The Cemetery the Veterans Took Over

“Weldon,” she said, “a letter never cut one blade of grass.”

I folded the letter and put it in my shirt pocket. It was still in the pocket three weeks later when I loaded my daddy’s mower into the truck before daylight, and Neva stood on the porch in her robe and did not say a word about it.

So that was how I came to be standing at the gate with my hand on the handle, looking at that first small flag. It leaned out of the weeds about thirty feet in. The marker under it was swallowed to the shoulders in johnsongrass.

I pulled the cord. The engine caught on the second try, and the sound went across that hillside like somebody shouting in church. A pair of doves went up out of the cedar and off over the road.

I had cut maybe ten feet when a pickup came up the gravel behind my truck and stopped.

Ezell Mouzon got out of it with a sling blade in one hand and a green thermos in the other. His overalls had been washed so many times they had gone soft as a dish towel. He is seventy-four years old. He served in Vietnam as an Army sergeant in a transportation company, driving trucks down roads other men were afraid of, and he is a deacon at Mount Zion church across the creek.

I knew him the way you know a man you have sat across a room from for fifteen years. We belonged to the same American Legion post. We had said good morning and good night at a good many meetings, and I do not believe we had traded forty words that meant anything.

I shut off the mower. The quiet came back all at once.

“Morning, Ezell.”

“Weldon.” He looked at the mower, and the weeds, and then at me. “You’re starting at the wrong end.”

“The front’s what people see.”

“That’s why it’s the wrong end.” He pointed the sling blade down the hill toward the back fence, where the ground sloped off to a creek bed and the cedars grew thick. “That’s where it’s worst. That’s where it’s always worst.”

“The county cut that too.”

“The county never did cut that, Weldon. Not in my granddaddy’s day, not in mine.” He did not say it unkindly. He said it the way a man tells you the time. “Y’all just noticed because the front caught up.”

I opened my mouth, and then I closed it, because I knew he was right.

All my life I had driven past Rehoboth and thought of it as a well-kept cemetery. And it was, along the road and up the front hill, where the people who visited went. The back section, down toward the creek, where Tamsey’s Black families have been buried since after the Civil War, had always looked the way it looked now. Leaning stones. Briars. A tractor that went through at a trot and left the corners.

I had never once walked down there. It had not occurred to me to wonder why.

“Well,” I said. “I reckon that’s where we’ll start, then.”

Ezell unscrewed the lid of his thermos and poured coffee into it. He handed it to me before he poured any for himself.