He set the cap down on the table, stood up out of his chair, and looked his brother dead in the eye. Then Dennis said, “Marlon, did you go up to the grave this morning?”
Marlon said of course he did, we all did.
Dennis said, “Then you saw the marker. Who do you think made it?”
There is no headstone on our father’s grave and there is not going to be one. There is a wrought-iron cross, five feet of it, with a scrolled top and the leaves worked into the arms, set into a concrete footing that Dennis poured on a Tuesday in a hard rain.
Half that room had already said something to somebody about how beautiful it was. Two of the cousins had asked which monument company.
Daddy asked him in March. That is the part none of us knew, and I want to be careful how I say it, because my brother did not say it to win anything.
He said Daddy called him out to the porch, the porch frame Dennis rebuilt in 2009, and asked him plain whether he could make a cross like the ones in the old Bohemian section of the cemetery, the ones the smiths made for each other before the war. He said Daddy told him he did not want a stone that a stranger cut out of a slab in Missouri.
Then Daddy gave him a paper bag with four hundred dollars in it for the iron, and Dennis took it because he understood that refusing it would have hurt the old man.
The receipt from the steel supply is in that bag still, folded, with Daddy’s handwriting on the outside.
Denny — the boys will all say something nice at my funeral. You are the one who is going to be standing out there in February setting it in the ground. That is why I asked you and not them. Do not tell anybody until you have to.
He read it once, at the table, in his flat railyard voice, and then he put it in his shirt pocket.
Then he said the only hard thing. He said, “Twenty-three years I have been the muscle at every one of these and I never once minded. But you stood up at his lunch and made a joke out of the fence I welded, and Daddy is lying under the only thing in this family I have ever been asked to sign my name to.”
Because he does sign them. There is a mark he stamps into everything, a D over a bar, on the underside of Mama’s steps and inside the porch rail and low on the back of that cross where you would have to kneel in the grass to find it.
The room did not stay quiet long. Our mother got up and went around the table and put her hands on Dennis’s face, which is a thing I had not seen her do since he was a boy.
Marlon walked out to his car. He came back in about twenty minutes later with his eyes red and he did not make a speech, he just sat down next to his brother and stayed there the rest of the afternoon.
He goes out to the cemetery with Dennis every spring now. They take a wire brush and a can of paint and they do the whole cross in an afternoon.
And I quit letting it ride. Twenty-three years I sat there for it, and my father, who noticed everything, noticed that too.