Residents filled every seat as I opened the chamber doors and walked inside, and a woman I have walked to her husband’s grave forty times stood up out of the second row, and then the whole row stood up with her.
I did not put that meeting on the calendar. The council did, because eleven people had called about it in three days.
What broke it open was a state law almost nobody thinks about.
In Georgia a scrap yard cannot buy metal off a man without writing down his name, his driver’s license, his tag number, and what he brought in, and the yards send those records to the sheriff. Bronze vases go for scrap. That’s the whole reason they disappear off graves, and it is why I have hauled the loose ones into the shop every October since 2009 and logged them on a clipboard in the tool room.
A detective named Yvette Speight pulled ninety days of scrap tickets from four yards in Bibb County. It took her an afternoon.
Nine cemetery vases, two of them with our lot numbers still cast in the base, sold across three yards over six weeks. Same name on every ticket. Same truck.
It was a man off the mowing crew the new superintendent had brought in when he cut the grounds contract over to an outside outfit in the spring.
That’s the part that got said out loud at the microphone by a councilman and not by me. The superintendent had been in that office four months. He had cut the crew, cut the hours, and handed keys to men nobody vetted, and when a vase went missing he looked around for the oldest face in the building.
They read my clipboard into the record. Sixteen years of it. Every vase I ever pulled off a grave for the winter, whose lot it came from, and the date I put it back in the spring.
Then Mrs. Alberta Speer, who is ninety-one, got up with a paper in her hand and asked to read something, and the mayor let her.
It was a note I wrote her in 2011 and forgot about entirely, on the back of a lot card, because I had found her husband’s marker sunk crooked after a wet March and set it and cleaned it before she came out on his birthday.
Mrs. Speer — I straightened Curtis and washed him off. He looks fine now. You don’t have to see him like that. No charge and no need to mention it.
She said she had kept it in her Bible for fourteen years and she’d like the city to hear what kind of man they’d called a suspect.
I had to stand there and take it, which was harder than the accusation.
The council voted that night to bring the grounds crew back in house. The superintendent apologized to me in the hallway afterward, and then, when I asked, again the next morning at the shop where the crew could hear it.
They gave me my keys and my flashlight and eleven days of pay.
Gates open at six-thirty. Same as they have since 1997.