She stayed until dark, raking in her good shoes in the mud, and did not once complain. I want you to remember her. She was a good woman in a hard job, and she came back.
By the second week of May, the front hill and the middle rows looked the way I remembered them from when I was a boy. Green and cut and quiet, with white stones standing straight in the early light and two hundred and nineteen new flags snapping in the breeze. We had a service planned for the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend at ten o’clock, with a bugler from the high school band, three volleys from the Legion honor guard, and chairs for two hundred and fifty.
The back section was almost done. All but one thing.
Every Sunday that spring, right after church let out, a long gray Buick had come up the road and parked at the gate. An old woman rode in the back seat with her hands folded on a coffee can. She never got out. She sat there with the windows down and looked at the back of the cemetery for about a half hour, and then her grandson drove her home.
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I noticed it the second Sunday and thought nothing of it. By the third, I had noticed that the coffee can held zinnias.
On the fourth Sunday Neva went out to the car with a thermos and two cups. She had not told me she was going. I watched from the hill as she bent at the window of that Buick and talked to the old woman for twenty minutes. When she came back up she had her hand over her mouth.
“Her name is Opal Lindler,” Neva said. “She’s ninety-four.”
“She taught Ezell in Sunday school.”
“She taught half of Tamsey. Weldon.” Neva’s voice stopped, and she started again. “Her husband’s back there. Fenton. He was killed in Korea in December of 1950. They’d been married eleven months.”
I did not say anything.
“She can’t find his stone. She hasn’t been able to for years, long before the county quit. It was lost in the briars back where the tractor never went, and the plat at the courthouse has him in the wrong row. She’s been sitting at that gate every Sunday since October because she can’t walk the hill, and she’s afraid if she starts asking people to look, they’ll come back and tell her he’s gone.”
“Gone where?”
“Moved. Lost. That somebody did something and never told her.” Neva looked at me. “She said, I don’t need to see him. I just need to know he’s still there.”
I thought about all the Sundays she had sat at the gate while I was home eating dinner.
When I told Ezell that evening, he was quiet a long time. “Twenty years she’s sat in the third pew of my church,” he said, “and never said one word to me about it.”
“She didn’t want to be a bother.”
“No,” said Ezell. “That’s the woman.” He rubbed his face. “We’ll find him.”
“We’ll find him,” I told Neva that night. “I spent twenty years learning how to find things buried in the ground. “It would be a pleasure to find a headstone.”
It was not easy.
Miss Bettye turned to 1951 in the ledger and read us the entry in a careful old hand. Lindler, Fenton R., Cpl., U.S. Army. Interred April 14. Section C, row 6, plot 4.