The Stone Dad’s Road Crew Set

So I did. I put my hands on the cold sides of that stone, and the boom lifted it off the pallet slow, and it rose up and turned a little on the straps in the sun.

The men steadied the base. Elwood called it: “Little more. Little more. Hold.” Nobody else said much. Men like that do not. They had spent their whole lives setting heavy things down exactly where they belonged.

When the stone turned on the strap, the face swung around toward Mom.

Under Dad’s name and his dates, the monument company had etched the picture of the grader. It was small, maybe four inches long. But it was the old grader, the exact one from the newspaper photo, with the blade angled and the cab door open, like he had just stepped out to look at a road.

Mom set the thermos down in the grass.

She did not cry right away. She just looked at it. Then she said, very quietly, “Oh, Harlan. They put your grader on it.”

The man who always had the little dog had to walk off a ways and stand by the cedars for a minute. Nobody said anything about it.

Then Mom said something I did not expect.

“I called Kurt this morning,” she said. She was still looking at the stone. “I asked him to come.”

I turned and looked at her. Then I looked at Elwood. Elwood looked down the lane.

“Mom,” I said. “Why?”

“Because he’s your dad’s son,” she said. “And this is your dad’s stone.”

Before I could say anything, we heard tires on the gravel.

Kurt’s pickup was coming up the cemetery lane. It was the same truck he had driven for nine years, with a dent in the tailgate. He came slow. He parked behind the boom truck and sat in the cab for what felt like a long time.

Then he got out.

He looked at the stone hanging there on the straps, a foot above the foundation, with his father’s name on it in the sun.

Then he looked at the three men holding it. Every one of them had worked beside his father. Some of them had known Kurt since he was a boy riding in the grader cab on a Saturday, the same way I had.

Nobody said a word. I could hear a pickup on the blacktop a mile off and the cedars moving in the wind.

Elwood said, “Set her down, Truman.”

The boom lowered the stone the last foot. I guided it onto the foundation, and the men squared it, and Elwood laid a level across the top and watched the bubble a long time and said, “That’s good.”

Then Elwood set down his end of the strap, picked up the square-nosed shovel that was leaning against the boom truck, and started walking across the grass toward my brother.

I did not know what Elwood was going to do. I am not sure Kurt did either. My brother stood by his truck with his hands at his sides and did not back up. I will give him that.

Elwood stopped in front of him. He is a head shorter than Kurt and fifteen years older, but at that moment he looked like the biggest man in the county.

“Kurtis,” Elwood said.