The Hill We Cleared for Grandma

That afternoon we found Grandpa Burl.

A poplar sapling had come up right in the middle of his grave, maybe two years old, taller than me. Its roots had pushed the grass up in a hump over him.

Wiley looked at it for a long time. Then he took out his hand saw, not the chainsaw, and got down on his knees and cut it off at the ground. He did it slow and careful, like he was cutting hair.

He did not say a word the whole time. When he was done, he laid his hand flat on the stone for a second and then got up and went on to the next one.

We found my daddy’s stone about four o’clock, under a mat of honeysuckle so thick it looked like a green bush. I did not use any tool on that one. I pulled the vines off with my hands until I could read his name.

We came down the hill a little before suppertime, with the sun still on the ridge. Thirty-four stones found. Twenty-six to go.

The second Saturday, Wiley’s brother brought a gas-powered pole saw from the lumber yard, and that made a world of difference. We took down the rest of the saplings and limbed back the trees around the edge so the sun could get in.

We raked. We burned nothing, because Grandma always said fire did not belong on that hill, so we dragged every limb and every armload of briars to the edge of the woods and piled it in long rows.

By that evening the brush piles were taller than I am, and we had found fifty-eight stones.

The last two took most of the third Saturday. One was a field rock that had fallen over flat and grown completely under the sod. Dovey found it with her stick. The other was the little stone that says Our Baby.

It had tipped over on its face. Nobody knew how long it had been that way. Wiley and I lifted it together and set it back up straight, and Wiley’s brother packed the dirt around the base with the heel of his boot.

When I stood back up and looked across the top of that ridge, I could see every stone. Sixty gray stones standing in fresh-cut grass, the sun on them, and the hills falling away blue and green on every side.

It looked the way it looked when I was a boy.

“Well,” Wiley said. “There it is.”

That was the third Saturday in May. Decoration Day, the way the family has always kept it, is the Sunday before Memorial Day. We had one week.

We had agreed we would not tell anybody. But you cannot cut brush on a ridge for three Saturdays in a hollow where everybody knows everybody without people noticing.

Wiley’s mother asked him what he had been doing up there. Dovey’s husband told somebody at church. The woman who drives the bus told her sister.

By Wednesday, I had four phone calls. By Friday, I had eleven. Everybody asked the same thing, which was: is it true, and are we doing it this year, and what can I bring?

I told every one of them the same thing. “Sunday after dinner. Bring a chair. Don’t tell Grandma, and don’t call Charlene. If she comes, she comes.”

Nobody argued with me about that. I think a lot of them had done the same arithmetic I had.