Sixty Wreaths on the Hill

I drove home with my hands tight on the wheel. The radio was playing a Christmas program, and I turned it off at the section line because I could not stand the sound of the bells.

Dwain was in the shop with the skid steer apart. He looked up at my face and set his wrench down on the bench, and he waited for me to talk, the way he does.

I told him all of it, standing by the woodstove with my coat still on.

He did not say much. Dwain never does. He wiped his hands on a shop rag for a long time.

“The county runs the loader over that brush pile every Wednesday,” he said finally. “They push it all up into one big heap for burning. They’re gone, Marly.”

I knew it before he said it. I think I had known it standing in Kaylee’s garage.

Sixty wreaths, every one of them under a loader bucket and a heap of broken limbs south of town.

There was nobody to call. It was her garage and her pickup, and the wreaths were gone either way.

No sheriff in South Dakota takes a report on cedar boughs. And nothing I could say to Kaylee would put sixty wreaths back on that floor by Saturday.

I could be angry, or I could be ready. I did not have time to be both.

Saturday was two days off. The Legion color guard would come up the hill road at eleven o’clock that morning, the way they have every December since the year after my father died.

My father is buried in that cemetery, up on the rise north of our place, where he can see everything he ever farmed.

He was drafted in 1966 and served with the Army in Vietnam. He came home in 1968 and went back to milking cows, and he never talked about it once.

Not to my mother, not to me, not to anybody I ever knew of.

He died in the fall of 2010. That first December without him, I walked the rows of our country cemetery with a notebook and counted every veteran buried there.

There were fifty-four that first winter. The oldest was a Union soldier on the far west end who came out here to homestead after the war. There are sixty now. The list only grows.

That first year I made the wreaths because I did not know what else to do with my hands.

The wreaths from the national program cost money our little cemetery board did not have.

And Dwain’s shelterbelt was full of red cedar that nobody was using. So I cut the boughs and wired them onto rings, and I tied a red bow on every one.

On Wreaths Across America Saturday we laid them, and the Legion men stood at the gate with their flags and saluted. We have done it every year since. Fifteen years.

I had made close to nine hundred cedar wreaths in that time. I had never once thought of it as a number until I stood in that swept garage with my keys in my hand.

Dwain looked at the clock over the shop door. It was just past three, and the light was already going yellow over the grain bins. “How many rings you need?” he said.

“Sixty,” I said. “She threw the frames out with them, Dwain. They were wired right on, every one.”

He nodded slowly and walked over to the shelf where he keeps his wire.

He had most of a roll of number nine smooth wire left over from fixing the corral, and an empty five-gallon bucket. That was all he needed to make a ring.