Six Hundred Stones Before Grandma’s Burial

Nell put her face up and caught one on her tongue and laughed, and for a second she was eleven years old again and not a girl raking a cemetery in the cold.

Then she went back to raking.

Her hands were red right through her mittens by then. Tova’s arms were shaking every time she lifted the trimmer, and she had gone through most of a spool of Arne’s line. I had refilled the red mower twice and the green one once, and my right hand had stopped feeling much of anything.

Around three I stopped them both.

“Girls. Look at me. We can come back tomorrow. You’ve done more today than most grown men would.”

Tova pushed her safety glasses up and looked at the rows we had left. About a quarter of the cemetery. The southeast corner, the oldest part, right by the church.

“Not till they’re all done,” she said.

“Tova.”

“Mom. Great Grandma’s being buried Monday. Everybody’s coming. They’re all going to walk past that corner.” She pulled the glasses back down. “Not till they’re all done.”

Nell did not say anything. She just picked up her rake.

A little after four, I heard a truck on the gravel, and I looked up, and it was my husband in his own pickup with a third mower in the back.

He had hauled his last load of sunflowers to the elevator, and the elevator manager had let him go an hour early when he told him why. He still had the dust on him. He did not even come in through the gate. He just lifted the mower over the fence, pulled the cord, and started in on the far end of the southeast corner, working toward us.

Nell ran over to him, and he picked her up with one arm and set her back down, and then she ran back to her rake.

He did not say anything about his brother. He did not have to. I could see it in how he pushed that mower, steady and hard, never looking up.

With four of us it went fast. By the time the sun was getting low and orange across the stubble, we came together in the last row, right beside the church, my husband mowing toward me and me mowing toward him.

We shut off the mowers at the same time. It was so quiet you could hear the wind in the fence wire.

I walked out to the gate and turned around and looked.

You could read every stone from the road again. Every row was straight and short and raked. The old white marble ones stood clean against the cut grass. The flat markers lay where you could see them. The little lamb on the child’s grave had its face back.

And on every stone Nell had cleaned, there was a small sprig of dried yarrow.

I had not seen her doing it. She must have been picking it all day out of the ditch along the gravel road, where it grows wild every summer and dries to a flat gray white head in the fall. She had laid one little sprig on top of every stone she trimmed.

Six hundred stones. I do not know if she got to all of them. I think she got to most.

“Nell,” I said. “When did you do that?”

She shrugged and looked at her boots. “Whenever I went by the ditch. Great Grandma always brought flowers. Nobody’s been bringing flowers.”

My husband put his hand on the back of her head. He did not say anything. He is not a man who says much. But I saw him swallow, hard.