Sixty Wreaths on the Hill

One of the men played Taps on a bugle, a real one, not a recording.

You could hear it go out over the whole white country, all the way to the trees along the river.

I stood by my father’s stone with my hands deep in the pockets of the navy coat he gave me.

I thought about him coming home in 1968 and never saying a word about any of it.

And I thought, Dad, they said your name. A child said your name, clear as a bell, in the snow, with her mother kneeling right beside her.

Afterward the Legion men stood around the cars and drank coffee out of Otto’s big green thermos. Dwain went down and stood with them, talking cattle prices.

Somebody’s wife had sent a tin of Christmas cookies, the spritz kind with the green sugar, and the kids ate more of them than they should have. Nobody stopped them.

Kaylee came and stood by me at the fence. For a while neither one of us talked.

We just looked at the rows. Then she said, “I don’t know how to make one.”

“Neither did I, once,” I said. “Neither did Noble, till yesterday.” She almost laughed at that.

She looked down the hill at her son, who had green sugar all over his chin.

“The smell, though,” she said. “He really does sneeze. I’m not making that part up.”

I said, “Then we’ll make them at my table, and they’ll stay in Dwain’s shop till Saturday.”

“And you’ll come to my table,” I said, “and you’ll leave the baby with your mother, and that’s that.”

And Kaylee laughed then, a real laugh, out loud in the cold. It was the first time I had ever heard Kaylee laugh at something I said.

Nine years she had been married to my son. Nine years of holidays across the table, polite and careful.

I am not going to pretend we became close that morning. We did not.

I am fifty-five and she is thirty, and we are different kinds of women, and some of that will always be there.

It sits between us like a fence line. But I have lived on a farm my whole life, and I can tell you something about fence lines. Every good one has a gate in it somewhere.

Josh came up the hill to get her. He put his arm around her shoulders and looked at me over her head, and I nodded at him, and that was all he needed. My son is like his father.

Then a little gust came over the top of the hill, the first real wind of the day.

It caught Noble’s bow on my father’s wreath and laid it over sideways, flat against the cedar.

I started to go to it. But Kaylee was already moving. She went down the row in the snow and knelt at my father’s gray stone, and she took off one thin glove.

With her bare cold fingers she lifted that red bow back up. She was careful with it.

She fluffed out the loops and set the tails straight, the way you would fix a child’s collar for church.

Noble watched her do it with his hands on his knees, nodding like an inspector.

Kenna stood on the other side of her and held the wreath steady against the stone.

The last thing I saw before we drove home that morning was my son’s wife on her knees in the snow at my father’s grave, straightening a bow.