We went to Section C, row 6, plot 4. There was a persimmon tree there, and a drain pipe from the church, and a stone that belonged to a man named Grissom who died in 1919.
Miss Bettye frowned at the page. “Section C was relaid in the sixties when they put in the pipe,” she said. “They moved the numbering. It’s off by two rows, I think, and nobody ever fixed it.”
“Which way?”
“I don’t know, Weldon. That’s the trouble.”
On the Monday of Memorial Day week I laid out the section with string. I ran ten-foot squares from the creek to the top fence, a wooden stake at every corner and a pencil number on every stake. Then I got a dozen steel probe rods from my shop, thin things four feet long with a handle on one end, the tool a surveyor uses to find a property pin. We lined up shoulder to shoulder and walked that section a square at a time.
You push the rod down with your whole weight. If it is dirt, it goes in easy. If it is a root, it gives a little, soft and springy. If it is stone, it stops, with a dull little tick that you feel in your wrist.
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We found a lot of stones that week, a footstone nobody knew about and the corner of a vault buried under sixty years of leaf mold. Each one we flagged with a pink ribbon, and each one Jubal read.
None of them was Fenton Lindler.
By Wednesday night my shoulders were on fire and my wrists were gone, and I sat in the kitchen with my feet in a pan of hot water and did not eat my supper.
“Maybe he’s not there,” I said.
“Maybe he is,” Neva said.
“I told her we’d find him.”
“I know what you told her.”
I was too tired to feel ashamed, and I was ashamed anyway.
On Thursday, two days before the service, I got to the cemetery at five in the morning. It was gray and cool, with mist along the creek. I wanted to walk that section by myself one more time.
I ended up at the far corner by the old holly. It is an enormous holly, thirty feet tall, with a trunk as thick as a man’s waist, and under it lies a deep mat of leaf mold that nobody had touched in sixty years. I had passed it a dozen times that week thinking, Nothing could be under there but roots.
Then I thought about Ezell’s granddaddy, and the way the county tractor had always gone through that back section at a trot. Nobody wants to get close to a holly. The leaves are sharp, and a mower hangs up on the roots, and a man has to work down on his knees. A tractor driver would have run a wide curve around that tree every time, for fifty years.
And a young widow in 1951, standing in the cold with a flag in her arms, would have wanted a place for her husband as far from the road as she could get and as close to shade, under the biggest tree on the hill.
I knelt at the foot of that holly and pushed the rod down through the leaf mold and into the dirt below it.
About eight inches down, it stopped.
It did not stop like a root. It stopped flat, with that dull little tick I had felt thirty times that week, and I knelt there with my hand on the handle and did not move.