The Empty Ground Beside Daddy’s Stone

What the town saw

“Colleen, you remember when he took me up here?” Mama asked me. “In the pickup. He had a check in his pocket, and he was so proud he could not hold still.”

“I remember, Mama.”

“He stood right here.” She patted the grass beside the chair with her free hand. “I said, Walter, a person does not buy their own grave on a Tuesday. He said, Opal, a person does when she wants it next to somebody.”

She chuckled. And then she lowered her voice. “It is a good spot. You can see the church.”

Down at the foot of the lane, people had started to stand in the gravel lot, in their Sunday coats, holding their keys.

Bernice Auld came first. She is the president of the Wednesday circle, seventy-six years old, with a purse she carries in front of her with both hands like a hymnal. She walked up the lane without saying a word and stood on Mama’s other side.

“Opal,” she said.

“Bernice. Sit down, you are making me nervous.”

Bernice sat down in the grass in her good skirt. I had never seen her sit on the ground in her life.

Then came Ardith from the circle, and Marjorie, and the Fenwicks from across Mama’s fence, and Pastor Lindquist with his robe still over his arm. Duane Kimbrell came last. He did not say anything. He stood with his hands folded behind the stone and looked down at the grass like a man at a funeral, which in a way he was.

And Arliss Tuttle came up the lane with his spade over his shoulder, which is how he arrives at most things, and he stood at the foot of the grave without a word.

That was when a gray Ford pickup turned in slowly at the cemetery gate, the way a man drives who has a funeral to plan.

Wendell Prater

I knew the truck. Everyone in Dunmore knows the truck.

Wendell Prater is eighty-four and has farmed north of town his whole life. He wears a feed cap that says Dunmore Co-op. He and Joyce were married fifty-eight years, and she and Mama cooked every funeral dinner in this county together for four decades, arguing over whose ham was better.

He got out of the truck and took off the cap before he even closed the door. He came up the gravel lane alone, slowly, in his Sunday shoes, and then he stopped.

He stopped three steps from Mama’s chair, because he had finally seen what was in the second space.

“Colleen,” he said. His voice shook. “I was told Opal asked to be scattered. That she never wanted this spot. That she said she would sooner go on the wind over the home place.”

I did not answer. I was not sure I could.

Mama turned her head.

She looked at him for a long moment, and her eyes were the clearest I had seen them in three months. I saw her find him, the way a person finds a name on a long list.

“Wendell Prater,” she said, clear as a bell. “You sit down.”

She had not said anybody’s name that clearly since Tuesday.

Wendell sat. He lowered himself down onto the grass beside her chair like a man whose legs had decided for him, with his cap in both hands, and nobody on that hill breathed.

“I am so sorry about Joyce,” Mama said. “She gave me my best tomato starts for forty years, and she never once told me they were from Burpee.”

Wendell started to cry.

“Opal,” he said finally. “I did not know.”

“I know you didn’t.”

“The girl told me you did not want it.”

“I can guess what the girl told you.” She looked down at her hand on Daddy’s stone. “That girl has been carrying a sack of feed up a hill for two years, Wendell, and I have been letting her. Do not you be hard on her.”

“Colleen, I want to tell you what your sister said when she handed me that deed. I have not told anybody. I think you ought to hear it from me.”