The boss of the cemetery, a stooped man in a gray cardigan named Mr. Halloran, sat down hard in the chair behind the desk and looked at me over the clause for a long time. “Mrs. Sorensen,” he said at last, “do you know who actually owns this cemetery?” I said that I supposed the board did, or the church. He shook his head, gently. “According to this page, you do. Or rather, you and the heirs of Arne do. If I am reading it right, and I would like my attorney to confirm it, the title to the original thirty acres of Lakeview reverts to your family.”
I did not understand a word of it. He walked me through the page slowly, with his finger under each line, and I began to see. The land for the cemetery had been given to the church in 1903 by the grandfather of my husband, Anders Sorensen, a Norwegian immigrant who had cleared it with a horse and a plow. His gift carried one condition, typed on a second page and recorded at the courthouse in Duluth. If any plot sold in perpetuity to a Sorensen or his heirs were ever resold to another family, the whole of the original land was to return to the Sorensens.
The founder of the cemetery, who signed the receipt that Arne tucked in his tackle box in 1979, had assigned me that right in writing, to be kept with the deed. I had signed the paper myself, in a car lot, with a ballpoint pen from the glove box. I had completely forgotten. Mr. Halloran took off his glasses, rubbed his eyes, and laughed, a short, helpless laugh. “Forty five years,” he said. “Forty five years, and I have been the manager for nine of them, and nobody in this office ever read the second page.”
There is no clause so small that it cannot outlast the man who wrote it and the people who forgot to read it.
His attorney arrived the following afternoon, a precise woman named Ms. Kowalczyk who carried an old leather satchel. She read the second page, then the deed, then the recorded gift of 1903, then the second page again. She asked to be left alone with the documents for an hour. When she came out, she asked if she could speak with me privately in the office of Mr. Halloran. She sat beside me and folded her hands. “Mrs. Sorensen,” she said, “I will be direct. I believe your claim is valid. The question is what you want to do with it.”
I looked out the window at the rows of gray stones going down the long hill toward the lake. I thought about Arne under that sod, and the thermos of coffee that I carried every Sunday, and the news I told him. I thought about the other family, whoever they were, who had bought a plot on a cheerful afternoon in August and were going to bury their own person in the place I had saved for myself. “I do not want the cemetery,” I said. “I am eighty years old. What would I do with thirty acres of dead people?”
Ms. Kowalczyk smiled for the first time. “Then let us talk about what you do want.” I told her, and it was very simple. I wanted my plot back, beside my husband, exactly where it had always been. I wanted the other family to be treated with respect, whoever they were, and I wanted them moved to equally good ground, at the expense of the cemetery, with a letter of apology. And I wanted somebody, someday, to make sure that no widow in Duluth would ever again be handed a check for eleven hundred dollars and told that was the best they could do.
The family who had bought my plot turned out to be the Nguyens, a young couple whose newborn daughter had died the previous month. They came to the cemetery with their parents and sat in the office of Mr. Halloran while he explained the mistake, and he wept as he did it. I wanted to sink through the floor. But Mrs. Nguyen took my hand across the desk and said in careful English, “Please. Do not be sorry. We only want our daughter to rest near the trees.” I told her I knew of a lovely spot under a maple, with a view of the lake.
We walked up there together in the cold wind, the two of us, with the whole procession of men in dark coats behind us. It was the best plot in the cemetery, a rise of ground with a flat stone bench someone had set there decades ago. The Nguyens stood in the snow and said nothing for a time. Then Mr. Nguyen bent down and put a handful of earth into his palm and nodded. The cemetery paid for everything, the stone, the sod, the clergyman, and a little brass plaque on the bench that read, simply, REST HERE.
The board met in January and passed three resolutions. Every plot sold in perpetuity would be recorded on a single printed map, signed and kept in a vault. No plot would ever again be resold without a notice to the family, by registered mail, and a waiting period of two years. And the cemetery would establish an endowment, in the name of Arne and Edna Sorensen, to pay for the care of graves whose families could no longer afford it. I was asked to cut the ribbon. I brought a thermos of coffee, and I poured the first cup for the empty chair.
This past Sunday I sat on the grass beside my husband with a blanket over my knees and told him all of it from the beginning. The wind came off the lake. A chickadee landed on the stone and cocked its head at me. “Arne,” I said, “you were right about the tackle box. Nobody ever looks in a fishing box.” And I swear on the Book that the wind turned, just for a moment, and carried to me the smell of cold water, pipe tobacco, and bait, which was exactly the way my husband smelled in 1979.
