The Hill We Cleared for Grandma

It was the kind of late May afternoon you get here maybe five times a year. Blue sky clear down to the hills. A breeze coming up out of the hollow, just enough to stir the grass. The whole ridge was bright.

And there were the stones. Sixty of them, gray and clean in the fresh-cut grass, every one with flowers in front of it. Pink and red and yellow and purple, all across the top of the ridge.

Wiley and his brother were still trimming around the last few stones with their weed eaters. When they saw us, they shut them off, and the whole hill went quiet.

The brush piles stood in long rows at the edge of the woods. Dovey was standing by the old cedar with her hands in her back pockets.

I shut the engine off. I unbuckled her belt and came around to her side. I took the basket off her lap and held my arm out, and she put her hand on it and stepped down onto the grass.

She did not move for a long time. She just stood there, holding my arm, and looked.

Then she let go of me and took her basket back.

She walked across that hill by herself, slow, the way she walks now. Past the twins. Past the soldier. Past my daddy, where she stopped for just a second and touched the top of his stone with two fingers.

She went straight to Grandpa Burl’s stone, the only one on the hill with no flowers in front of it.

She stood there a minute. Then, before I could get to her, she got down on her knees in the grass. I do not know how she did it with her hip. I have never known.

She took the first bunch of paper roses out of the basket, red ones, and set them against his stone. She straightened them twice.

“Well, Burl,” she said, in her ordinary voice, like she was talking to him across the supper table. “I told you they’d come.”

I had to look away. So did Wiley.

When she was ready, Wiley and I helped her up, one on each side. She brushed the grass off the front of her dress and looked around at all of us.

“Who’s got me a chair?” she said.

Wiley’s brother had brought one of those folding lawn chairs with the green and white webbing. We set it up by Grandpa’s stone, in the shade of the cedar, and she sat down in it like a queen.

That is when the trucks started coming up the hollow.

I could hear them down below, at Grandma’s barn. Doors shutting. Children hollering. Somebody laughing.

And then people started coming up the logging road on foot, carrying lawn chairs and casserole dishes and quilts and coolers.

Wiley’s mother came first, with a pan of fried chicken under foil. Then Dovey’s husband with all three of their boys, every one of them carrying a folding chair. Then Grandma’s nephews from over on the other fork, and their wives, and their grown children.

They kept coming for an hour.

By three o’clock there were forty people on that hill. I counted, because I did not believe it. Forty of us, in lawn chairs and on quilts, spread out among the stones.

The women spread the dinner on two quilts laid end to end in the shade. Fried chicken and deviled eggs and soup beans and a pan of cornbread big as a stop sign. Green beans cooked all morning with a ham hock. Two stack cakes.