Somebody was already waiting at the grave, as I told you. It was a very old woman in a wheelchair, parked on the path below the stone, with a plaid blanket over her knees and a thin man of seventy standing behind her with his hands on the handles. She had white hair and a face like a dried apple, and she held a single white rose in both hands. When I came up the slope with my dozen roses and the envelope in my pocket, she turned her head and looked at me with a calm, ancient gaze. “You must be Elmer,” she said. “I am Hannah Weller. I am the mother of Thomas.”
I stopped as if I had walked into a wall. I had not known she was alive. I thought she must have died long ago, in the grief of that summer. She was ninety four. The man beside her, Samuel, was the younger brother, who had been eleven the night of the fire. They had come every Monday for fifty seven years, they said, and for the last twenty three they had found white roses on the stone already. Delivered, always, by a florist from Lititz. They never knew who sent them. “Until last week,” Samuel said. “The lady at the shop told us your wife had passed.”
Hannah held out her hand for the envelope. I gave it to her, because I could not open it myself. She took her glasses from her pocket and slit the flap with her thumbnail, an old steady thumbnail, and she read the letter slowly, her lips moving. When she finished, she handed it to Samuel to read aloud. He did, in a shaking voice. It was in the round, careful hand of my wife, the hand that wrote two hundred labels for peach jars every August.
Dear Elmer, if Hannah Weller is reading this over your shoulder, then I thank God, because I have been too much of a coward to do it myself. On the night of August 9, 1968, I was eighteen years old and I was in the barn of the Weller family with Thomas. We were supposed to be milking. He had asked me to meet him in the hayloft because he wished to give me a ring made of braided straw, and a lantern was hanging above us on a nail. I knocked it with my elbow. It fell into the hay.
A girl of sixteen can carry a spark for fifty years, and the only fire that ever burned worse was the one she could not tell her husband about.
Samuel read on. Thomas pulled me down the ladder. We were safe on the ground. The fire was spreading faster than anyone could imagine, in the dry August hay. Then we heard the dog, a collie named Duke, barking in the loft. Thomas went back for him. He told me to run to the house and call for help. I ran. By the time the men came with buckets, the roof was falling in. He did not come out. I never said that the lantern was mine. The county decided it was lightning. I let them.
Hannah closed her eyes. She sat so still that I thought she had gone to sleep. Then she said, “Samuel, give me my rose.” He did. She leaned forward in the chair and laid it on the stone, on top of the others, with a hand that shook. “Elmer,” she said. “I have known for fifty seven years. I saw her face at the funeral. She stood in the back, white as chalk, in her Mennonite cap. I knew right then. I never said a word to her because I saw that the girl was already punishing herself more than I ever could.”
I could not speak. Hannah went on. She said that a few weeks after the funeral she found a tin box in the road beside the barn ruins, with a small braided straw ring inside. Thomas must have dropped it. She understood everything. She put the ring in the pocket of her apron and decided that her son had gone back into a burning barn for a dog because that was who he was, and that a young girl was not to blame for the character of a boy. She said, “I forgave her that night. I just never found the right time to say so.”
The letter ended with a few more lines. Elmer, forgive me for letting you marry a woman with a stone in her heart. I loved you more than I knew how to say. I hope the roses were enough. I think they were not, but they were what I had. The voice of Samuel broke here, and he stopped, and he gave me the paper.
Hannah reached into her cardigan and took out a small tin box, rusted at the corners. She had carried it for fifty seven years, she said, waiting for the right person. Inside was the straw ring, brittle and brown, a loop of braided wheat no bigger than a young finger. She held it out to me. “It belongs to Bernice,” she said. “It always did. Put it on her stone.” My hands were shaking so badly I had to use both.
We buried the ring that afternoon, in the cemetery of the Mennonite church in Ephrata, at the foot of the stone of my wife. Hannah and Samuel came, and our children, and the florist from Lititz, who cried openly in her good coat. I laid the dozen white roses across both graves. And every Monday since, a van pulls up at Greenmount, and a woman gets out with two bunches, one for Thomas and one for Bernice. Hannah and I pay for them, half and half. It is only a gift between two old families who finally understand each other.
