He looked at the hill, and for a second something moved in his face. Then it closed again. “Then he’s on my ground,” he said, and he turned around and walked back across the road.
I stood at the gate a long time. A meadowlark was going somewhere off in the hay. The chain was warm when I put my hand on it, and it did not give at all.
When I got back in the car, Mom had the coffee can of geraniums in her lap. She had both hands around it like it might get away from her.
She did not cry. My mother did not cry in front of people, and I counted as people.
“He won’t open it,” I said.
“I heard.” She looked straight out the windshield at the hill. “I haven’t missed a Veterans Day with your father since the day he came home in 1968, Dean. Not one. Not even the year I had my gallbladder out.”
“I know, Mom.”
“I missed this one.” She meant Memorial Day. She meant that morning. Then she said, very quietly, “I’d like to go home now.”
We left the geraniums on the end post of the gate. I wedged the coffee can in between the post and the hinge so the wind would not take it.
When I looked back in the mirror at the bottom of the road, it was the only red thing on that whole hill.
I should tell you how a family loses a hill.
Dad died in March of 2021, of his heart, in the recliner by the south window with the farm report on. He was 75.
He had been drafted in 1966, went over in 1967, and came home in 1968 with a bad knee, a Bronze Star he would not discuss, and a habit of standing up every time the flag went by on television.
He farmed the home quarter all his life. He also gave me the eighty acres across the road when I married, with the little white house on it, and I have farmed that eighty on evenings and Saturdays ever since.
The hardware store pays the light bill. The eighty pays for itself, most years.
After Dad was gone, Mom stayed out on the place two more winters by herself. Then she fell on the back step carrying in the mail and lay there forty minutes before I found her.
Nothing broke, thank God, but something in her made up its mind. In the fall of 2023 she moved into a senior apartment in Albany, two blocks from the square.
The home quarter had a note against it from a bad stretch in the eighties that Dad never quite got out from under, and Mom’s apartment was not free, and her medicine was not free either.
I am an only child, a hardware clerk with a mortgage on a used planter. I sat at her kitchen table with a pencil for three nights trying to make it come out so I could buy it, and it never came out.
So we sold it at auction in February. The auctioneer read off the legal description, and somewhere in it was the old line about the family burying ground excepted.
