The Last Ballad(8)

Ella and John had buried Willie ten miles east, in Ranlo, because they’d been living there and working at the Rex Spinning Company when he died. They’d buried him in the municipal cemetery because they had not belonged to a church and no church had offered a piece of earth in which to place the tiny pine coffin.

It had been five years since Willie’s death, but Ella still traveled to the cemetery at least once a month on her Sundays off. She and John had not been able to afford a tombstone, so John had chiseled the letter W on a field rock and placed it at the head of the grave. Ella had maintained it since, sweeping it clean, dressing it with what she could find, what she could afford.

That fall she had set aside what little money she could in the hopes of buying one of the felt poinsettias she’d seen in the window at Falls Hardware in downtown Bessemer City. She finally purchased one before her shift on a Saturday afternoon, three days before Christmas. The next morning she walked and hitched to Ranlo with the felt flower wrapped in tissue paper and a shiny new baseball in her coat pocket. Willie had died too young for Ella to know for certain whether he loved baseball, but his older brother Otis loved it more than anything on earth, so Ella figured that Willie would’ve loved it too. She’d done everything she could to keep Otis from finding the baseball after she’d bought it, went so far as to wrap it in oilcloth and hide it up under the cabin’s eaves, where she prayed it wouldn’t get wet or loose itself and fall to the ground.

The Sunday she’d visited the cemetery had been unseasonably warm, and she’d removed John’s old jacket and left it on a bench while she picked weeds and used her hands to sweep the field rock. After that she spent close to an hour arranging and rearranging the poinsettia and the baseball on a cleared patch of dirt in front of the rock. She’d brought along a small glass jar to house the flower, but the jar just seemed to swallow it instead, and so she decided to curl the poinsettia’s metal stem around the baseball to keep it from rolling away, the felt flower peeking out above the white leather like a red burst of sun.

The weather had changed by the time she returned to the cemetery a few weeks later in January. The sky had spit snow all night long but had stopped near dawn, and only an inch or so remained when Ella arrived in Ranlo. Her footprints were the first set of tracks in the cemetery, and she looked forward to seeing the red flare of felt against the snow-covered ground. But when she arrived at Willie’s graveside she found that the poinsettia and the baseball were gone. She stood there for a moment, staring down at the hump on the ground where the field rock lay covered in snow. She looked around at the other graves, searching each one for a flash of red, for a glimmer of the baseball’s bright white leather. She turned and saw the tracks she’d left on her way in, retraced them in her mind, came to terms with the fact that the snow had not caused her to lose her way. Although Ella knew that it was Willie’s grave that she stood before, that did not stop her from kneeling and brushing the snow away and using her finger to trace the chiseled W in the cold stone. She ran her hands through the snowy grass, hoping to find what she knew for certain was not there.

She stood, turned around, walked beside the footprints she’d just made. The caretaker’s tiny shack sat by the cemetery’s entrance, a thin wisp of smoke slipping from its chimney. She knocked on the door and waited, listened for a moment, knocked again. Inside there was the crash of something metal falling to the floor. The sound was followed by mumbled words of frustration that Ella wasn’t able to discern.

The door swung open, revealed an old man in spectacles and long underwear. He squinted into the sunlight and buttoned a denim coat over his chest, did his best to part his thin, white hair with his long, crooked fingers.

“Yes, ma’am?” he said.

Ella looked at the old man, and then she turned and looked back in the direction of Willie’s grave, hoping again that she had made some kind of mistake, that the poinsettia and the baseball hid somewhere out there in the snow, waiting for her to find them. The man straightened his spectacles, folded his arms across his chest, and tucked his hands under his armpits to keep them warm.

“My son’s grave’s been robbed,” she said.

“Ma’am?” His eyes went wide, the blue pupils smoky with cataract.

“Somebody stole things off his grave,” she said. “I need to know what happened to them.”

The old man turned his head so that his right ear was closer to Ella. She realized that he could not hear well, and she repeated what she’d just said.

“Oh,” he said. “Scared me. I thought you meant his grave was dug up.” He smiled as if the fact that such a ghastly violation had not occurred should serve as the end of the matter.

“A felt poinsettia,” Ella said. “And a baseball. They’ve been stolen.”

“I clear all the graves after the New Year, ma’am,” he said. “Always have.” He sniffed, scratched at the side of his nose.

“But they cost me a lot of money,” Ella said.

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” he said. “That’s the rules.”

“Nobody told me the rules.”

“Well, I’m sorry, but that’s the rules.”

“What did you do with them?”

“The rules?”

“No,” Ella said. “My son’s things. What did you do with them?”