Halvor Seim came out of the side door near the end, holding the arm of the pastor. Halvor was seventy-one and had buried his parents, his wife and one of his sons in that ground. He had paid his ninety dollars both springs like everybody else.
He stopped dead on the walk. He looked down the rows a long time. Then he looked at me, and then at my girls standing on either side of me, and then he looked over at Kermit.
Kermit had come out last, with his wife. He had seen it too. He was standing very still by the church wall, and his face had gone a color I had not seen on him before.
Halvor walked across the short grass toward us, slowly. He stopped beside me. He did not say anything to me. He turned and looked at Kermit, and Kermit looked back at him, and then Halvor turned back toward the grave, because the pastor was ready to begin.
The committal was short. It always is. The pastor read the words about ashes and dust and the sure and certain hope. My mother put a handful of dirt on the casket. The wind had stayed down, and you could hear a meadowlark somewhere, which is late for a meadowlark.
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Grandma went into the ground next to Grandpa, on the right side, facing east, in short clean grass.
When everyone else had turned to go in for lunch, Nell knelt down by Grandpa’s stone and took the last sprig of yarrow out of her coat pocket. She had saved it. She laid it on the fresh dirt where Grandma was.
“There,” she said, to nobody. “Now you’re both mowed.”
I picked her up, which I had not done since she was seven, and carried her to the church door.
After a Lutheran funeral out here, there is always a lunch in the church basement. The women of the church make it. There were ham buns and two kinds of hotdish and a Jell-O salad and pickles and about nine kinds of bars, and the big coffee urn going in the corner. The long tables had white paper on them.
People sat down and ate and talked about Grandma, the way you do. Somebody told about the time she drove her own grain truck to the elevator at seventy-four. Somebody told about her lefse. People laughed.
Kermit sat at the far end of our family’s table with his wife. He did not eat much.
About halfway through, Halvor stood up.
He did not tap a glass or anything. He just stood up at his table with his coffee cup in his hand, and the room got quiet on its own, because that is what happens when Halvor stands up.
“I want to say one thing,” he said. “And then you can all go back to your bars.”
A few people smiled.
“Sigrid was a good woman, and she is where she wanted to be. But I went out that side door today and I did not recognize our cemetery. I have not seen it look like that in two years.” He looked around the room. “I would like to know who mowed it.”
Nobody said anything for a second.
Then Nell, who was sitting beside me with a bar in her hand, said, in her plain eleven-year-old voice, “We did. Me and Tova and Mom. On Saturday. And Dad came at four.”
The whole room turned and looked at our table.
Halvor nodded slowly. “All of it?”
“All six hundred,” Nell said. “I counted. Well, Tova counted. I said the names.”
Somebody laughed and then stopped.