The Cemetery the Veterans Took Over

“Private Jesse Tolliver,” he said. “United States Army. 1918.”

He was not performing. He said it at the volume you would use to say hello to somebody on a porch. He went to the next stone. “Sergeant Amos Harley. Marine Corps. 1944.”

By the end of the next week he had read every veteran’s marker in that cemetery, all two hundred and nineteen, one at a time, before anybody ran a blade within six feet of it. Nobody told him to. He just thought somebody ought to say them first, and none of us grown men could think of a reason that was wrong.

Quincy, who is not a man who talks about Iraq, stopped his mower one morning and stood with his cap in his hand while Jubal read a stone. I saw his jaw working. Then he put the cap back on and started the machine again, and he never said a word.

We did the flags that month too. Two hundred and nineteen graves, and most of the flags had faded to nothing.

There is a right way to do it, and people wrote to ask, so I will tell you. You do not let a flag touch the ground, ever. You do not drop one in a pile, and you do not put one in a trash bag, no matter how faded. Ezell showed us how to pull each worn flag from its holder and fold it into a triangle on the spot, the way you would at a funeral, and lay it in a clean box in the bed of Quincy’s truck.

The Legion honor guard took the old flags to the post on Friday evenings and retired them by fire, the way the regulations say, with the Scouts standing at attention. Fifty-eight the first week. Seventy-one the second. New flags came from the Legion, and from the grocery store, which sent two cases without being asked. Each one was set at the head of a grave, straightened, and stepped back from.

It was in the third week, on a Wednesday afternoon, that I walked into the Seabee corner of the old section looking for my daddy.

I had not been there in eleven years.

My father, Hugh Sullins, was a Navy Seabee in the Pacific in the Second World War, a construction man who built airstrips on islands I could not find on a map. He came home and put up houses in this county for forty years, and talked about the war once, to say he had never been so tired as the day they finished the last runway, and never so glad.

He died eleven years ago in January. We buried him on a gray, sleeting morning, and I stood with my hat in my hand and my mother on my arm, and when it was over I went home and told myself I had done my part.

I had not been back since. Not on Memorial Day. Not on his birthday. I told people I was too busy, and then I told myself he would not have wanted a fuss. The truth is I was afraid of the quiet out there. A man who has spent twenty years finding things buried in the ground does not always love to stand over one.

I found his marker in the second row. Or I found where it should have been. It had sunk. The government marble, which is supposed to stand a good eight inches out of the ground, had settled into the red clay until only an inch and a half showed above the grass. The flag holder beside it was bent over flat.