The grass on my grandfather’s row came up past my knees. I stood at the edge of it on a Thursday afternoon with the funeral director beside me, and neither of us could find the spot where Grandma was supposed to go.
“It’s next to him,” I said. “She bought the plot the same week she buried him. Eleven years ago. Right side, facing east.”
The funeral director was a quiet man from Rugby who had done this a thousand times. He took a step into the grass, and it closed around his good pants like water. He looked at me, then back at the rows, and he did not say anything, which was kind of him.
I could see the top of Grandpa’s stone. Gray granite, a little rounded at the shoulders, with a sheaf of wheat carved in the corner because he had farmed his whole life north of town. I could see that much. The name was gone under brown stalks and dead foxtail.
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I took out my phone and called my husband’s brother.
Kermit answered on the fourth ring. I could hear a radio in the background and the whine of a grain auger somewhere. He sounded like a man who had been interrupted.
“Kermit, it’s Lacey. I’m out at the cemetery with the funeral home. We’re burying Grandma on Monday.”
“I heard. I’m sorry about Sigrid. She was a good lady.”
“She was. Kermit, the grass is up to my knees. We can’t find her plot. When was this mowed last?”
There was a little pause. The auger kept whining.
“It’s the end of October, Lacey,” he said. “Cemetery doesn’t care what week it gets mowed. Snow’s coming anyway. It’ll all lay down by Thanksgiving.”
I stood there holding the phone, and I watched the wind push across that dead grass in long waves, and I thought about every family in our church who had written him a check in April.
“Okay,” I said. “Thank you.”
I hung up before I said anything else. Then I walked over to my grandfather’s stone, crouched down, and pulled the grass away from his name with both hands until I could read it again.
I should tell you how the fund works, because if you did not grow up around a little country church, it might sound strange.
Our church sits about nine miles out of town on a gravel road in Pierce County, north-central North Dakota. It is a small white Lutheran church with a steeple you can see for three miles across flat ground, and a cemetery behind it inside a wire fence.
The church itself does not own a mower. It never has. The cemetery is kept by what everybody calls the mowing fund, which is forty families who have people buried out there. Every spring each family pays ninety dollars.
Forty families at ninety dollars is thirty-six hundred dollars a year. That money is supposed to pay somebody to mow every two or three weeks from May to the end of September, trim around the stones, and keep the gate and the fence up.
For as long as I could remember, an old bachelor farmer named Arne did it. He mowed with a riding mower and trimmed with a gas string trimmer, and he did it for the money and also, I think, because he liked being out there among people he had known.
Two years ago Arne’s knees gave out. He stood up at the annual meeting in the church basement and said he could not do it anymore, and he was sorry. Nobody wanted the job.