The ground Monday and Tuesday
On Monday morning, I met Duane Kimbrell and Wendell Prater at the funeral home before it opened.
Wendell signed the deed for Space 2 back over to Opal Hartman at Duane’s front desk, with Duane’s notary stamp on it, and Duane charged him nothing.
When Duane slid the stamped paper across, I said, “Mr. Prater, let me pay you back the twenty-eight hundred. I have it.”
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“No ma’am.” He put his big hand flat over my checkbook before I could open it. “I am not taking a dime of that back. Call it Joyce’s gift to Opal’s kitchen. She would have wanted the house kept.”
“That is not fair to you.”
“Colleen, I am eighty-four years old. Nothing is fair. Put it toward the furnace.”
Arliss opened the ground two spaces down at noon that same day, by himself, with a spade and a long patient quiet. I went up the hill to watch. I did not offer to help, because I knew better.
When he was done, he opened the ledger on the lid of the vault box. He wrote a line under the old one in his tight slanting hand, and he showed it to me.
J. Prater placed Lot 14, Space 4, Oct. 27, by W. Prater’s own choosing. A.T.
Then I understood why Arliss had said to come to church.
Joyce Prater was buried Tuesday at ten in the morning, under a plain blue sky. The church was so full they set up folding chairs in the aisle. I stood in the back with Rick, who had driven down Saturday night after I called him, and he held my hand through the whole service.
At the grave, Wendell stood alone with his cap crushed in both fists. When the pastor finished, he looked back along the row to Daddy’s stone and its blank half, and he tipped his head to it, a little, the way you do to a neighbor across the road.