The Hill We Cleared for Grandma

Aunt Charlene waited until the cornbread had gone around the table twice. Then she put both hands flat on the oilcloth, the way she does when she has already made up her mind about something.

“I’ve been thinking about Decoration Day,” she said. “And I think it’s time we quit.”

It was the Sunday before Memorial Day, a year ago last May. We were all at Grandma’s kitchen table after church, the windows open, the smell of soup beans and fried potatoes still hanging in the room.

Grandma Ottie had a forkful of greens halfway to her mouth. She stopped, and then she set the fork down on her plate very carefully, like it might break.

“Quit,” she said.

“Mommy, you’re 88 years old,” Charlene said. “You can’t climb that hill. Last time it took two men to get you up it, and you were sick for a week after. It’s not safe. It’s time to let it go.”

Nobody said anything. My cousin Wiley looked at his plate. His mother looked at the window. I looked at Grandma, because I could not help it.

She did not argue. She is not a woman who argues at the table. She just folded her napkin in half, and then in half again, and set it beside her plate.

“Well,” she said. “If that’s what everybody thinks.”

It was not what everybody thought. But nobody said so, and I am ashamed to tell you I was one of the nobodies.

I want to tell you about that hill before I tell you the rest, because you cannot understand what Charlene took unless you know what it was.

My name is Asa Hensley. I am 44 years old, and I drive a coal truck out of Hyden, in Leslie County, Kentucky. I have hauled coal off these mountains for twenty-two years, since back when there was a lot more of it to haul.

The Hensley graveyard sits on the ridge above Grandma’s place, up an old logging road that climbs out of the hollow behind her barn. You can see the top of it from her porch if the leaves are not full out.

There are sixty graves up there. The oldest ones go back to the 1850s, when the first Hensleys came over from Virginia and cleared a farm on the creek. Some of the oldest graves are marked with nothing but a flat field rock set on end.

My great-great-grandparents are up there. Two little twins who died of the diphtheria in 1902 are up there, side by side under one stone. A Hensley who went to France in the first war and came back is up there, and one who went in the second war and did not.

My grandpa, Burl Hensley, has been up there since 2009. And my daddy, Grandma’s oldest boy, has been up there since 2016, when his heart gave out at sixty-one on a Tuesday morning in the shop.

Decoration Day is what we call it here. Some people in other places say Memorial Day and mean the same thing, but here it is older than that. It is the day the family goes up the hill and cleans the graves and puts flowers on every one of them.

For as long as I have been alive, Grandma Ottie has led it. She has walked from grave to grave with her basket and told whoever would listen who was under each stone and how they lived and how they died.