Saving Graces - Elizabeth Edwards [50]
Chuck Gooch, the foreman, Wink, and the Montenard workers at the cemetery became part of our family. We would see them as we read and as we carried water for the flowers we planted. They would know we had been to the cemetery before them when they would find the fallen twigs in our section of Oakwood neatly stacked along the curb. They would stand back or spin their lawn-mowers off in another direction while we prayed or when we needed time alone. But they would join us at the grave while we worked or planted, asking if we needed water. Or Wink would come, shovel in hand, and dig where I pointed. We gave them presents on Wade’s birthday and at Christmas, and they replaced a small statue of an angel when someone stole a similar one from Wade’s grave. Just like family.
Mother’s Day, when Wade’s friends brought a pink dogwood for me, was a hard day. Six weeks. They had planned to plant it that afternoon, but in the early hours of Mother’s Day, a fraternity fire in Chapel Hill claimed the lives of five young people, including Ben Woodruff, who had been a senior at Broughton High School when Wade was a freshman. “The boys”—and some of their older brothers—were part of a wide, happy circle from which large shavings had now been cut, and the circle would never roll again straight and carefree. So the boys delivered the tree and went to be together, again, as they had when Wade died. Although Wade and Ben were not friends, Ben had been good to Wade in soccer and in Latin activities. It was startling to read his obituary. Born in Nashville, as Wade had been. Latin, soccer, Woodberry Forest Sports Camp, all like Wade. And now, like Wade, buried in Oakwood Cemetery. We went to Ben’s parents. The day before we went, we knew everyone who had gathered in their house better than we knew the Woodruffs themselves, and now, on the day Ben died, we knew Bonnie and Leon better; we recognized ourselves in their vacant eyes. I don’t have to see them often to know that we are forever linked.
When John and I came from seeing Ben’s parents, we planted the tree in the backyard. The girls brought a collage of photographs and a poem they framed. And they answered my request to dig through their pictures and find any with him in it. Wade worked on the yearbook staff—as I had done decades before and as Cate did in the years after him—and his friends there found pictures of crowds of students in which, they assured me, that was Wade sitting behind the fellow in the cap or leaning against the bleachers near the wall, as they pointed to a dot I could hardly see.
There were things that came up that spring and the next year that Wade would certainly have done. Honors breakfasts, literary magazine readings, assemblies. The only question for us was whether there would be a hole where he would have been or whether we would fill it. So there was no question at all. We went. And sometimes there was a moment of grace. At the spring honors assembly, Wade was to get several awards. We went to receive them for him. Watching the children who marched in together and sat in the honorees’ chairs was one of the hardest moments I’d had. I could only bury my face in my hands. It was stupid to come, I thought, stupid, stupid, stupid. What did I expect? When we stood to accept his first award,