Six Hundred Stones Before Grandma’s Burial

We left the house at seven. I had a cooler with sandwiches and a thermos of coffee and a thermos of hot chocolate, both mowers and the trimmer in the back, rakes, a bag of gloves, and the extra gas.

The sun was coming up over the stubble fields when we turned onto the gravel. Tova was quiet in the front seat. Nell was in the back, singing something under her breath.

When we came over the last rise and the church came into view, small and white with its steeple against all that open sky, Nell stopped singing.

“It looks lonely,” she said.

The cemetery sat behind it inside the old wire fence, and from the road it did not look like a cemetery at all. It looked like a pasture nobody had grazed. You could see the tops of the taller stones. The low ones were gone.

I parked by the gate. We sat in the car for a minute.

“Okay,” I said. “Grandpa’s row first. Then we start in the northwest corner and work back and forth. Tova trims ahead, I mow behind, Nell rakes behind me. We stop at noon to eat.”

“What if we don’t finish?” Nell said.

“Then we come back tomorrow after church.”

“We’ll finish,” Tova said, and got out of the car.

I am not going to pretend it was easy. I want you to know what it was.

The first pass with the red mower did exactly what Arne said. The grass lay down flat in front of the deck, and the mower rode up over it and bogged and coughed, and I had to back up and push again. By the end of the first row I was sweating under my barn coat in thirty-four degrees.

The second pass, coming the other way, cut it. Brown chaff blew everywhere. It got in my hair and down my collar and in my teeth.

Tova went ahead of me along the stones with the string trimmer. She wore her gray stocking cap pulled low and her safety glasses, and she walked bent a little at the waist, holding the head of the trimmer an inch off the ground, close along the granite but never touching it.

My husband had told her once that if you let the line hit the stone it would mark it. She remembered.

Nell came behind both of us in her pink hooded coat with a rake taller than she was. She raked the cut grass off each grave into little piles, and then she knelt down and pulled the last bits off the face of each stone with her mittens.

And she read the names. Every one. Out loud.

“Olaf Hendrickson. Eighteen sixty-two to nineteen thirty.”

“Anna. Beloved wife. I can’t read the rest.”

“Baby Girl. Nineteen nineteen.”

She was quiet for a second after that one. Then she raked the clippings off the little stone very carefully and moved on to the next.

Around nine I stopped to put gas in the mower and saw her with her mittens off, running her fingers in the carved letters of an old stone to get the dirt out.

“Nell, your hands are going to freeze.”

“I know.” She kept going. “But I want them to know somebody came.”

I had to turn back to the mower then. I did not want her to see my face.

Grandpa’s row took us an hour, because I would not let the girls rush it. When we were done, you could see his stone clear from the gate. You could read his name and the sheaf of wheat in the corner. You could see the flat grass beside him, on the right side, facing east, where Grandma would go.