Then she went back to her lawn chair, picked up the thermos, poured a cup of coffee, and handed it to my brother. He held it in both hands and did not drink it for a long time.
The crew did not leave right away. Men like that never leave right after a job.
They stood around the boom truck with their coffee and told stories about Dad. The time he pulled a school bus out of the ditch with the grader in a blizzard, and then went back and cut the shoulder so it would not happen again.
The time he found a calf on the road at dawn and eased it a mile and a half home ahead of the grader, slow as a walk, with the farmer’s wife running behind in her housecoat.
The time the county bought a new grader with air conditioning and Dad would not turn it on for a month because he said he could not hear the road.
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Mom laughed at that one until she had to wipe her eyes with her cardigan sleeve. I had not heard her laugh like that in six years.
Kurt stood at the edge of the group and listened. At one point the man who always had the little dog said, “Kurt, you remember riding with him? You used to sit on the toolbox.”
Kurt nodded. “He let me run the blade once. Out on the Blencoe road. I cut a ditch right down the middle of it.”
“I remember that,” Elwood said. “Your dad went back and fixed it on his own time. Never told anybody.”
Kurt looked down at his coffee. “I didn’t know that.”
“There’s a lot about your dad nobody knew,” Elwood said. “He liked it that way.”
When the sun started getting low over the cornfields, the men loaded the straps and the blanket and the pallet, and Truman folded up the boom.
Before they left, each one of them went over to the stone and did something small. One put his hand flat on top of it. One brushed a cedar twig off the base. Elwood just stood in front of it with his cap off for a long minute.
Then he turned to Mom. “It’s set, Edith. Level and plumb. It’ll be standing long after all of us.”
“Thank you, Elwood.”
“Don’t thank me. Harlan would’ve done it for any of us.” He paused. “He did, for my dad. Back in ’91. Helped me set his stone. I’d forgotten that until this week.”
Mom took his hand. “I hadn’t forgotten,” she said.
The pickups went back down the lane one at a time, slow, with the dust drifting out over the dry corn in the low sun. The boom truck went last. Truman honked twice at the gate. Dad used to honk twice at our mailbox when he went by on the grader.
After they left, it was just the three of us. Mom, Kurt, and me, standing by the stone in the late afternoon light.
Kurt pulled the tin marker out of the ground. He did it carefully, working it back and forth so the stake would not bend. He brushed the dirt off it and held it out to Mom.
“What do you want me to do with this?”
Mom took it from him and looked at the faded card behind the plastic for a long time.