The key fit the lock of the back gate on the first try. I stood at the edge of the driveway at number 9 Pecan Street with the key still in my fist, looking down the narrow side yard to the shed. The blinds in the little white house were pulled down, every one. Somewhere inside a television murmured. The grass behind the shed was knee high and gold in the late sun, swaying in a way the rest of the lawn did not, and I stepped toward it with my heart pounding in my ears.
Before I could take a second step, the back door banged open. A very old woman in a pink housecoat came out onto the stoop, with white hair like cotton and a cane in each hand. She was ninety if she was a day. She said in a high, cracked, furious voice, “You get away from there!” I stopped. I put up both hands. “I am so sorry. I am Peggy Fairley. I am the wife of Buck.” The canes lowered by an inch. She stared at me. “Buck?” she said. “Buckley? Is my boy dead?”
Her name was Odessa Fairley. She was ninety four. She was the mother of my husband. I cannot tell you how those words landed on me. In forty one years of marriage, Buck had told me his mother died of pneumonia in Albany, Georgia, when he was eleven. He said she was buried in a cemetery that had since been plowed over for a Walmart. I had even put flowers on the lot once, on a trip to Albany, on his say so. I sat down on the back step, because my legs would not hold me.
She came and sat beside me. It took her a long time, with the canes. She put one hand on my knee. “He told you I was dead,” she said. It was not a question. “I expect he thought it was the kindest thing.” She looked out at the tall grass. “His daddy drank, you see. And when Buckley was eleven, he came home from school and found his daddy asleep on the kitchen floor. And his little brother, Daniel, in the creek out back. Daniel was six. Drowned. I was at work. I have not forgiven myself in sixty years.”
Grief that cannot be spoken sometimes turns into a lawn that nobody is allowed to cut.
Odessa told me that Buck was sent to live with an aunt in Macon after the funeral, and that he never came back. He wrote to her once, when he was seventeen. He said he could not look at her without seeing the creek. He said he would not be a son to a woman who could not keep a child alive. She wrote to him every month for fifty years. He never answered. But in 2012, when his aunt died and Odessa moved to Macon to be near the only people she knew, Buck found her. He bought this house. He paid a man to mow the front. And he made one rule. Nobody was to touch the back.
“That corner is the creek bank in Albany,” she said. “I brought the dirt in a flower pot when I moved. A handful. And I planted it with the seeds I saved from the garden of Daniel.” She stood up and led me, step by step, to the edge of the tall grass behind the shed. In the middle of it, hidden from the street, was a small, perfect circle of wildflowers, black eyed Susans and little blue asters, bowing in the wind. And a flat white stone no bigger than a loaf of bread, with one word cut into it. Daniel.
I knelt down in the grass. Odessa told me Buck came every Thursday afternoon, when I thought he was at the tire store. He sat on a folding stool by the stone. Sometimes he talked, sometimes he did not, but he always brought one thing. A marble. A baseball card. A small tin car. The stone was ringed with them, dozens, rusted and bright. He never spoke of his brother to a living soul, she said. But he spoke to Daniel every Thursday for fourteen years, and I understood at last why my husband had always seemed to carry a stone in his chest.
She gave me an envelope that Buck had left with her, to be given to me, she said, only if I came on my own. Inside was a short note in his heavy printing. Peg, I am sorry. I should have told you. I could not stand for you to look at me like a man with a dead brother. I wanted you to see the coach. I wanted to be the man you thought I was. Mama will need you. I love you. I read it twice, and I laughed once, out loud, because it was so like him. He would have written a mile of apology and then asked about supper.
I helped Odessa pack that week. She protested. She said she had lived in the little house for fourteen years and did not need the company of a stranger. But she cried when I asked her to come and live with me, and she let me carry the canes. We kept the stone where it was, and the man who had mowed for Buck was told he would never be needed for the back, and he nodded, and he looked relieved. The gravel yard of mine felt wrong with her in it. So the next Saturday, I hired a young man to take out the gravel in front of my own house.
I planted a patch of wildflowers in the front, in the circle where the gravel had been. Odessa sat in a lawn chair and watched. She said she never thought she would see tall grass in front of a house on purpose. I said it was for Daniel. And on Thursday afternoons, we drive to Pecan Street together, the two of us, and we sit on folding stools by the stone, and Odessa talks to the little brother of her son, and I bring a marble.
