Six Hundred Stones Before Grandma’s Burial

“I could call Halvor tonight,” I said. Halvor Seim was the church council president, seventy-one years old, and as fair a man as I have ever known.

My husband nodded slowly. “You could.”

I thought about it for a long time. I thought about Halvor calling a council meeting. I thought about Kermit getting a phone call on Friday and showing up at Grandma’s funeral on Monday angry, or not showing up at all, and every person in that church whispering about it over the casket.

Grandma was being buried Monday. I did not want a fight at her funeral. I wanted the grass short around Grandpa’s stone.

“No,” I said. “I’ll mow it.”

My husband looked at me. “The whole thing?”

“The whole thing. Six hundred stones.”

“I’m hauling Saturday. They won’t let me off, not with the bins this full.”

“I know,” I said. “I’ll take the girls.”

Our girls were at the kitchen counter pretending not to listen. Tova was fourteen, long brown hair, tall for her age, the kind of girl who does not talk much but does not quit either. Nell was eleven and talked enough for both of them.

“We’re mowing Grandma’s cemetery?” Nell said.

“Great Grandma’s,” Tova said.

“I know whose it is.”

“We’re mowing all of it,” I said. “Saturday. It’s going to take all day. You can say no.”

Tova shrugged one shoulder. “Can I run the trimmer?”

My husband had taught her to run a string trimmer the summer before, along the ditches and the fence line behind our house. She was careful with it. She wore safety glasses without being told.

“You can run the trimmer,” I said.

“I’ll rake,” Nell said. “And pull the grass off the names. You can’t read half of them anyway.”

We own one push mower, and it is old, and I did not trust it for a full day of knee high grass. So on Friday after work I drove out to Arne’s place.

He still lives on his farm a few miles from the church. He came to the door on two canes and listened to me with his head tipped to the side.

“Two summers,” he said. “I drove by in August. I thought maybe I’d gone blind.”

“Can I borrow your push mowers? I’ll bring them back clean.”

He took me out to his machine shed. He had two push mowers, one red and one green, both with high wheels in the back. He showed me how to set the deck as high as it would go.

“First pass, it’ll just push it over,” he said. “Go slow. Second pass, come at it from the other way, and it’ll cut. Don’t try to take it all at once or you’ll choke her down every ten feet.”

He filled both tanks from a gas can and put an extra can in the back of my car. Then he went back in the shed and came out with a spool of trimmer line.

“For the girl,” he said. “She’ll go through it. That old grass is tough on line.”

I tried to pay him for the gas. He would not take it.

“Sigrid brought me a pan of bars every Christmas for thirty years,” he said. “You go mow her cemetery.”

Saturday morning was clear and cold. The weather on the radio said there could be flurries by afternoon. It was the last week of October, and in Pierce County that is about when you start looking at the sky.