The Stone Dad’s Road Crew Set

I found him in the shop, under the hood of an old Ford pickup. He wiped his hands on a red rag and offered me a lawn chair and a can of pop from the little refrigerator by the door.

I told him about the tin marker. I told him about the six years. I did not say anything bad about Kurt. I did not have to.

Elwood did not say a word for a long time. He looked at his boots. Then he looked out the shop door at the bean stubble across the road.

“Your dad set half the culverts in the north end of this county,” he said finally. “I watched him do it. He could set a forty-foot pipe so true you could roll a marble down it.”

“I know.”

“He never once complained. Not about the cold, not about the pay, not about me.” Elwood took off his seed cap and turned it in his hands. “And he’s been six years under a tin sign.”

“The monument company will set it,” I said. “But I wondered.”

Elwood put his cap back on. “We’ll set his stone,” he said. “Give me a day.”

That night he called two of the old crew. The next evening he called me back.

“Three of us,” he said. “Truman’s still got the boom truck from his septic business. The monument people will pour the base and bring the stone out, and they said we can do the setting ourselves as long as we sign their paper. Second Saturday in October, if the weather holds. Afternoon. A couple of the boys are still getting beans out in the mornings.”

I sat down on the back step after we hung up, and I cried for the first time since the funeral.

I did not tell Mom everything right away. I told her the stone was ordered. I told her it would be set the second Saturday in October.

I did not tell her who was coming. I wanted her to see them come up the lane.

My husband was sorry he could not be there. He custom-combines for two neighbors in the fall, and one of them had beans standing that would not wait. He checked the sky that morning, said, “You’ll have a good day for it,” and kissed me on the top of the head.

The day was beautiful. It was one of those October days in western Iowa when the sky is so blue it looks painted and the air smells like dust and dry leaves. Dad used to call that kind of day grading weather. No mud, no wind, the gravel packing down just right.

I put on my tan barn jacket and my old jeans and picked Mom up after lunch. She was wearing her navy cardigan, the good one with the pearl buttons, and she had a coffee thermos ready on the counter.

She always brings coffee. She brought it to every ballgame and every field day and every hard morning of my life.

“Who’s going to drink all that?” I asked her.

“Somebody will,” she said.

The Onawa cemetery sits on a little rise just outside town, with cedars along the west fence and cornfields on three sides. The corn stood tall and dry that week, tan and gold in the sun, and you could see a long way over the top of it.