The snowy shroud lay heavily on the ground and stones. It resisted our encroachment. Snow permeated our shoes, saturated our socks, and burned our feet. I didn’t own winter boots, but Linda – Linda was only 20 miles from the home of her youth. Linda knew better. Five months after her birth, seventeen snowy inches blanketed this same ground, but even that storm was slight compared to the 30 inches she watched fall last March. Linda had boots to wear, but didn’t.
We’ll never find it in this snow. Should I call Aunt Grace? Linda asked. She’ll know where it is. Linda took off her gloves, tucked them under her left arm, and began scrolling through her phone.
Laughing, her husband Paul brushed snow off a marker.
Aunt Grace will know.
It’s in the back to the right, I said, but Linda was already holding the phone close to her mouth, her frozen breath lingered like a ghost.
Paul continued clearing snow.
Linda put away the phone and blew on her fingers before putting on her gloves.
Aunt Grace said to the left on the edge in the middle, and she wants a picture.
Of course she does. Paul laughed again. After a dozen years of marriage to Linda, he knew our family. Just as he knew that his wife would forget her boots, he knew that Aunt Grace would want a picture. Now, he tromped left through the snow. He wore boots.
Linda laughed too. Aunt Grace always knows.
She tried to step in Paul’s tracks, but his stride was too long. Our diminutive height – and Aunt Grace’s too – came from Nellie Prentice, our grandmother’s mother.
This time though, Aunt Grace didn’t know.
It’s in the back to the right. I repeated.
After clearing snow from two dozen markers, they returned – Linda still attempting to match Paul’s strides with her Prentice legs.
It’s in the back to the right. I insisted. Maybe 50 feet in from the back and side boundaries. It had been nearly 30 years, but I remembered in the back and to the right.
My grandmother didn’t have much time for much, and certainly not for story telling. For years she took the bus and subway from a crowded house in Queens to an office in Manhattan. From the exterior, the house seemed roomy, but on the inside were four, then five children, a blind father-in-law, later a daughter-in-law, and even later a granddaughter. Sometimes room was made for her sister-in-law Sarah, after her discharges from Bellevue (Aunt Grace remembers waiting on the lawn watching patients pound on windows while my grandparents visited Aunt Sarah.). Aunt Grace and my mother shared a bed.
Forty years later, when I was nine, my grandparents moved to Sunset Drive in Norwich, New York. For two weeks every summer, Grandma and I played rummy and Scrabble. One day, my grandfather drove us thirty minutes to Edmeston and stopped at a cemetery. Grandpa’s parents were there. One stone was for his mother; one stone was for his father – the one who had lived with them in Queens. There was a smaller stone too. It was nestled close to the earth and read:
William Peck
Dec 9 1941
Apr 10 1942
The cemetery was at the foot of a hill.
It used to be called Peck’s Hill, Grandpa told me. That house is where the farmhouse was.
My grandparents lived there until shortly before my mother’s birth in 1945.
Grandpa and my mother trimmed the grass and pulled up weeds around the headstones. They moved to the Cady plot. Grandpa’s mother had been a Cady. They tidied Brian Cady’s headstone. His parents buried him after he was killed in Vietnam, 1968.
I stayed with Grandma.
William was her second child. He was born in December 1941. He caught pneumonia. He died in April 1942. There are no pictures of him.
I used to stand on the hill, Grandma told me, and look down here. I remember thinking that he must be cold. I wished he had a blanket.
Paul’s voice interrupted my memory
Here it is. I found it.
It was in the back to the right.
We brushed off the markers for our great grandparents, for our grandparents, and for Aunt Sarah. I felt under the snow for a tiny stone and cleared it. I put the first of the flowers I had brought on William’s marker. The yellow daffodil glowed vibrant against the snow and weathered headstone.
Before we left, I looked up the hill. Nearly eighty years later, the grief of a young woman with a toddler, a baby on the way, and a baby sleeping in the cold at the foot of the hill was still a palpable sadness hanging in the space between.
I took a daffodil from Grandma’s headstone and placed it on William’s stone.
Sit tibi terra levis. I whispered. May the earth be light upon you.
Beautiful, moving, touching, not a word too few or too many.