Six Hundred Stones Before Grandma’s Burial

His face kind of broke a little. He nodded. Then he put his cap back on and went out.

My husband watched him go. Later, in the car, he said, “That was decent, what you said to him.”

“It was true,” I said.

“That’s why it was decent.”

I want to tell you the rest, because it is the part I am proudest of, and it is not about me.

Kermit sold the dark blue pickup the first week of December. He bought an old half-ton with a hundred and eighty thousand miles on it from a man in Rugby, and he drove that.

On the Sunday before Christmas, after church, he walked up to Halvor in the narthex in front of everybody coming out of the service and handed him an envelope. It was the money for every mowing he had not done. Halvor counted it right there, which is something Halvor would do, and then he shook Kermit’s hand.

People saw. Nobody said anything mean. Some of the older men shook his hand too, on the way out. That is how it is in a small place. You pay it back, and you stand there while people see you pay it back, and then you are allowed to go on being part of things.

He resigned as treasurer in January. Halvor took it over himself.

At the annual meeting in March, down in the church basement, the first item on the agenda was the mowing fund.

Halvor stood up and said they needed somebody for the summer. He said thirty-six hundred dollars, same as always, mow every two or three weeks, May to the end of September, trim around every stone.

Then he looked over at our table.

“I’ve got a recommendation,” he said. “If her mother will let her.”

Tova was sitting beside me. She had turned fifteen in February. She went red to the ears.

I looked at her. She looked at me. Then she looked at Halvor and nodded once.

The families voted. It was not close. Nobody voted against.

Arne, who was sitting in the back on his two canes, said he would sell her his riding mower for what it was worth and throw in the push mowers and the trimmer for nothing. My husband said he would haul it out there for her every time until she could drive.

Nell asked if she could be the raker. Tova said yes, for ten percent.

“Fifteen,” Nell said.

“Twelve,” Tova said.

The whole basement laughed. Halvor wrote it down in the minutes.

That was a few years ago now.

Tova still mows it. She drives herself out there now, and she does it every two weeks from May to September, and she trims close along every stone without ever touching the granite. Nell rakes. In the fall, before the first snow, the two of them go along the ditch by the gravel road and pick dried yarrow and lay it on the stones.

People come again. The old widow with the cane came every Sunday afternoon until she passed, and now she is out there too, next to her husband, in short grass.

Kermit comes out once in a while and helps with the fence. He does not say much about it, and nobody asks him to.

Grandma and Grandpa are side by side on the right, facing east, and you can read both their names from the road.

The families gave the mowing job to Tova the next spring, thirty-six hundred dollars, and the grass has been short ever since.