The Cemetery the Veterans Took Over

We worked the first hours of that morning, the two of us. I took the mower down the hill, and he went in ahead of me with the sling blade, cutting a lane through the briars so I would not run the blade into a stone I could not see. Twice he stopped, and bent, and put a hand flat on a stone I could not make out, and said a name under his breath. The first was an aunt. The second was the man who had taught him to drive a truck.

I understood then that I was not clearing weeds. I was walking through his people.

Around ten-thirty a dust cloud rose at the gate, and then another. By noon there were seven of us.

I did not call anybody, and neither did Ezell. Everybody in Tamsey drives past that hill on the way to church or the feed store, and every one of them had been feeling all winter what I was feeling, and every one of them was waiting for somebody to start a mower.

Quincy Gadsden came in a white truck with a zero-turn mower on a trailer. He is forty-one, a Marine Corps sergeant who did two tours in Iraq, and he runs a landscaping business with four crews. He had a Saturday full of lawns to cut. He stood at the gate and looked at the hill for a long moment.

“I’ll be back,” he said, and left, and was back in forty minutes with a trailer of string trimmers and two of his men. He did not charge a cent. He never has.

Lamar Ravenel came in a long old Mercury with a pressure washer in the trunk. He is a retired Navy chief petty officer, thirty years, a boiler man, a big pleasant fellow with a voice that goes through a wall. He had the hose run out before Ezell walked over and put one finger on the nozzle.

“Not on the marble,” Ezell said.

“It’s a pressure washer. It cleans things.”

“It cleans things the way a belt sander cleans a table.” Ezell took a plastic jug out of his truck. “Water. A soft brush. Nothing else. Bleach eats the stone and pressure wears the letters off, and you won’t know you’ve done it till some child can’t read her grandmother’s name.”

He said it like he had said it before. He had spent six summers cleaning the stones at Mount Zion, the way his own father had.

Lamar looked at the nozzle in his hand. Then he laughed, a big laugh, and coiled the hose. “Brush it is, then.”

By the second Saturday there were nineteen of us.

There was a retired schoolteacher who could not lift a weed eater and ran the coolers and chairs under the cedar like a general. And there was Bettye Hucks, eighty-three years old, church clerk at Rehoboth Baptist for fifty years, who showed up with the original burial ledger in a pillowcase.

That ledger made the rest possible. It went back to 1838, in six different hands, with a hand-drawn map pasted in for each decade. Miss Bettye would open it on a tailgate and put her finger on a name and say, “Row nine, fourth stone from the cedar, you’ll want to cut around the iris,” and we would go look, and she would be right.

And then there was the boy.

His name is Jubal. He is Ezell’s grandson, eleven years old, and he came with his grandfather the second Saturday in rubber boots two sizes too big. He stood at the edge of the first cleared row for about ten minutes, watching the men work around the markers.

Then he walked up to the first stone, got down on one knee, and read it out loud.