Carrow Cemetery sits on a little rise a mile north of town, with a line of old cedars along the west fence.
The front part is the part everybody knows. The good granite. The family names. The flagpole the Legion put up. But behind the last row of stones there’s a strip of plain, mown grass. About an acre. It runs all the way back to the corner where the fence meets a cornfield.
My mother was in the far northwest corner of it.
Her car was parked on the lane with the trunk wide open. The red wagon sat in the grass next to her with the four stones still in it.
She wasn’t on her knees. She was sitting flat on the ground with her legs straight out in front of her, like a little girl in a sandbox. Next to her was a square hole where she’d cut out a piece of sod.
I ran the last part.
“Are you hurt?”
“No. I’m waiting.”
“Waiting for what?”
“For my knees to decide.” She said it like she was talking about the weather. “It’s been about twenty minutes. They’re coming around.”
I got her up. I walked her to the car and sat her on the edge of the open trunk. And then I said everything, with the wind blowing across the corn stubble.
“You are going to hurt yourself out here, and nobody will find you until dark. You are seventy-nine years old. You have one hole dug. There are sixty-one. At one a day, you’d be done at Christmas. Mr. Stroud closes on the fourteenth of November, and he wants his rock down before the ground freezes. You cannot win this with a trowel.”
“I know what the arithmetic is.”
“Then call somebody. Call the state. There have to be laws about this.”
“I called Lincoln in August, when Dick first floated the idea.” She brushed some grass off her coat. “A very nice young man told me to put a request in writing, and they might get somebody out here to look in the spring.”
She looked at me.
“Spring is after November.”
“Then get a lawyer.”
“With what, Beth Ann? And to say what? The dead are not a legal question.”
“Then what are they?”
“They’re a question of whether anybody remembers.”
I was angry enough by then to say the next thing.
“You have a book. I saw it on the step this morning. Why didn’t you just show it to somebody before it ever came to a vote?”
“I did.”
That stopped me cold.
“I took it to the county clerk in August. She was very polite. She said the county’s register burned in thirty-four, and she couldn’t enter a handwritten copy of a book nobody can produce. Then I took it to the newspaper. They said they couldn’t print sixty-one graves on the strength of a notebook.”
She looked down at her hands.
“A notebook is not a record. Two very nice people told me so before Dick ever opened his mouth.”
Adrian Hawthorne is a celebrated author and dedicated archivist who finds inspiration in the hidden stories of the past. Educated at Oxford, he now works at the National Archives, where preserving history fuels his evocative writing. Balancing archival precision with creative storytelling, Adrian founded the Hawthorne Institute of Literary Arts to mentor emerging writers and honor the timeless art of narrative.