The Empty Ground Beside Daddy’s Stone

The book in the tool shed

Arliss Tuttle has been the sexton at Mt. Hope since 1971. He is eighty-two years old, as thin as a fence post, with a cap he has worn long enough that the brim has gone soft as cloth. He dug my father’s grave, and my grandparents’ graves, and just about every grave in Dunmore for the last fifty years.

He was sitting on an overturned bucket outside the tool shed with a green ledger open across his knees, as if he had been waiting for me.

“I wondered how long it would take you,” he said.

“You know.”

“Duane called me Friday. Asked where Joyce Prater was going.” He looked down at the book. “I told him I would dig where I was told. But I did not say I liked it.”

He turned the ledger around so I could read it.

Lot 14. Two spaces. Two names, in my father’s blocky handwriting: W. Hartman. O. Hartman. Below them, in a different pen, in Arliss’s tight, slanting hand, was a third line dated May 1988.

W.H. asks that nobody be placed beside him but O.H. A.T. so promised.

I read it three times.

“Your daddy came up here that same day,” Arliss said. “After he showed her the ground. He stood right where you are, and he said, Arliss, I have a good feeling about this cedar, but I will be gone before she is. Promise me nobody sets anybody next to me but Opal.”

“You wrote it down.”

“I write everything down. Fifty-five years in this shed.” He rubbed his thumb along the edge of the page. “That is not a deed, Colleen. Patty has the deed, and as far as the law goes she has the right. I am not going to tell you different.”

“Then what is the book for?”

“The book is for me,” he said. “The deed says who owns the ground. The book says what was promised on it. Those are two different things, and I have been keeping the second one for a long time.”

He closed the ledger and set it on his knee.

“The Prater grave does not get opened until I open it,” he said. “And I have not decided yet.”

“Arliss, I am not asking you to refuse a family.”

“I know you are not. You have never asked anybody for anything in your life. That is your trouble, and your mother’s too.” He put the cap back on. “Go home. Get some sleep. Come to church in the morning.”

“Why church?”

“Because that is where everybody will be,” Arliss said.

Duane Kimbrell calls

Duane Kimbrell phoned my cell at nine that night, while I was sitting at Mama’s kitchen table with a cup of tea going cold.

“Colleen, I want you to know I heard what your sister said to me on the phone this morning,” he said. “I want you to know I did not like it.”

“She has the power of attorney.”

“She does. I looked at it myself. It was signed in 2022 at the bank, with a witness, when your mother’s mind was clear. It is good paper.” He cleared his throat. “Good paper is not the same as right.”

“Duane, what can I do?”

“I can tell you what I know, and I cannot tell you what to do with it,” he said. “The Praters have the deed to Space 2. Arliss opens the ground Monday at noon. I put Joyce in it Tuesday at ten. If the Praters were to say themselves that they would rather lay Joyce somewhere else, I could redo the paperwork in one morning. But it has to come from them.”

“They don’t know.”

“Wendell told me Friday that Patty said Opal wanted to be cremated and scattered over the home place. That she never wanted the grave.” He was quiet. “I did not know whether to believe it. I know your mother. I have never known Opal Hartman to want to be scattered anywhere.”

“She doesn’t,” I said. “She wants to be next to Daddy.”

“That is what I thought,” Duane said. “I will be at church tomorrow, in the back pew where I always sit.”

He hung up.

I got up and went to the front room and looked at my mother sleeping, and I made a decision. It was not a big decision, and it was not a clever one. I was just going to let her be where she belonged for one afternoon, and let anyone who wanted to look do so.