The Fifty I Laid On His Desk

I told her. I told her about Sully and the nine years and the deer on the county road, and she stood there in her barn coat with her hand over her mouth.

“We’ll never pour over it,” her husband said. “Not ever. That stays.”

The ground froze the week before Thanksgiving, and the season ended the way it always ends. Most of the crew went on snow removal for Hobart.

A few went back to farm work or drove truck for the elevator. Everybody who wanted winter work got it. Nobody got passed over. I noticed that.

Kyla and the boys got through the winter. The church sent meals for a month. Jodi took the boys one Saturday a month so Kyla could sleep.

The guys plowed her driveway every time it snowed without anybody asking, and I don’t believe Hobart ever said one word about his trucks being out on a private road.

In March, the funeral home sent Kyla a reminder that it was nearly time to think about the headstone. You can’t set a stone right away in this part of the country.

You wait for the grave to settle over a winter and you order it in spring and set it when the ground is dry.

Kyla called me about it. She did not ask for money. She would never have asked.

She just wanted somebody to go with her to the monument company in Marshall, because she did not want to pick out her husband’s stone by herself.

So Jodi and I went with her on a Saturday in April.

The monument company is run by an old man named Wilbur Lindahl whose father started it, and the showroom is a cold front office with sample stones lined up on the floor and pictures of more stones on the wall.

Kyla had already decided on something simple. Gray granite, flat, with his name and his dates and maybe a little picture of a concrete trowel cut into the corner if it was not too much.

She had a number in her head she could pay a little at a time.

Wilbur listened to her the whole way through. He wrote it all down on a pad. Then he set down his pencil and folded his hands on the counter.

“Mrs. Moen,” he said, “I need to tell you something, and I was asked not to make a fuss about it, so I’m going to tell you plain.”

Kyla looked at me. I looked at Wilbur.

“Your husband’s stone has been paid for,” Wilbur said. “Since February. Whatever you pick out. The man said you were to have whatever you wanted, and if you wanted the upright one instead of the flat one, that was fine too, and I was to send the bill to him.”

Kyla put her hand on the counter like she needed it to stand up. “Who?” she said. But I think she already knew. I know I did.

“Hobart Kvale,” Wilbur said. “He came in here in February in the middle of that ice storm. Sat right there in that chair for an hour. Said he didn’t know the first thing about headstones, his wife had done all that for her own folks. I showed him how it works.”

He reached under the counter and took out a long envelope with the bank’s name printed in the corner.

“He asked me to give you this, too,” Wilbur said. “He said he didn’t know how else to get it to you without it being a whole thing. I told him I’d see that you got it.”