up your boy’s.”

“I trim a little,” I said. “Not like that.”

He looked at me over the biscuit. “Then somebody else cares about Corey.”

I did not know what to do with that sentence. I carried it back to the car and turned it over for the rest of the day.