My brother-in-law runs the cemetery I mow, and he once took sixty dollars out of my check over a lawn chair. At ten to six on a Saturday he got me on the radio: “There’s biker trash asleep on a grave in the back section. Get him gone or don’t come Monday.” I drove out to do it, and then I saw what was under him.
That job was most of what the divorce left me, and my sister’s husband never let a payday go by without reminding me who signed it.
The motorcycle came first.
A black bagger with a little trailer hitched to it, parked on the gravel fifty feet past the sign Jorge had stenciled himself in March. NO BIKES PAST GATE.
Then the bed.
Pine, painted the yellow of a school bus, low rails on both sides, sitting on the grass between two rows of markers like somebody had moved in overnight.
He was on it.
A big man, sixty or past it, short silver beard and silver hair cut close. A leather vest and nothing under it, which at that hour told me plenty. Old tattoos down both arms to the wrists, gone soft and blue.
His boots stood side by side on the grass. His feet stuck out past the footboard in gray socks.
There were two pillows.
His head was on one. The other had a quilt with a cartoon fox folded on it, and nobody’s head at all.
In nineteen years at Bethel Hill I’d picked up beer cans, balloons, a man who proposed on his mother’s grave, and once a full set of dentures in a coffee can.
Nobody had ever brought a bed.
“Sir, I need you off that,” I said.
He didn’t move. “Give me till seven.”
“This isn’t a campground.”
“No, ma’am.”
“You can’t have a motorcycle back here. You can’t have furniture on a plot.”
“It’s not on the plot,” he said. “Measure it.”
He was right. The rail stopped about two inches shy of the bronze.
PALMER, the marker said, and the years. Twenty-nine. A little motorcycle cast in the corner, the kind the funeral home charges eighty dollars extra for.
Somebody had left a pink plastic hair clip on it, and a spark plug.
I knew that grave.
Last December thirty-some bikes had followed that hearse in, and the ground was soft, and they left ruts the whole length of the lane.
Jorge billed the widow six hundred and forty dollars for the reseeding.
I typed the letter. He signed it.
My radio went off on my belt.
“Is he gone?” Jorge said.
“Working on it.”
“You’ve got five minutes, Mariana. I can see you from the office.”
His eyes came down off the sky and found me.
“Mariana,” he said, like he was putting it somewhere.
“And you are?”
“Alejandro.”
He rolled over to the edge and put his whole weight against the rail. It didn’t give. He rolled back.
“What are you doing?”
“Checking it.”
He looked over at the little walk-in gate with the padlock, then at his watch, then back at the padlock.
“Who’s the bed for?” I said.
“His girl.”
He tipped his head at the marker.
“He was building it in my garage. Had the rails on. Drew the headboard.” He reached back and tapped it. A motorcycle in pencil, the front wheel painted black, the rest just lines. “Then the bridge iced.”
“So you finished it.”
“Most of it. I don’t paint.”
The radio again. “Three minutes.”
I turned the cart key off and back on, which is a thing I do when my hands don’t have a job.
“When she was little,” he said, “he’d lie down in every bed she slept in before she did. Motels. Her grandma’s couch. The tent at the lake. Lie there a minute, then tell her it was SAFE.”
“How old is she?”
“Six. Hasn’t slept in a bed since December. She sleeps on the floor by her mama’s door.”
I didn’t have anything for that.
“Told her mama she’d sleep in this one when her daddy said so.”
He put his hands back on his stomach and looked straight up.
“So I brought it to him first.”
She was supposed to be at that gate at six-thirty.
It was six forty-four.
At six-fifty Jorge’s truck came down the lane, right over the grass he’d charged a widow for.
He got out with his phone already up.
“I told you,” he said, to me, not to him. “I told you exactly what to do.”
“Give him ten minutes, Jorge.”
“Ten minutes is how this starts.” He walked to the foot of the bed and looked down at Alejandro like a stain on a rug. “GET UP. You and your trash.”
Alejandro sat up slow. He put on one boot, then the other, and laced them both.
Then he stood, right between Jorge and that bed, and didn’t say a word.
Jorge’s chin came up. “You know what I do with things people leave on my grass? That bed goes IN THE DUMPSTER. And she gets the bill for hauling it.”
“You’re the one who signs the letters,” Alejandro said.
“I’m the one who runs this place.”
Jorge bent and took hold of the footboard.
That’s when I heard them.
Down on the county road, a long low sound climbing toward us.
Seven motorcycles.
Not one came through the gate. They backed in along the ditch outside the fence, one after another, rear tires to the grass, and shut off, and sat there with their arms folded.
Jorge didn’t let go of the footboard.
Behind the last bike a gray hatchback pulled onto the shoulder, and a young woman in scrubs ran around to the back door.
The girl came out in pajama pants and a sweatshirt, holding a fox pillowcase in both fists.
Her mother pulled on the walk-in gate. The padlock knocked against the bars.
Riley Palmer. I’d typed that name on an envelope.
“Gate opens at eight,” Jorge said, loud enough to carry. “Same as for everybody.”
My keys hung on my belt next to the radio. The little brass one was for that padlock.
Jorge saw my hand go to it.
“Mariana. You open that and you’re finished. I’ll tell Ernestine why.”
Alejandro wasn’t looking at either of us.
The girl had pushed her face between two bars, and her eyes went past the bed and past him, to Jorge’s hand on the footboard.
“Are you the mud man?” she said.
Six fifty-three
Jorge didn’t let go. He looked at her the way he looks at a dandelion.
“I’m the manager, honey.”
“Mama reads your letter at the table,” the girl said. “About the mud. The mud man wants six hundred and forty.”
She said the number like she’d practiced it.
Riley put her palm on the girl’s back. “She heard me on the phone with my mother. More than once.”
So he was the mud man. In that house he’d been the mud man since January, and I was the one who’d folded him into an envelope and licked it.
Jorge let go of the footboard and wiped his palm down his pants. He didn’t look at the girl again. He looked at me.
“Go get the flatbed,” he said. “It’s behind the shed. Keys are on your belt.”
They were. Same ring as the cart, same ring as the brass one.
I took my hand off the ring. That was all I did.
Alejandro hadn’t moved an inch from where he stood.
“Ma’am,” he said to me, not taking his eyes off Jorge. “You know what’s back of that shed.”
I did. The dumpster. The township empties it Thursdays, and the raccoons get it the other six days.
“Flatbed, Mariana,” Jorge said. “We’re going to load it.”
The Monday bag
Ernestine got me this job in 2007. Jorge had been manager four years by then, and she sat across from him at their kitchen table and said her sister could run a mower as well as any man he’d hire, and he signed it with her standing there.
When the divorce came, the job was what I had left that was mine.
He never let me forget the signature. The lawn chair was mine, folded against the back fence one August, and his mower ran it over. He docked me sixty dollars for the blade.
One of my jobs is the Monday bag.
Every Monday at nine I carry the township’s canvas deposit bag up to Viola at the township office. Plot fees, vault fees, the odd check for a memorial bench. Viola won’t take a slip in Jorge’s handwriting because she can’t read it, so I write every line into the book myself, and the yellow carbon stays behind. From Friday to Monday the bag rides under the cart seat, zipped, with the gas receipts.
In January Jorge dictated the Palmer letter from his chair with his feet on the desk.
“Make all payments to J. Chilton, Grounds,” he said at the end.
I asked why not the township.
“Grounds keeps its own account for repairs,” he said. “Viola takes three weeks to cut a check for a gallon of gas.”
I typed it. I typed Riley Palmer on the envelope and put a stamp on it.
In April I reseeded that lane myself. A Tuesday. Two bags of annual rye from the co-op, thirty-one dollars and forty cents, and the girl at the register had a 2019 calendar still up behind her. I stapled the receipt into the book, because Viola wants receipts stapled, and the township paid me back.
It rained that Thursday. The rye came in fine.
Jorge drove out once to look at it and said it was thin.
Now his truck was parked on it, both front tires.
The flatbed
“I’ll take it to the shed,” I said. “Inside. I’ll lock it till eight, and at eight she can see it. Nobody hauls anything.”
It was the best I had.
“Fine,” Jorge said. “Go.”
That was too fast, and I should have heard it.
“No,” Alejandro said.
“It’s a shed,” I said. “It’s dry.”
“She’s not coming to see it, ma’am. She’s coming to get in it.”
“Then she can get in it in the shed,” Jorge said, and he waved me off like I was taking too long with a coffee order.
I took the cart down to the shed, got in the flatbed and brought it around the long way on the gravel. When I backed it up to the bed, Jorge dropped the tailgate himself.
“Good,” he said. “Now grab the other end.”
I’d done his job for him. I’d brought him the truck.
Alejandro sat down on the side rail of the bed. He didn’t say anything. He just sat, like somebody on a porch, and the frame didn’t creak once under him.
At the fence, one of the seven got off her bike. A woman my age, gray braid down the back of her vest, reading glasses on a cord. She came and leaned her arms on the iron.
“Morning, Jorge,” she said.
“Cara. You’re on private property.”
“You still bill by the rut?”
He turned his back on her. He held his phone out at Alejandro with his thumb over it.
“I’m calling the county. Trespass, destruction of grounds, a motor vehicle past posted signage.”
“Call them,” Alejandro said.
Jorge didn’t. He put the phone in his shirt pocket and pointed at the gate instead.
“And she doesn’t come in at eight either. That account isn’t current. Nobody visits on an open balance.”
Riley’s hands came off the bars.
“I paid every dime of that, Mr. Chilton.”
Eight money orders
“Eighty a month,” Riley said. “Money orders from the post office. January through August. Made out how the letter said.”
She said it fast, like she’d said it in the car to herself.
“I put them in your door slot. In the envelope you sent, the first one. Then in plain envelopes. I wrote the plot number on every one.”
“Grounds is behind,” Jorge said. “I’ll look Monday.”
“You don’t have to look. I’ve got the stubs. Eight of them. They’re in my glove box.”
Jorge turned to me like none of that had been said.
“Flatbed, Mariana. Plus the hauling. Plus a Saturday callout, that’s time and a half.”
“You want her to pay time and a half,” Cara said from the fence, “for you to throw out her kid’s bed.”
“I want people to stay off my grass.”
The girl had taken her face out of the bars. She was holding the fox pillowcase up under her chin.
“Is it still yellow?” she said to Alejandro.
“Still yellow.”
“Did he say yet?”
“Not yet,” he said. “He’s waiting on you.”
Jorge breathed through his nose.
Eight Mondays at least, if she’d paid like she said. Eight envelopes with a plot number on them, through a slot in an office door I walk past every morning. I’d written that name one time, on an envelope. I didn’t remember writing it again.
Two more riders got off their bikes and came to stand by Cara. They didn’t touch the fence. One of them took his sunglasses off and folded them into his vest.
“Mariana,” Jorge said. “I’m not asking.”
I walked away from the flatbed. Back up the row, to the cart.
“Where are you going?”
I got there and stood at the side of it. My hands didn’t have a job, so I gave them one.
I lifted the seat.
Yellow carbons
The bag was where it always is, under the seat on top of the gas receipts.
I unzipped it and took out the book.
“Close that,” Jorge said.
I opened it on the hood of the cart and started in January. My own writing, every Monday. A vault fee. Two plots in the new section. A bench check from a family with the name of a bank on it. February the same. March.
Nothing that said Palmer. No plot number from the back section. No eighty dollars, not once.
April. Rye seed, two bags, co-op, thirty-one forty. The staple had gone a little rusty from riding under the seat.
Alejandro came up behind me. He didn’t get close. He reached into his vest and held out a piece of paper folded in quarters, soft at the creases.
“She keeps it in the glove box with the stubs,” he said. “I asked to borrow it.”
I unfolded it. My typing. The township letterhead, the six hundred and forty, Jorge’s signature in his blue felt pen.
Make all payments to J. Chilton, Grounds.
Jorge was coming up the row now.
“That’s township property, Mariana. That book doesn’t leave the bag.”
“I know,” I said. “I carry it.”
“Grounds is a separate account.”
“At what bank?”
He stopped about six feet off. “You want to do this in front of them?”
I held up the April page so he could see the staple.
“The township paid thirty-one forty for that lane. I stapled the receipt myself.”
The brass key
Jorge talked. I let him.
“You know what they pay me? Do you know? Forty-one thousand to run a hundred and twelve acres for the township. Saturdays I don’t get paid. Christmas I don’t get paid. Every time one of these bike funerals comes through, who gets the call when the lane’s tore up? Me.”
“I reseeded it,” I said.
“With my shed. With my cart. On my clock.” He was pointing at his own chest. “That money’s for my time. Every family with ruts in that lane pays the same. The family with the twins paid. The son of the man with the Harley urn paid. Nobody cried about it till now.”
At the fence Cara said, “Nobody knew about it till now.”
He didn’t look at her.
I took the brass key off the ring. It’s small, and it took two tries with my thumbnail.
“Mariana.”
I walked down to the gate, and the girl backed up a step and Riley caught her.
“You open that, you’re done here. Today. And you call Ernestine and you explain to her why her husband’s out of a job because her sister took the side of a bunch of trash against family. You explain who’s going to pay for her car. Go on. You tell her.”
The padlock was cold. I opened it and pulled the chain through the bars and held the gate.
Riley came in first. The girl didn’t. She stood in the gateway holding the pillowcase and looked at Jorge for a while, and then she walked past him without slowing down, out onto the grass to the bed.
She stopped at the rail.
“Did he say?” she said.
Alejandro went over and stood by the footboard. He looked at the marker, at the hair clip and the spark plug.
“Ask him,” he said.
She looked at the bronze for a while. Then she climbed in over the rail, pushed the fox quilt to the side and put her head on the pillow with the fox pillowcase still in her fists. Her feet came about halfway down. Riley put her hand over her mouth and sat in the grass.
Jorge had his phone out again. “I’m calling the county.”
“Tell them about the money orders,” Cara said.
He looked at the phone a long time. Then he put it back in his pocket and held his hand out to me, palm up.
“Keys. Radio. Bag.”
I gave him the ring. I unclipped the radio and gave him that. I kept the book under my arm and the bag zipped in my other hand.
“That bag goes to Viola Monday,” I said. “Same as always.”
“That bag’s not yours anymore.”
“Then take it to her.”
He didn’t reach for it. Seven riders and a woman in scrubs, and he didn’t reach for it.
He walked back to his truck and got in and slammed it, and backed out over the rye.
The girl had her eyes shut. She didn’t open them.
“Bye, mud man,” she said.
Ten to six
Three Saturdays later I woke at ten to six for a radio that wasn’t on my nightstand.
I’d taken the bag to Viola that Monday at nine, same as always, plus the book with Riley’s eight stubs in a rubber band. Viola put Jorge on leave by Wednesday. She put me on leave too, until the board sorts out who typed what. The board meets in November.
Ernestine hasn’t called. She’s still in my phone as Ernie.
Riley works six to two on Saturdays at the nursing home out on the county road, so I sit with the girl. Twenty dollars and the coffee in her pot, which is terrible.
I let myself in with the key under the frog. A township check for six hundred and forty dollars was on the fridge under a pizza magnet, Viola’s signature on it, not cashed yet.
The bed was against the girl’s bedroom wall, rails and all, the fox quilt half on the floor. Two pillows.
She was awake. Sitting up, with the headboard right in front of her.
The pencil motorcycle had both wheels now. The back one was black too, thick and lumpy, and over the lines on the bottom.
“I did the back one,” she said.
“He told me he doesn’t paint,” I said.
“I know. So I did.”
She scooted over to the far pillow, the one with the fox case on it, and patted the empty one.
“You have to check it,” she said.
If this one stayed with you, pass it to somebody who’s ever typed a letter they wish they hadn’t.
For more stories about family bonds tested in unexpected ways, read the biker who took the shelves my late husband built and the girl who spoke a name no one had heard in decades. And when family crosses a line, there’s the vest my granddaughter cut open.
