The Hill We Cleared for Grandma

And every year we passed a coffee can around at the dinner. A red coffee can with a slot cut in the lid. That was the mowing fund.

It came to about $300 most years. It paid a neighbor boy to take his mower up there three or four times over the summer so the briars did not take the hill back before the next May.

When Grandpa Burl died, the can went to Charlene. She was the one living closest, down the road in the old Begley place with her husband. She paid the boy, she kept the can, and every May she brought it back up the hill to be filled again.

So when she said at that table that it was time to quit, the first thing I thought, God forgive me, was not about Grandma. It was about the can.

But I did not say anything about that either. Not that day.

After dinner I walked out on the porch, and Grandma came out a minute later and sat down in her rocker. She looked up at the ridge for a long while.

“You can’t see the stones anymore,” she said.

I looked. She was right. A year ago you could see the gray of the stones through the trees from her porch. Now it was all green, the whole top of the ridge.

“It’s just the leaves, Grandma,” I said.

“No, it’s not,” she said. And that was all she said about it, then or for a long time after.

That summer I drove past the hollow most days going to and from the tipple. Every week the green on top of the ridge got a little thicker. I told myself it was Charlene’s business. I told myself Grandma had said it was all right.

In August I ran into the neighbor boy at the feed store, the one who had always mowed the hill. He is not a boy anymore, he is twenty and works on the road crew, but he still mows for people on weekends.

“I haven’t been up there since last summer,” he told me, when I asked. “Charlene called and said not to come. Said she’d let me know.” He shrugged. “She never let me know.”

I stood there in the feed store with a sack of dog food on my shoulder and did the arithmetic.

The can had been passed the May before last, at the last Decoration Day we had. It had come back full, or near it. And the boy had not been paid to mow a single time since.

I thought about calling Charlene that afternoon. I had the phone in my hand in the truck. I thought about driving straight to the Begley place and asking her to her face where that $300 had gone.

Then I thought about Grandma.

There is a thing she has said all my life, any time there was trouble in the family over a burying or a headstone or who sat in what pew at a funeral. You don’t fight family over the dead. The dead have had all the fighting they need.

If I went to Charlene, it would be a fight. Charlene is not a woman who says she was wrong. It would be all up and down the creek in a week, and Grandma would hear every word of it, and she would have to sit across from both of us at Thanksgiving.