Opal is a small woman, with hands like a bundle of twigs and a dark blue church dress with a brooch on the collar. She looked straight ahead the whole way up the path, her mouth set. I think she had been disappointed too many Sundays.
Tavis pushed her around the holly, and she saw the stones.
I will not tell you everything she did, because it belongs to her. She did not make a sound. She sat very still for what felt like a full minute, looking at the white marble with her husband’s name on it, a fresh flag standing beside it, and the dark granite lying next to it with her own.
Then Quincy Gadsden walked across the grass and lifted that wheelchair like a cradle and set it down at the foot of the stones, so close that she could put out her hand.
She touched the marble lightly with two fingers, the way you would touch a face. Then she moved to the granite and ran a fingertip along the letters of her own name.
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“They cut it crooked,” she said, in a small dry voice.
I thought I had misheard. Then Ezell laughed, a sound like a door opening, and everyone laughed, even Opal, and Neva’s face was wet.
“Mr. Pettigrew’s eyes were bad by then,” Opal said. She laid her hand flat on the granite. “I told Fenton he did it wrong. Seventy-five years I’ve been telling him. Out loud, from the car. I thought he’d be tired of me.”
Nobody could answer that.
She sat a long while. Then she took the zinnias out of the coffee can, red and orange and a wild sort of pink, and Tavis got down and helped her lay them on the stone one at a time.
She looked up at me. I was standing six feet off with my hat in both hands, the way I had stood at my own father’s funeral, and I felt every one of my sixty-five years.
“Mr. Sullins.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You’re the one with the rod?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I thought you’d be younger.”
“I thought so too,” I said, and she smiled.
“I’m going to ask you one thing,” Opal said, “and I don’t want any argument.”
“Anything.”
“When it’s my time, when they cut that last number in my stone, I want somebody to mow it first. I want the grass cut before the people come. I don’t want my Fenton lying in weeds again, and I don’t want anybody to see me in them.” She had not blinked. “Will you see to it?”
I looked at Ezell, and at Quincy, and at Jubal with his notebook in his hand, and at the pickup trucks lined along the road. I thought about the rod, and the holly, and my father’s stone that I had set straight with my own hands.
“Ma’am,” I said, “I will mow it myself.”
“I thought you might.”
“Before daylight. Before the people come.”
“Good,” said Opal Lindler. She folded her hands over the empty coffee can. “That’s settled, then. Now somebody get me a cup of coffee.”
The service was the next morning, the last Saturday in May, under a high clean sky and a breeze off the creek.
There were three hundred and sixty people on that hill. Chairs ran out by a quarter past nine, and the rest stood along the rows in church clothes and work clothes and uniforms. Old veterans in caps with the names of ships and divisions. Children on their fathers’ shoulders.