The little white church stood behind us with the last sun on its steeple. Grandma had sung in it for sixty-one years. I stood there and thought she would have liked the yarrow better than anything from a florist.
We loaded the mowers in the dusk and drove home with the heater running and nobody talking. Nell fell asleep against the window before we got to the blacktop.
We did not say a word about Kermit to anyone that weekend. Not Saturday night, not Sunday.
On Sunday morning we went to church like always. Kermit was there with his wife, three pews up on the other side. He did not turn around. After the service he went straight out to his pickup and did not stay for coffee.
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In the car on the way home, my husband said one thing.
“That’s his to tell,” he said. “Monday. If he doesn’t, I’ll talk to Halvor myself after the funeral.”
I nodded. It was the right answer. It was his brother, and it was his to say.
On Sunday afternoon I took the mowers back to Arne. I had cleaned them in the yard with the garden hose and scraped the decks. He came out on his canes and looked at them.
“You get it all done?”
“All of it. My husband came out at four and helped finish.”
“All six hundred.”
“All six hundred.”
He nodded slowly, and his eyes got wet, and he said, “Well,” and went back in the house. That was the whole conversation. I understood it.
Monday was cold and bright, with no wind, which felt like a gift.
The funeral was at eleven in the church. It was full. Grandma had outlived most of her friends, but she had not outlived their children, and they came from town and from the farms and a few from as far as Minot and Devils Lake.
We sang “Children of the Heavenly Father,” which was her favorite. Nell held my hand through all four verses, and she sang the fourth one, which I had not known she knew.
Then the pallbearers carried Grandma out the side door of the church, and we all followed her out into the cemetery.
That is when it happened.
You have to understand that most of these people had not been out there in a long time. Some of them had tried, and turned around at the gate. Some had just stopped coming, the way you stop going places that make you sad.
They came out that side door expecting what they had seen in the summer, or what they had heard about.
They stopped.
I watched it go through them. One family and then the next. People stopping on the walk with their coats buttoned up, looking down the rows. Short grass. Clean stones. Every name readable. And on top of almost every stone, a little sprig of dried yarrow.
An old woman with a cane, the same widow who had turned back on Memorial Day, let go of her son’s arm and walked straight across the short grass to her husband’s stone. She stood there a long time. Then she reached down and touched the yarrow on top of it, and she put her hand flat on the granite and left it there.
Her son looked around at all of us, like he was trying to figure out who to thank.