Six Hundred Stones Before Grandma’s Burial

Tova shut off the trimmer and stood there a minute with her safety glasses pushed up on her cap.

“That’s better,” she said.

That is the most she said all morning.

Then we started in the northwest corner.

Six hundred stones is a number. Walking it is something else. There were the old ones from the 1890s, thin white marble gone soft and leaning, names worn down to almost nothing. There were the big family stones from the forties and fifties, Norwegian names, Swedish names, one German family in the corner.

There were the newer flat markers set level with the ground, which were the worst, because the grass had grown right over them and you could not see them until the mower blade scraped.

Every time I heard that scrape, I stopped and backed up and let Tova come in with the trimmer, and Nell would get down on her knees and clean it off.

We found a stone for a soldier from the First World War that I had never known was there. We found a little lamb on a child’s grave, half buried in thatch. We found my great aunt and uncle, who I had not visited since I was a girl.

At eleven, a pickup came slowly down the gravel road from the north.

I knew the pickup. Dark blue, newer, with a toolbox across the bed. It slowed down when it came even with the cemetery, slowed almost to nothing.

I stood there in the middle of the row with my hand on the mower, and I looked at it, and I did not wave.

It sat there a few seconds. Then it picked up speed and went on toward town.

Tova had seen it too. She did not ask. She pulled the cord on the trimmer and went back to work.

At noon we sat on the tailgate of my car with the hatch up against the wind and ate ham sandwiches and drank hot chocolate. We had done about a third of it. My shoulders ached all the way down my back.

The wind had swung around to the northwest and come up hard. You could feel winter in it.

Nell held her cup in both hands and looked out at what we had done. From where we sat you could see it plainly, a line right across the cemetery, short grass and clean stones on one side and the brown, waving tangle on the other.

“It’s like a before and after,” she said.

“It is.”

“Is Uncle Kermit going to get in trouble?”

I took a minute before I answered. I did not want to lie to her, and I did not want to teach her to hate her father’s brother.

“Uncle Kermit was supposed to take care of this,” I said. “He didn’t. That’s between him and the church and God. Today, we’re just taking care of Great Grandma.”

Nell nodded. She thought about it.

“He could have asked for help,” she said. “If it was too much.”

“Yes,” I said. “He could have.”

Tova finished her sandwich and stood up and pulled her gloves back on.

“Let’s go,” she said.

By two o’clock the first snowflakes came. They came out of a sky that was still mostly bright, the way they do out here in late October, little dry flakes drifting across the prairie in the sun. They did not stick. They just went by.