The Cemetery the Veterans Took Over

I pulled the rod out. I moved over a foot and pushed it down again, and it stopped. I moved a foot the other way, and it stopped there too. Two flat stones, lying side by side, one long and narrow, one smaller.

I laid the rod on the leaves and took off my hat. Then I called Ezell. I said, “I think I’ve got him,” and he said, “I’m coming.”

By seven there were fifteen of us standing in a circle under that holly with shovels and trowels and soft brushes, and no one said much. We took off the leaf mold a handful at a time. Under it was black dirt, and under the dirt, the face of a flat marker.

Jubal knelt down with a brush and a bottle of creek water and cleaned it, one letter at a time, the way his grandfather had taught him.

It was the plain white marble the government gives. The letters were sharp. Jubal read them in the same voice he had used for all two hundred and nineteen.

“Fenton R. Lindler. Corporal. United States Army. Korea.”

He read the dates. Then he moved over and cleaned the second marker, the smaller one. It was dark gray granite, polished, with letters cut deep, and it had a different look from the government stone. Somebody had paid for it, a long time ago.

“Opal Ruth Lindler,” Jubal read. “Nineteen thirty-two.” And then he stopped.

“Go on,” Ezell said quietly.

“There’s a dash, Granddaddy. And then it’s blank.”

Nobody said a word.

Opal told us the rest of it later. In the spring of 1951, eighteen years old and eleven months married, she had walked into the monument shop in town the week after she buried Fenton. She had a job at the pressing plant that paid eleven dollars a week. She asked the man what it would cost to have her own name cut on a stone to lie beside her husband’s, and whether she could pay four dollars a month.

It took her three years. The man, a Mr. Pettigrew, never raised the price and never sent a notice. When she made the last payment in 1954, he cut her name, the year she was born, and a dash. Then he told her to bring the date when it was time.

She never married again. She raised her sister’s children. She taught Sunday school for fifty-three years, and never once asked anybody to look for her husband’s grave on her behalf.

And on that Thursday morning she was waiting at home, not knowing we had found it.

We worked the rest of the day. We cut the holly roots back with hand saws so as not to hurt the tree, reset both stones level on gravel, and washed them. Miss Bettye wrote the corrected plot in the ledger in blue ink, the first change anyone had made to Section C in sixty years.

On Friday morning I called Opal’s grandson, Tavis, and asked if he would bring his grandmother to the cemetery at ten, a day before the service, before the crowd came.

“Is it something bad?” he said.

“No, sir. It’s not bad.”

She came in a wheelchair. Tavis pushed her up the cut path with a blanket over her knees and the coffee can of zinnias in her lap, and a good many of us stood back among the cedars with our caps in our hands.