The Hill We Cleared for Grandma

Saturday night I could not sleep. I sat out on my own porch until midnight thinking about how I was going to tell Grandma, and whether I should, and what if it was too much for her.

Then I thought about her at that kitchen table in April, curling crepe paper roses with her thumbs, for whoever goes up.

After church I drove her home and sat in her kitchen while she warmed up dinner. When we had eaten and she had put the dishes in the sink, I said it.

“Grandma, put your Decoration Day dress on. We’re going up.”

She had her back to me at the sink. She stood there with her hands in the dishwater for a long time.

“Asa,” she said, not turning around. “I’ve not been up there in two years.”

“I know, Grandma.”

“I can’t walk it anymore. Charlene’s right about that.”

“You’re not walking it,” I said. “You’re riding.”

She turned around then and dried her hands on the dish towel. She looked at me the way she used to look at me when I was eight and had told her something she was not sure she believed.

Then she went in the back bedroom, and I heard the closet door open.

While she was dressing, my cousins were already up on the ridge. They had gone up early with buckets of flowers, real ones from the grocery in Hyden and peonies and iris from half the yards on the creek.

They put flowers on every grave on that hill except one. We had talked about it, and we all agreed. Grandpa Burl’s would wait for her.

Right after one o’clock I heard Wiley’s green side-by-side coming down the logging road. He pulled it up to the edge of the porch and climbed out and handed me the key without a word, and then he went back up the hill on foot.

Grandma came out the front door.

She had on her navy dress with the small white flowers all over it, the same dress she has worn to Decoration Day for as long as I can remember. She had pinned her white hair up in the back the way she does for church and for funerals and for nothing else.

On her arm was her basket, the old split oak one, and in it was every paper flower she had made since April. She had the little white bunch on top, with the ribbon.

She stood on the top step and looked at that side-by-side.

“I’m not getting in that thing,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am, you are,” I said.

And she laughed. I had not heard her laugh in a year. She held onto my arm and the porch post and let me help her down the steps and into the seat, and I buckled the belt over her lap and set the basket on her knees.

I drove that logging road at a walk. Where it washed out, I got out and guided the wheels over the rocks with one hand on the roll bar and the other on her shoulder.

She did not say one word the whole way up. She held that basket with both hands and looked straight ahead.

The trees opened up, and we came out on top of the ridge into full sun.