When he retired, the crew gave him a cake shaped like a grader. Mom kept the little plastic blade from the top of it in her china cabinet. It is still there, behind the gravy boat.
He died in October, six years ago, in his recliner, with the farm report on. His heart just stopped. The doctor said he would not have felt a thing.
At the funeral, the road crew came in their good shirts and stood in the back of the church because they said they were too dirty to sit up front. They were not dirty. That was just how they were.
The week after the funeral, Mom sat at her kitchen table with her checkbook. Kurt and I were both there. She had already been to the monument company and picked out a stone.
“Gray granite,” she said. “Not fancy. Upright, with both our names, and room for my date when it comes. It’s $2,800, set.”
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She wrote the check out to Kurt. I remember being a little stung by that, but only for a second. Kurt was the oldest. In Mom’s way of thinking, the oldest son took care of the stone.
“You handle it, Kurtis,” she said, tearing the check out. “You’re the oldest. Your dad would want it to be you.”
Kurt folded the check in half and put it in his shirt pocket. “I’ll take care of it, Mom. Don’t you worry about a thing.”
That is the last time I remember her not worrying about a thing.
I want to be fair to my brother, so I will tell you what I learned later. That winter, his used-car lot out by the highway was going under. He had bought too much inventory going into a bad season, and the bank was calling on his loan.
He told me, much later, that he deposited Mom’s check to cover a payment that was due that same week. He told himself he would put the $2,800 back by spring and order the stone then. Nobody would ever know.
Spring came, and the lot did not get better. Then summer. By the time he could have scraped it together, a year had gone by, and the shame of it was bigger than the money. Every year the shame got bigger and the lying got easier.
That is a reason. I have thought about it a great deal, and I believe it is the truth. But it is not an excuse, and I never once let myself pretend it was.
The first spring, Kurt said the monument company was backed up. That sounded right. A lot of people order stones after harvest, and the ground over a new grave has to settle.
The second spring, he said the granite had not come in. Mom nodded. She did not know where granite comes from any more than I did.
The third year, he said there had been a mix-up with the lettering and they were redoing it. Mom said, “Well, I want it right.”
By the fourth year, she stopped asking him in front of me. I think she knew. I think she knew long before I let myself know, and she was protecting him the way mothers do, by not looking straight at the thing.