The Cemetery the Veterans Took Over

Ezell opened with the prayer, and the Rehoboth pastor closed it. The honor guard fired three volleys, and every head on that hill jumped, and every one of us stood straighter. A boy from the high school band stepped out in front of the cedar and played Taps, once, slowly, a little flat at the end because he was sixteen and his hands were cold, and I have never heard it played better.

Annetta Varnadore stood at the back in a plain blue dress. At the end she took Ezell’s hand and mine in both of hers and did not say anything. She did not need to.

Then Jubal read the names.

It took forty minutes. Two hundred and nineteen of them, at a microphone set at the foot of the hill, in his grandfather’s old Sunday jacket that hung to his knuckles. He read them the way he had in April, plain and steady, at the volume of a boy saying hello. Private. Corporal. Sergeant. Chief. Captain. The last one he read was Fenton Lindler, Corporal, United States Army, Korea, and Opal, in her chair at the front, lifted one hand off her knee and held it there until he finished.

No one in that crowd made a sound.

When it was over, I walked down the hill by myself to my father’s stone. I told him about the county, and the weeds, and the rod, and the holly. I told him I was sorry it had taken me eleven years.

But the wind came up just then, and the new flag on his stone lifted out straight and snapped once and held, and I took it for a yes.

We still go out on Saturdays.

Nobody calls anybody. Twelve to twenty pickups are in the gravel by ten till six every week, April to November. Ezell runs it. Quincy sends a crew. Lamar has become, to my great surprise, insufferable about the correct way to scrub a stone. Miss Bettye keeps the ledger on the tailgate. Jubal reads every stone we uncover, and last month he found one of his own, a great-great-uncle nobody knew was there.

The county did not put the money back, and nobody has asked it to. Annetta Varnadore comes out the first Saturday of every month in her old jeans. Last time she brought a rake of her own, with her name written on the handle in marker.

Neva still says a letter never cut one blade of grass. I keep the third one in my shirt pocket anyway, folded small. It reminds me that I was angry, and that I did something better than be angry, and that I did not do it alone.

My daddy’s mower sits in the back of my truck now, with the cord wound neat and the blade sharpened and the gas can full beside it.

Opal Lindler rides out every Sunday after church in the back of a gray Buick, and now she gets out. Tavis pushes her up the cut path and sets her chair at the foot of those two stones, and she sits there for a half hour with a coffee can of zinnias in her lap, telling her husband everything that happened that week.

I am keeping my promise. Whenever the day comes, I will be at that gate before daylight, and Fenton will not be lying in weeds.

This story is a dramatization. Names, characters, and details are invented, and any resemblance to real people or events is coincidental.