Six Hundred Stones Before Grandma’s Burial

Then my husband’s brother put up his hand.

Kermit Brandvold was forty-five then, like he is now, give or take. He farms wheat and some sunflowers on his own place and his late father’s ground. He said he would take over as treasurer of the fund and either do the mowing himself or hire it done.

Everybody thanked him. I thanked him. I remember thinking it was a decent thing for a busy man to take on.

The first summer, I drove past in June and the grass was long. I thought, well, it’s a wet June. I drove past in August and it was longer. I told myself he was harvesting and would get to it.

The second summer, I stopped driving past. I am ashamed of that now.

But other people noticed. I heard it in the church parking lot, the way you hear things in a small place. One widow said she had tried to take geraniums out to her husband on Memorial Day and turned around at the gate because she could not walk through it with her cane.

Another family had quit going altogether. A woman I work with at the dental office said her mother cried in the car.

I heard all of that, and I did not do anything. He was my husband’s brother. I told myself it was not my business.

Then Grandma died.

Her name was Sigrid, and she was ninety-one, and she died in her own bed in the house in town where she had lived since Grandpa passed. My mother found her on a Tuesday morning with her Bible on the nightstand and her reading glasses folded on top of it.

She was the person who taught me to make lefse. She was the person who sat in the second pew on the left for sixty-one years and sang every verse of every hymn, even the fourth verse that everybody else skipped.

She used to say she was not afraid of dying because she knew exactly where she was going, and it was right next to Grandpa, facing east.

When I came home from the cemetery that Thursday, I sat in the car in our driveway for a long time.

My husband got home a little after dark. He was driving truck for the elevator through sunflower harvest, which in our part of the state runs right through October and into November. He was gray with dust and tired down to his boots.

I told him about the grass. I told him what his brother had said on the phone.

He sat down at the kitchen table and put his hands flat on it.

“Twice,” he said. “I think he mowed it twice this summer. Maybe twice last summer too.”

“Did you know?”

“I knew it looked bad. I didn’t know what he was doing with the money.” He rubbed his face. “His wheat was poor last year, Lacey. Real poor. And he’s behind on that pickup. He told me in September he’d missed two payments.”

I want to be fair to Kermit, because my husband was being fair to him. A bad wheat year in North Dakota is not a small thing. I have watched good men lose ground over one dry July.

But I kept seeing that widow at the gate with her cane and her geraniums. She paid ninety dollars so her husband’s grave would be mowed. It was not Kermit’s money to borrow against his truck.