The Hill We Cleared for Grandma

So I put the phone down. I did not fight Charlene over the money. I let that summer go by, and the fall, and the winter.

I found out the rest of it later, from Wiley’s mother, and I will tell it now so you know I am not leaving it out.

Charlene’s husband lost his job when the mine he worked at shut down, the spring before all this. Thirty-one years underground, and one Friday they told the whole crew not to come back on Monday.

They had a mortgage on the Begley place and no insurance anymore. That winter was a hard one. And $300, Wiley’s mother said, was about one fill on the propane tank.

I believe that. I have known hard winters. I have seen what a layoff does to a man and to the woman married to him.

But here is the thing I could not get past, and still cannot. She never asked. Not Grandma, not me, not anybody. There are forty of us within a few miles of that ridge. Somebody would have helped.

Instead she kept the can, and quit paying the boy, and then stood up at her mother’s table and told an 88-year-old woman that her dead were finished. She made it sound like she was protecting Grandma. She was protecting herself.

That is the part I could not forgive. Not the money. The using of Grandma to hide it.

The winter went by. Grandma did not say one more word about the hill.

Then, the first warm Saturday in April, I stopped by her house with a sack of seed potatoes and found her at the kitchen table with her glasses down on her nose and paper everywhere.

Crepe paper. Pink and white and yellow and a deep red, in rolls, and a spool of green florist wire, and her good scissors. She had a shoebox beside her already half full of finished flowers.

She was making roses. She would cut the petals, stretch the edges with her thumbs so they curled, and wind them onto the wire one at a time. Her hands shake now, but not when she does that.

“Grandma,” I said. “Who are those for?”

She did not look up. “Whoever goes up,” she said.

I stood in her kitchen holding that sack of seed potatoes, and I did not have one thing to say.

Her mother taught her to make those flowers in the 1940s, when nobody on the creek could afford store flowers for Decoration Day. Every grave on that hill has had paper flowers on it at one time or another, from her hands or her mother’s.

There was one bunch in the shoebox that was different from the rest. Small white roses, five of them, tied with a white ribbon.

I knew who those were for. Every year she makes white ones for her baby brother. He died in the winter of 1946, a little before his first birthday, of a fever the doctor in Hyden could not get to in time because of the snow. She was eight years old.

His stone is the smallest one on the hill. It does not have a name on it, only the words Our Baby and the year. She has set white flowers on it every May for eighty years.

“I’ll be back,” I said, and I set the potatoes on her counter.

That night I called Wiley.