The Man Who Kept Corey’s Grave

The obituary

“I could not stop thinking about him,” Clifton said. “At the supper table I would put my hand on my chest and feel it going, strong and even, and I would think, there’s a boy in here doing the work.”

Marva spoke for the first time, in a clear small voice. “He used to cry about it in the night. He didn’t think I knew.”

“I wrote the network a letter,” Clifton said. “That’s what they let you do. They pass it along, if the family wants it. I wrote four times, over four years, and I never heard a word. I’d have understood if you’d burned them.”

My hand was shaking on my knee.

“In the fourth year, when no answer had come, Marva and I did something foolish. We went to the public library in Bolton Gap and looked up every Tennessee obituary we could find for the ninth through the eleventh of March. It took a whole day. We didn’t know what we were looking for. We found nine young men. Six were civilians. Two were soldiers who had died overseas, and the dates didn’t match. And one was Sergeant Corey Lassiter, of Culley Springs, twenty-four years old, stationed at Fort Campbell.”

He drew a worn piece of newsprint from his jacket and unfolded it on his knee. I knew it without looking. I wrote it myself.

I wrote, in the thick of that terrible week, a single line near the end that the funeral director said I did not have to include. I put it in because Corey would have wanted it said.

Corey was an organ donor, and we pray that those who received his gifts will live long and fruitful lives.

“That is how I found him,” Clifton said. “I read that, and I put my head down on the library table. The lady at the desk came over to ask if I was all right.”

I could not say anything. My throat had closed.

“Marva drove us here that summer. I sat at your gate an hour and could not get out of the truck. Who was I to tell a mother I had her boy’s heart? So I came back, and I came back. One day the grass was long and the flag was down, and I couldn’t stand it. I could not carry a soldier’s heart around and let his grass go to seed.”

“I figured, I can’t say thank you the way I want to. So I’ll do the one thing a soldier ought to do.”

He wiped his face with a big, work-roughened hand.

“I’ll keep the post.”