The Man Who Kept Corey’s Grave

What I saw from behind the cedar

I parked at the bend in the black cold and sat with the blanket up to my chin.

At twenty minutes past six, headlights came up the county road.

A gray Chevrolet pickup.

A man got out.

He was not young. I could see that even in the dark, by the way he stood a moment with one hand on the door, waiting for his legs to agree with him. He was broad through the shoulders and heavy at the middle, in a canvas coat and a feed-store cap. From the truck bed he took a folding kneeling pad, a rolled shop rag, and a pair of long-bladed grass shears with the handles wrapped in black tape.

He walked up the lane the way a man walks when he knows the path by heart.

I watched him come to Corey’s stone. He did not do anything for a moment. He stood in front of it with his arms at his sides and his cap in his hand, and he bowed his head.

Then he raised his right hand to his brow and held a salute.

I put my fist against my mouth.

It was not a perfect salute. His elbow was loose and his fingers had a tremor. But it was the real thing, taught long ago by someone who meant it.

He held it a full ten seconds. Then he put on his cap and got down on the pad and began to work.

He trimmed. He took the shears along the base of the marble with slow strokes, a quarter inch at a time. He picked the clippings off the stone with his fingers and worked a small brush into the lettering. He lifted a new flag from his coat, shook out the folds, and drove the stake down with the heel of his hand.

All the time he was whispering. I could not hear the words, but I could see how gentle his face was, even in that thin gray light, and I thought, he is telling my boy the news.

I have never in my life seen a stranger do so tender a thing.

Then he did something I did not understand, and have thought about every day since.

He laid his left hand flat against the top of the headstone, and he laid his right hand flat against his own chest. And he stayed that way, with his head down, between the two, for a long time.

The card on the dashboard

I think I would have stayed hidden forever if the sun had not come up.

He worked a full hour, and the whole time the sky went from black to pewter. Then the light climbed over the Methodist steeple and struck my windshield straight in the eyes. The man at the grave looked up and turned around.

Our eyes met across eighty yards of frozen grass.

I did not move. Neither did he. He took off his cap and nodded to me once, like a man who has been caught at something and is relieved.

He gathered his tools. He walked down the lane, not toward me but toward his truck. He opened the passenger door and took out an envelope. Then he walked, very slowly, to the Buick.

He did not come up to the window. He stopped three yards off, and laid the envelope on the hood.

“Ma’am,” he said, in a voice so deep and soft that I rolled down the glass to hear it, “I’m sorry to startle you. I’m sorry I’ve been a coward about this. That’s for you. Read it when you can.”

“Sir,” I said.

“I’ll be at your gate Thursday at eight,” he said. “If you’d rather I wasn’t, I understand. I’ll keep to Wednesdays and I’ll never trouble you.”

He touched the bill of his cap, got into the gray truck, and drove away.

I sat there until my hands stopped shaking. Then I opened the envelope. Inside was an index card, in the same careful square print.

Mrs. Lassiter, my name is Clifton Stovall. I live in Bolton Gap, seventy miles from here. I have been coming to your son’s grave for two years, and I have a thing to tell you and a thing to ask. I will tell it to you in person if you will let me. I am not a stranger to him, though I am to you. Forgive me. C.S.

I am not a stranger to him.