The Hill We Cleared for Grandma

“I’ve put white flowers on him every year since,” she said. “Eighty years. I thought last year I’d missed my first one.” She looked over at Charlene. “But I reckon he don’t mind waiting a year.”

Charlene did not say anything. She sat there with her plate on her lap and the tears running down, and her mother reached over and patted her knee twice, and went on.

That was all. That was all that anybody ever said about it on the hill.

Charlene stayed the rest of the afternoon. She did not talk much. She helped wrap the leftover chicken and fold the quilts. When the sun started down toward the hills, she was the one who carried her mother’s basket back to the side-by-side.

Before she left, she came over to where I was loading weed eaters in the bed of my truck at the barn. She stood there a minute with her hands in the pockets of her sweater.

“Asa,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I didn’t know how to tell her,” she said. “About the money. After the mine closed.” She stopped. “I meant to put it back.”

I want to be honest that I had a lot of things I could have said right then. I had been saving some of them up for a year.

I didn’t say any of them. Grandma was sitting on her porch thirty feet away, in her rocker, in the last of the sun, with her eyes closed and her Decoration Day dress still on. She looked happier than I had seen her look since Grandpa died.

“The boy mows in June,” I said. “That’s all.”

Charlene nodded. She looked at me for a second, and I could not tell what she was thinking. Then she went and kissed her mother on the forehead, and walked down to her car.

I drove Grandma back up the hill one more time that evening, by herself, because she asked me to. The sun was low but it was still full daylight on the ridge, and the flowers were bright against the stones.

She did not get out. She just sat in the side-by-side with her basket empty in her lap and looked at all of it.

“Your daddy would have liked this,” she said.

“I know, Grandma.”

“You don’t fight family over the dead,” she said. “But you can outwork them.” And she laughed a little, and patted my hand on the wheel, and told me she was ready to go down.

The neighbor boy mowed the hill three times that summer. I paid him myself, the first time, because I did not want to wait and see.

The second time, he told me somebody had already paid him. He would not say who.

The next May, the Sunday before Memorial Day, forty-six of us went up the hill. Grandma rode up in Wiley’s side-by-side again, with a new basket of paper flowers on her lap, and Charlene sat in the seat beside her and held the basket steady.

After dinner, when the quilts were spread and the blessing had been asked, Charlene stood up and walked over to Grandma’s chair. She was holding a coffee can. A red one, with a slot cut in the lid.

She set it on the quilt in front of her mother and went back and sat down.

Wiley’s mother counted it that night at Grandma’s kitchen table, because Charlene would not. It was the $300 mowing fund, every bit of it, in old folded bills.

And there was another $300 in there with it, in new ones.