The cemetery of Pikeville Freewill Baptist sat on a hill behind the church, with a white fence around it and a view of a river valley turning gold. Brother Caudill met me at the gate in a black suit gone green with age. He was eighty one, bent like a question mark, and he carried a cane with a silver handle. He took my hand in both of his. He said, “Mrs. Seward, I have prayed for this day for thirty years.” Then he led me, slowly, between the rows of old stones to a small gray marker under a dogwood.
It was a child grave. The stone was modest, polished granite no bigger than a bread box. The front said, Jimmy Mullins, 1966 to 1974, Beloved Son. There were fresh flowers in a mason jar, and a small metal truck set carefully on the grass. My knees went weak. Brother Caudill steadied me by the elbow. I said, “Who is Jimmy Mullins?” He said, “Madam, I think you should go around to the back of the stone.” I walked around the dogwood. I bent down and read what my husband had paid to have carved there.
It said, I am sorry. I will come every year. Earl Seward. I put my hand on my mouth. Around the words, someone had tucked the small flat stones that mourners in Kentucky leave on a grave, dozens of them, smooth from a creek. Brother Caudill told me that Earl himself had put each one there, one every April, and that the family of Jimmy had never moved them. It took him some time to say the next part. He stood with his cane and looked out over the valley and said, “Earl drove the bus that struck him.”
A man can carry a grief for fifty years in silence, but a wife who finds it will carry the other half of it to the grave.
I sat down on the ground, right there in my good coat. He told it very gently. In 1974, when Earl was twenty two, a rookie driver on a long charter route through eastern Kentucky, a boy of eight ran out from behind a parked coal truck on a mountain road in the rain. Earl braked. He could not stop. The investigation cleared him in a day, and said no one could have avoided the child. But Earl never forgave himself. He came back to Pikeville to attend the funeral, and Brother Caudill was the young pastor who spoke at it.
“He sat in the back pew,” the old man said. “When the family filed out, he fell on his knees in the aisle. The mother of Jimmy, Nora, stopped. She put her hand on his head. She said, Son, it was not your fault. God does not hold you responsible. And you must not either.” She was the one who told him to come back. She said that when a man carries a thing like that, he needs a place to set it down once a year. She said the grave was a good place. So he came. For forty nine years, he came.
I thought of Earl and his fishing trips with a brother who had been dead since 1999. I thought of the way he went quiet every April and stood at the kitchen window. I had thought it was his old back, or the weather. I had thought it was nothing. I asked Brother Caudill why he never told me. He said Earl asked him not to, because he did not want me to see him as a man who killed a child. “He thought you would stop looking at him the way you did,” he said. “Like he was the best man alive.”
I stayed at the grave until dusk. Brother Caudill left me alone with a lantern, and a thermos of coffee from the parsonage. I read the words on the stone again. I found a flat stone of my own by the fence, smooth and cold, and I laid it on the pile with the others. And I said aloud, as if he could hear, “Earl, you foolish man. You could have told me. I would have come with you.” The wind moved in the dogwood. I felt my husband in the quiet, as one feels a warm hand in a dark room.
The next morning, Brother Caudill walked me to a small yellow house at the bottom of the hill. An old woman sat on the porch in a rocking chair with a quilt over her lap. Nora Mullins, ninety three, with eyes the color of creek water. Brother Caudill introduced me. I said that I was the wife of Earl. She said, “I know who you are, honey. He sent a Christmas card every year. Come up here and sit by me.” I climbed the steps. She took my hand in hers, which was soft and dry as paper.
She said, “He was a good boy. He was just a boy himself.” I could not answer. She said, “Every April he brought me a box of peppermints. We never talked about it. We just sat here. He was the nearest thing to a son I had left.” She turned to look at me with a clear, kind gaze. “Now you are here. I have prayed for it. Will you come and sit with me next April?” I said I would. I said I would come every year. She nodded as if this was the only answer she had expected.
I went home to Columbus a different woman. I told my daughter the whole story at the kitchen table, and she wept, and then she said she wanted to come with me in April. We have been twice since. We bring peppermints. We sit on the porch with Nora, who is ninety five now, and we do not say much. On the way out, I pass the dogwood, and I lay a stone on the grave of Jimmy. Then I go around to the back, and beside the words of my husband, I add my own small stone, flat and gray, in the same place.