The Hill We Cleared for Grandma

Wiley is my first cousin, five years younger than me. He runs a saw for a logging outfit up toward Hazard, and he is the best hand with a chainsaw I have ever seen. He is quiet. He thinks before he talks, which is more than most of us can say.

I told him about the paper flowers. I told him about the neighbor boy, and the can, and the green on top of the ridge.

He did not say anything for a while. I could hear his television going in the background.

“How bad you reckon it is up there?” he finally said.

“Two summers,” I said. “No mowing.”

“Two Saturdays,” he said. “That’s all it’ll take. If we get enough of us.”

“You think so?”

“I think it don’t matter how long it takes,” he said. “Who else?”

We made a list. Wiley’s younger brother, who works at the lumber yard and would come if Wiley told him to. Our cousin Dovey, who keeps chickens and three boys and is stronger than either one of us.

And our cousin on Grandma’s sister’s side, who drives a school bus and had told me just that winter that she missed Decoration Day more than Christmas. That made five of us.

“What about Charlene?” Wiley said.

“No,” I said. “Not Charlene. And not Grandma either. Not till it’s done.”

“All right,” he said. And that was that.

We went up the first Saturday in May. It was a clear morning, still cool, with the fog lifting off the creek as we drove in. We parked at Grandma’s barn and told her we were looking at timber on the ridge.

She looked at the weed eaters in the back of my truck, and the brush hook, and Wiley’s two saws, and she did not say a word. She just went back inside and shut the screen door. I think she knew.

The logging road had washed bad in two places. We walked it carrying everything, and by the time we came out on top I was sweating through my shirt.

Then we stood there and looked at it, the five of us, and nobody said anything.

You could not see a single stone from the edge of the clearing. It was briars to my belt, blackberry and greenbrier tangled together, and sumac grown up through the old wire fence. Honeysuckle had climbed everything it could climb.

“Lord have mercy,” my cousin from the bus route said, very quietly.

Wiley set his saw down, pulled his gloves on, and started the first one. The rest of us went to work.

It is slow work, clearing a graveyard. You cannot run a brush hog over it. You have to go stone by stone and find each one before you cut, so you do not knock it over or chip it. Some of the old field rock markers are only a foot high.

Dovey went ahead of us with a long stick, feeling for stones in the brush like she was hunting eggs. Every time she found one she tied a piece of orange flagging tape to the nearest sapling so we would know.

By noon we had found twenty-two of the sixty. We ate dinner sitting on my tailgate down at the barn, baloney sandwiches and a jug of sweet tea, and nobody talked much. Our arms were scratched up like we had been in a fight with a cat.

Grandma came out on the porch while we ate and stood there watching us. She did not come down and she did not ask. When we went back up, she lifted one hand off the porch rail, just a little.