The Empty Ground Beside Daddy’s Stone

What Patty said on his porch

He told me sitting in the grass, in front of everybody.

Patty had come out to his place three weeks before, on a Tuesday evening, in the car with the bad muffler. Joyce was in the front room in the hospital bed the hospice people brought, sleeping, with the oxygen going. Patty had sat down on Wendell’s porch steps and not come in.

“She said she had heard I was looking for a spot under the cedar,” Wendell told me. “She said she had one. She said it plain, the first thing out of her mouth. She did not hide it. She said it was the space next to her father.”

“She told you that.”

“She did. And I said, Patty, who is that for? And she said it was Mama’s, and Mama was not going to be able to use it. She said Mama wanted to be cremated.” Wendell looked at me. “I did not believe it, to tell you the truth. But I believed that girl needed something. She had a letter in her hand, Colleen. A white one with a county seal on it. She kept folding it and unfolding it while she talked.”

“What did the letter say?”

“I did not read it,” he said. “I did not have to. I have had one myself, in 1986, in a bad hog year. You do not need to read a letter like that to know what it is.”

“I wrote her a check for twenty-eight hundred dollars that night at my kitchen table,” Wendell said. “She would not take a check. She asked for cash. I drove to town the next morning and got it out of the bank myself. She cried when I gave it to her. She was ashamed to be crying, and she kept trying to stop. I have thought about that girl every day for three weeks.”

He looked up at Mama.

“I took advantage of that, Opal. I did not mean to. But I did.”

“You did no such thing,” Mama said sharply. “You gave a girl cash when she asked for it. That is not taking advantage. That is what a neighbor does.”

“Opal.”

“It is a good spot, Wendell. It is under the cedar. Joyce would have liked the view of the church.” She said it softly, and I realized she was giving him something, handing him a way out of it. Then her voice firmed. “But Walter is in that ground, and I am going to be next to him. I gave him my word in 1988. You are going to have to put Joyce somewhere else.”

Wendell Prater nodded slowly. He did not argue. He did not ask for a refund, or a lawyer, or a conversation. He put his hand flat on the grass beside the stone, as if to say goodbye to it.

“Arliss,” he said without turning around.

“Yes, Wendell.”

“Is there ground two spaces down? Joyce used to say she wanted to be where she could keep an eye on Opal.”

Arliss Tuttle took his cap off.

“There is a space two down,” he said. “It is under the same cedar. Orville Brody gave it back to the association when he moved to Wichita. It is the association’s to sell, and I have kept it clear.”

“Then that is where Joyce goes,” Wendell said.