He wiped his hands on a rag and did not look at me. “Paper doesn’t stop anybody from suing, Dean. You know that. And once I open it for you, I open it for everybody who ever had a cousin up there.”

“There’s six people up there, Clint. They’re all Kesslers.”

“I’m sorry about your dad.” He went back to the grease gun. “I am. But the answer’s no.”

All that summer I watched Mom get smaller. She quit going to the Wednesday lunch at church. She quit doing the crossword.

When I came by on my lunch hour she would be sitting at her little table with the television off, holding Dad’s old coffee cup, the brown one with the chip on the handle, turning it around and around in her hands.

“You want coffee in that, Mom?”

“No,” she said. “I just like to hold it.”

The idea came to me on the eighteenth of October, sitting on my own little combine at the north end of the eighty, looking across the road and up.

From my side you can see the whole hill. The cemetery sits in the far northeast corner of the home quarter, right where it meets the Maupin ground, and the north side of the plot’s woven wire fence is the line fence itself.

My great-grandfather set it that way on purpose, people said, so the dead could look out over two farms.

That morning Lois Maupin’s hired man was combining her corn on the far slope, and I watched the head of that combine eat its way up the hill toward our cemetery fence, row after row, until there was nothing standing between Lois’s farmyard on the blacktop and the cedar tree but a mile of cut stalks.

A mile of cut stalks, and not one foot of it on Clint Rayburn’s ground.

I sat there with the engine running until the grain tank alarm went off.

Lois was 66 and had been a widow seven years. She still lived in the stone house by the blacktop and still kept a few cows on the creek pasture, and she still sang alto in the choir in a voice you could hear from the parking lot.

I had known her my whole life without ever really knowing her, the way you know the people who sit three pews up.

My wife baked a gooseberry pie, which is the pie you take when you are asking for something large, and on the Sunday after church I drove it over.

Lois met me on the porch in her barn coat and took the pie and looked at me over the top of it.

“This is a gooseberry pie,” she said. “What do you want, Dean Kessler?”

So I told her. The chain, the padlock with our sticker on it, what Clint said about the park and the lawsuit, the geraniums on the gatepost.

I told her Mom had not been up to Dad in nearly a year, and that she had never once missed Veterans Day since 1968. I asked her if I could take Mom up across her stalks, from her side, on the eleventh.

Lois did not answer right away. She set the pie on the porch rail and stood looking up the hill at the cedar for so long that I started to think I had made a mistake coming.

“Did your dad ever tell you about the creek?” she said finally.

“No, ma’am.”

“No, he wouldn’t have.” She pulled her coat tighter. “March of 1979. My husband tried to ford the low-water crossing on our creek road in the pickup after three days of rain, because he was stubborn and he was twenty-five. It took the truck right off the slab and rolled it. Your dad was the next man down that road.”

I had not heard one word of this, ever.

“He went in after him,” Lois said. “In March. Chest deep. He got the door open and got him out by the collar and drug him up the bank, and then he drove him to the hospital in Albany soaking wet with the heater on high and never said another word about it to anybody, so far as I know.”

She looked at me hard. “My husband lived forty more years because of Bernard Kessler.”

She picked the pie back up.

“Bring him all the company you want,” she said. “I’ll take a panel out of my fence right at the corner. You won’t have to touch that man’s ground with so much as a boot heel.”

I drove home with my hands shaking on the wheel. I don’t think I had ever loved my father more than I did on that stretch of blacktop, for a thing he never told me.

That night I called the Legion post in Albany. Dad had been a member forty-four years.

He marched with the color guard in the Fourth of July parade until his knee would not let him, and after that he rode in the back of a pickup and saluted from a lawn chair.

I asked the commander, Merritt, if he thought maybe a dozen of the men would be willing to walk up the hill with Mom on Veterans Day morning.

I said it was a long walk, a mile uphill through stalks, and I understood if most of them could not do it.

He was quiet on the line, and then he asked me to say the part about the chain again, slowly. So I did.

“Let me call around,” he said.

He called back the next evening while I was doing chores. I had to take off a glove to answer.

“Dean,” he said. “We’ve got sixty.”

“Sixty what?”

“Sixty men. Women too, a couple of them. We’ve got the rifle squad. I’m bringing the bugle. Some of them are coming from the post over in Stanberry, and two from King City who served with your dad’s cousin. Every one of them wants a flag in his hand. You tell me what time.”

I sat down on an overturned bucket in the barn and could not talk for a minute.

“Dean? You there?”

“I’m here,” I said. “Nine o’clock. Lois Maupin’s yard, on the blacktop.”

Then I drove to town and told Mom.

She was at her table with the brown coffee cup. I sat down across from her and told her about Lois, and the creek in 1979, and the panel in the fence, and the sixty.