Six Hundred Stones Before Grandma’s Burial

Halvor did not look at me. He did not look at the girls. He turned, slowly, and looked down the length of our table to the far end.

He did not say Kermit’s name. He did not have to. Forty families turned and looked where Halvor was looking.

I want to tell this part exactly right, because it matters how it went.

Nobody said anything. Not one person. They just looked. And Kermit sat there with his coffee cup in front of him and his face going red and then white, and his wife staring at her plate.

My husband was sitting across from me. He did not move. He kept his eyes on his brother, steady, and I knew he was waiting to see if Kermit would do it himself.

It was maybe five seconds. It felt like a long time.

Then Kermit put both hands on the table and stood up.

“I’m the treasurer of the mowing fund,” he said. His voice was rough. “Everybody knows that. I collected the money the last two springs. Thirty-six hundred each year.”

The room was so quiet you could hear the coffee urn ticking.

“I mowed it twice,” he said. “This summer and last summer. Twice each. That’s all.”

Nobody moved.

“My wheat was bad last year. Some of you know that. I got behind on my pickup and I used the fund to make the payments, and I told myself I’d catch it up after harvest, and I told myself the cemetery didn’t care what week it got mowed.”

He stopped. He looked at the old widow with the cane, who was sitting two tables over with her son.

“That was wrong. I knew it was wrong. Your husbands are out there, and you paid, and I didn’t do it.”

The widow looked back at him. She did not say anything. She just looked at him, and I think that was harder for him than anything she could have said.

“I’ll pay it back,” Kermit said. “All of it. Every dollar I didn’t spend on the cemetery.”

Halvor looked at him a long time.

“By Christmas,” Halvor said.

It was not a question. Kermit nodded.

“By Christmas,” he said.

Then he sat down. His wife put her hand on his arm. And after a minute, the women started coming around with the coffee pots again, because that is what you do, and the room started to hum, and people went back to talking about Grandma.

I did not say anything to Kermit at the lunch. I did not look at him. I did not want to be the woman who looks at somebody across a funeral lunch.

But when we were loading up the leftover bars to take home, he came over to the kitchen pass-through where I was standing with the girls.

He stood there a minute with his cap in his hands.

“Lacey,” he said. “I’m sorry. About Sigrid. About all of it. About what I said on the phone.”

“I know,” I said.

He looked at Tova, and then at Nell. “You girls did that? All day?”

Tova nodded. Nell nodded.

He did not know what to say. I could see that. He was a grown man who had done a wrong thing and been caught at it in front of his whole church, and now two girls were looking up at him who had done his job for him in the cold.

“Grandma would have fed you lunch anyway,” I said. “You know that. She’d have made you take bars home.”