Sixty Wreaths on the Hill

When he was done he held it up to me with both hands. His bow, which he had tied himself with Verlie watching, hung off to one side like a tired dog’s ear.

“Is it good enough for a soldier?” he asked me. He was very serious about it. His lip was shaking a little, like he was afraid of the answer.

“It’s good enough for a general,” I told him. I set it on the stack by the door, right on top, where everybody could see it, and Noble counted it out loud. “That’s fifty-two.”

At twenty past four, with the last of the sun coming in flat and gold across the kitchen table, I wired the last bundle onto wreath number sixty and handed it to Verlie for its bow.

Noble stood up on his chair. “That’s sixty,” he said. Then everybody was quiet for a second, and then Garland started clapping, and then all of us were clapping.

Even Dwain clapped. Even Verlie, who said she had not clapped indoors since 1968, when her brother came home on leave and walked in the kitchen door without telling anybody.

The wreaths were stacked on the porch and along the back wall, sixty cedar wreaths with sixty red bows.

The whole house smelled of them. I stood and looked at them a long time.

And I thought, Kaylee, I could not have done this without your children. That was true. Two of the four children who made those wreaths were hers.

Josh came for Kenna and Noble after dark, still in his co-op coat with the frost on the collar.

He stood on the porch and looked at the stack for a long time. He did not come in.

“Kaylee’s at work till seven,” he said. Then he said, “I’m sorry, Mom.” He said it to the wreaths more than to me, I think, but I heard it all the same.

“You didn’t throw them out,” I said. He looked down at his boots. “No,” he said.

“But I didn’t tell her, and that’s on me. I should have told her, Mom.”

That night I sat in my chair with butter rubbed into my hands and pitch still under my nails.

I thought about Saturday, and I thought about Kaylee, and I did not know which one I dreaded more.

Saturday came up bright and still. The wind had blown itself out in the night and left a light, fresh snow over everything, sparkling on the fence posts.

The sky over the hill was that hard, clean blue you only get on the coldest mornings, when the air is so still you can hear a dog bark two sections over.

Dwain backed the pickup up to the porch at eight. We loaded the wreaths in the bed on a tarp, stacked careful, bows up, so nothing would get crushed on the gravel.

Bernadine and Garland rode in the cab with me and Dwain. Kenna and Noble came with Josh, who dropped them off at the cemetery gate and drove away again without coming in.

Our cemetery sits on a rise a mile north of our place. It is an acre and a half of headstones inside a woven-wire fence, with a row of old spruce along the west side.

The cemetery board had already set out the little flags. Every veteran’s stone had one, a small American flag on a wooden stick, pushed down into the snow beside it.