The Cemetery the Veterans Took Over

I stood there for a long time.

Ezell had come up beside me without my hearing him. He looked at the marker, and then at me. He did not say a word.

He went back to his truck and came back with a shovel, a pry bar, and a bucket of gravel from the church lot. We dug that stone out together an inch at a time, and I held the sides while he worked the bar underneath. We packed the hole with gravel, set the marble upright, and tamped it again.

When we were done, I wiped the face with a soft brush and some creek water. It gave his name, his rating, the Navy, the war, and the years.

“Machinist’s mate,” Ezell said.

“Second class.”

“Good man to have on an island.”

“He fixed things,” I said. And then my voice did something I had not planned on, and I looked at the cedar tree for a while.

Ezell did not touch me and did not speak. A lesser man would have said something, and I would have had to answer.

After a minute he said, “I buried my granddaddy back there, and it was eleven years before I could walk down to his stone again with a rag. I’d drive past.”

“Why?”

“Same reason as you.” He picked up the bucket. “It’s easier to be busy.”

It was not all easy after that. I would be lying if I said it went like a song.

It rained six days at the end of April, and the weeds grew back where we had cut. A hornet nest the size of a football came out of a leaning marker and sent three men to the clinic. A stone in the old section cracked straight across when a fine welder tried to stand it up, and I watched that grown man sit down in the grass and put his head in his hands. Ezell glued it with an epoxy made for the job and told him the stone had been cracking for twenty years and had only been waiting for someone to notice.

We started a coffee can on the tailgate that first Saturday for gas and trimmer line and gravel. By the third week it held about eleven hundred dollars. Nobody counted it, and nobody asked anybody to give. A woman I do not know put in a twenty and a note that said, My mother is at the back, please.

And in the fourth week, on a Tuesday, Annetta Varnadore came back.

She came in old jeans and work gloves, in her own little Toyota, not the county truck. She parked at the gate and walked up the hill with a box of trash bags and a tired look. I thought she had come to tell us to stop, or that somebody was worried about liability.

“I can’t spend a dollar on this, Mr. Sullins,” she said. “I want you to know I tried. They won’t let me.”

“I know it.”

“But the landfill is going to waive the tipping fees on every load of brush you haul up there through June. I can do that much. And I can send the dump truck Friday if somebody will load it.”

“Ma’am, we’d be obliged.”

“I’m not asking for thanks.” She put a glove on and bent and picked up an armful of cut vetch. “I’m asking for a rake.”