The Man Who Kept Corey’s Grave

Every week, a little more

I decided it was probably a one-time kindness. A boy from the high school doing a service hour. A church lady with a spare Saturday.

But it happened again the next Thursday.

The flag was straight. The grass was square. And the stone had been wiped, not with a hose, because there were no streaks, but with something soft and slow, the way you would polish a good table.

Around the first of December the old flag disappeared and a new one stood in its place, bright, with no fraying at the edges. At Easter a pot of red geraniums appeared at the foot of the stone, planted in the ground so the wind could not take it.

It was proof I was not alone with him. For five years I had believed that if I stopped coming, no one on earth would say his name. Now a stranger was answering a question I had not known I was asking. Does anyone else still carry him?

I began to ask around.

I asked Pastor Ledbetter, who keeps the cemetery’s key box in his office. I asked the ladies at the Wednesday prayer supper and the man at the hardware store. Nobody knew.

I asked the Veterans of Foreign Wars post, because it had to be one of their old boys. The commander, Dewey Haskins, told me it was not them. “We do the flags on Memorial Day, Nadine, and that’s all. We’re all over seventy, and half of us can’t get off the floor.”

The gray truck

“There’s a truck,” Hobart said, the week after Easter.

“What kind of truck?”

“Gray Chevy, maybe ten years old. I’ve seen it twice at the far gate, on a Wednesday around dusk. Never seen the driver up close. He stays out of everyone’s way. I thought he was visiting his people.”

“Did he have a tag from here?”

“County sticker I didn’t recognize. Not Culley Springs. I didn’t think much of it, Nadine. A lot of folks come up here quiet.”

Wednesday evenings. Dusk. A man on a kneeling pad.

I wanted to sit up there some Wednesday and see for myself. I got as far as putting on my coat. But I was afraid that if I saw him, he would stop, and he was the only person on earth tending my son with the care I wanted to give. So I did something quieter.