The Man Who Kept Corey’s Grave

Pastor Ledbetter’s advice

I told Pastor Ledbetter, who has known me since I was a girl and does not scare easy. He read the card standing at the church kitchen counter with a coffee urn in his hands.

“Some gifts have to be received before they can be understood, Nadine,” he said. “The giving is not the hardest part.”

At seven the next day I put on my navy dress and my church coat with the little gold star on the collar. At a quarter to eight I got in the Buick and drove up the hill.

Thursday at the gate

He was already there.

The gray truck sat at the iron gate, and beside it stood the man from the cemetery, scrubbed and pressed, in a white shirt and a brown jacket bought for a bigger man. His cropped hair was silver. Next to him stood a small woman in a green cardigan, with a face like a kind apple, holding her purse in front of her like a shield.

I parked and got out. My knees felt like water.

“Mrs. Lassiter,” the man said. “I’m Clifton Stovall. This is my wife, Marva. We’ve come a long way to talk to you, and we’re sorry to ambush you, and you can say the word and we’ll go home.”

I looked at him. He was around sixty, with a good, plain face, a farm face, and eyes that were swimming.

“Mr. Stovall,” I said, “you’ve been tending my boy’s grave for two years.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I came to say thank you.”

He closed his eyes, and I saw his jaw work.

“I didn’t do it for thanks,” he said. “I did it because I couldn’t not.”

“Come up the hill with me,” I said. “I’d like to sit down for this.”

What he told me

We walked up the gravel lane together, the three of us. Marva took my arm without asking, and I let her.

At Corey’s stone I unfolded my little stool. Clifton and Marva sat on the bench the Veterans of Foreign Wars post had installed in memory of Odell Haskins. For a moment, none of us spoke.

Then Clifton Stovall took a long breath, and he began.

“I was a mechanic in the Army, Mrs. Lassiter. Nineteen eighty-four to eighty-eight, in Germany. Fixed five-ton trucks and kept them running. I came home and opened a little shop in Bolton Gap, and I turned wrenches for thirty years, and I never had a day’s trouble with my heart.”

His hand rose to his chest and stopped.

“Then at fifty-three, I came down with something they call cardiomyopathy. The muscle gets bigger and weaker until it can’t push the blood. First I was out of breath on the stairs. Then I couldn’t walk to the mailbox. I went from two hundred and forty pounds to a hundred and ninety.”

Marva wiped her eye with the back of her wrist.

“They put my name on a list, and I waited fourteen months, and they didn’t promise me anything. Every night you listen to your own heart hurry and drag, and you know somebody has to die for you to live. I made peace with the Lord a hundred times.”

He stopped, and I understood where this was going before he said another word.

I understood it the way I had understood the porch, and the major, and the sound of the tires.

“The call came at four in the morning,” Clifton said. “March the tenth. It was a nurse, and she said, Mr. Stovall, we may have a heart for you. Can you come now. And I looked at Marva, and she was already holding my shoes.”

I put my hand on my own throat.

“They don’t tell you much,” he said. “It’s the rule, so the family’s grief stays theirs. I woke up after the operation and the first thing I heard was a beat. I had not heard a good one in so long that I thought a machine was broken. The nurse said all she could say was that he was a young man. A soldier. Twenty-four years old.”

He looked at the stone in front of us.

“I did not know your boy’s name for a long time, ma’am. I want you to know I did not go looking, not at first. I thought it wasn’t mine to know.”