The Hill We Cleared for Grandma

Grandma looked at him. Then she nodded and lifted the white ribbon bunch out of her basket. Five small white paper roses. She put them in his hand.

Wiley walked down the hill to meet his aunt.

I watched him go. He walked to where the logging road comes out of the trees, and he stopped, and waited. A minute later Charlene came around the last bend, breathing hard, one hand on her side.

She stopped when she saw him. Then she looked past him, up the hill.

I do not know what she expected. Maybe a few of us, a little brush cut, somebody trying to make her look bad. I think she came up there ready for a fight.

What she saw was forty of her own people sitting in lawn chairs on a hill she had said was finished. Every stone clean and every grave in flowers. And her mother in a green and white lawn chair under the cedar, in her Decoration Day dress, with a paper plate on her knees.

Nobody said one word to her. Not one. Not a hello, not a hard word, nothing. Forty people just looked at her, and then most of them looked down at their plates.

It was the quietest I have ever heard that hill.

Wiley held the white roses out to her.

“Grandma made these for the baby’s stone,” he said. “She says she’d like you to set them.”

Charlene looked at the flowers in his hand for a long time. Then she took them.

She walked up the hill past all of us. Past the lawn chairs and the quilts and the children, past the twins and the soldier and her own daddy’s stone with the red paper roses on it. Nobody moved.

She went to the little stone in the corner, the one that says Our Baby. She stood over it.

And then she saw it. She saw that somebody had set it back up straight, and packed the dirt around it, and cleaned the moss out of the letters with a wire brush. Dovey did that, the last Saturday. It took her an hour.

Charlene got down on her knees, slow, like her mother had. She laid the five white roses against the stone. Her shoulders started shaking, and she put one hand over her face.

Nobody went to her. It was not ours to do.

Grandma’s voice came across the hill, not loud.

“Charlene,” she said. “Come sit down. I’m fixing to tell about the baby.”

Charlene stayed there another minute. Then she got up, and wiped her face with the back of her hand, and came and sat down on the end of the quilt nearest her mother’s chair. Wiley’s mother handed her a plate without a word.

And Grandma told about the baby.

She told how he was born in March of 1945, with a full head of black hair. How he would laugh any time her mother sang. How the snow came in January of 1946, three feet of it, and he took the fever, and her daddy rode a mule toward Hyden for the doctor and could not get through.

She told how she, eight years old, sat up with him that last night while her mother slept an hour, and sang him every hymn she knew, and how he was gone before her daddy got back.