The Stone Dad’s Road Crew Set

But Mom would never in her life let our family’s name go in the county paper over money. Not the court news, not the sheriff’s report. Not with Dad’s name in it. Not at 83.

And I would not do that to her. I would not make her choose between her son and her husband’s grave in front of the whole county.

So I went to see Mom instead. I told her I had talked to the monument company, that the stone had never been ordered, and that Kurt had used the money for the lot.

She was shelling the last of her lima beans at the kitchen table. She did not stop. Her hands kept going, pop, pop, into the bowl.

“I thought it might be something like that,” she said quietly.

“Mom, why didn’t you say anything?”

“Because then I’d have to know it.” She set a pod down. “He’s my boy, Nadine. Your dad would have been so ashamed of him. I didn’t want to be ashamed of him too.”

I reached across the table and took her hand. It was cool and papery and smelled like beans.

“I’m going to order the stone,” I said. “The one you picked. I’ll pay for it.”

“You can’t afford that.”

“I sold a lot of seed corn this year, Mom.”

She looked at me a long time. Then she said, “Both our names. And room for my date.”

I went back to the monument company the next week. Lavonne came out from behind the counter and hugged me before I had even said who I was. She had pulled the brochure for the exact stone Mom had looked at six years before.

It cost more now. Granite had gone up, and so had everything else. I wrote the check anyway, out of my fall commissions. I did not tell Mom the new price, and I am not going to tell you either.

Lavonne asked if we wanted anything etched on it besides the names and dates. Some families put praying hands, or a cross, or a deer, or a tractor.

I thought about it for a while. Then I asked her if they could do a road grader.

She smiled. “We did a combine last spring. I imagine we can do a grader. Bring me a picture.”

I had a picture. The county paper had run one when Dad retired: Dad standing beside the old grader, squinting into the sun, his orange vest unzipped. I borrowed it out of Mom’s scrapbook while she was at church circle and drove it over.

The company said the stone would take about eight weeks. They would pour the concrete foundation at the cemetery themselves, the way the cemetery board requires, and bring the stone out on a pallet.

“Do you want our crew to set it?” Lavonne asked. “That’s included.”

I started to say yes. Then I stopped.

“Let me ask somebody first,” I said.

Elwood Stange was Dad’s foreman on the county road crew for most of Dad’s 31 years. He is 74 now, retired, and still lives on the same acreage north of town with two dogs and a shop full of things he is going to fix someday.