The Man Who Kept Corey’s Grave

The debt

There is a thing the Army teaches, and Clifton Stovall said it to me the third time we met, over coffee in my kitchen.

“The creed,” he said. “The one they teach the young ones now. You know the line? I will never leave a fallen comrade.”

“I know it,” I said. “Corey kept it on his wall.”

“We didn’t have those exact words in my day,” he said, “but we had the thing. I thought it was about dragging a man out of a ditch. It was another thirty-five years before I understood it was also about this. A man you never met, who handed you everything he had left, and what you owe him back.”

“You don’t owe him anything,” I said.

“Yes, ma’am, I do.”

He said it so gently that I let it stand.

“I can’t pay it to him,” he said. “I can pay it to the place he’s resting. I can pay it to you. I’d like to keep paying it, if you’ll have me, for as long as I’m able.”

“Then we will have to split it,” I said.

“I’ll take Thursdays,” I said. “You take Wednesdays. And on the first Saturday of every month, you and Marva will come to my house for lunch, and I will not hear one word of argument.”

He opened his mouth and I put up a finger.

“I am a Gold Star mother, Mr. Stovall,” I said. “I outrank you.”

Marva laughed so hard she had to put her face in a dish towel.

What the town learned

On the following Memorial Day, the post asked Clifton to stand beside the commander at the ceremony. He said he was a mechanic, nobody. They insisted.

When the roll was read and they came to Sergeant Corey Lassiter, the whole hill was silent. Then Dewey, who is eighty-one and shook like a leaf, said, “And there stands the one who has kept his post.”

Nobody planned it. A man in the second row started to clap, and then the rest followed. Clifton stood there with his hand over his chest.

Thursdays now

It is October again as I write this, and the leaves on the hill are going to red and gold.

I still go up the hill on Thursdays, at eight, with my thermos. The difference is that now, most weeks, a gray Chevrolet is parked at the gate when I arrive. He has not stopped coming on Wednesdays, and I have not asked him to. Some Thursdays he comes anyway, and brings Marva, and we sit in a row on that bench.

Once, last month, I asked him whether it troubled him to be here. To sit by the grave of the young man whose heart he carried.

He took a long time to answer.

“Mrs. Lassiter, I think it’s the only place I don’t feel like a thief,” he said. “Because here, I’m not taking from him. Here, I’m bringing him home.”

I have thought about that every day since.

The flag on Corey’s stone still stands straight as a fence rail. The grass is clipped square. The geraniums come back each Easter, planted deep.

But I no longer ask who is keeping him company.

I know.

And on the mornings when the mist is thick over the hill and the mockingbirds start up in the cedar, and I stand at the foot of my son’s grave with my hand on the cold marble, I find that I am not guarding him anymore.

I am just visiting.

I am listening.

And somewhere out on the road between here and Bolton Gap, a man in a feed-store cap is walking his morning mile with my boy’s heart, steady and quick, keeping the time.

This story is a dramatization. Names, characters, and details are invented.