They Called the Groundskeeper a Gravedigger at the Memorial Day Service — Until the Trustee Read the Plot Map
Ward Stetler took the shovel right out of Elmer Vance's hands, drove it into the grass beside the obelisk, and said, "Digging is all you're good for, Elmer," loud enough for the whole front row to hear.
Three hundred families heard it. Elmer has dug and tended every grave in Cedar Rest for twenty-six years.
Elmer didn't answer him. He walked to the tool shed behind the west row, and when he came back he was carrying a folded piece of linen.
He laid it flat on the base of the obelisk.
Nobody in that cemetery had ever seen it before, except the two people who already knew what it meant.
It was a plot map, hand-drawn by his father Roy, who was cemetery sexton for thirty years before him. Every burial plot was outlined in thread. Every sale date written beside it in faded pencil. Every plot stitched by hand, one at a time, for decades.
Ward stepped forward and reached for it. He wanted it folded. He wanted it back in his own jacket pocket before anybody got close enough to read it.
That was when the organ stopped.
Nadine Vance, Elmer's granddaughter, stood up from the bench holding a manila folder she'd carried to church every Sunday for three weeks.
"My grandfather said nothing," she told the crowd. "So I'll say it. Look at the four plots in the south field."
Ward's hand was still hanging in the air over the map. He told her to sit down.
She didn't.
Trustee Gladys Pekar came up the aisle past the folding chairs, took the outdoor speaker off its tripod, and held it in both hands like a microphone.
"Stay seated," she said. "I need every family who owns a plot in the south field to hear this."
Then she read four plot numbers out loud, one at a time, over a speaker that carried the whole way to the cars where the covered dishes were waiting.
Four plots. Eight families. The same numbers, sold twice.
The first family stood in the second row, holding a deed with a Stetler Monument Works stamp on it. The second family stood in the ninth row, holding a deed with the same plot number. The third and fourth stood without being asked, because by then they already knew.
Ward owns the monument company. He's been the board chairman for eleven years. He signed every one of those deeds himself, out of his own jacket pocket, instead of the board's file.
For four years, four plots sold twice. Money into the monument company's bills. Money for a new mower shed. Money for his mother's care.
Not one dime into an account of his own.
That's what confused me first, and it confused the crowd too. A thief keeps the money. Ward didn't. He believed he was collecting on something.
His father bought the south field from Elmer's father back in 1974 on a handshake and no recorded deed. The purchase price was never fully paid. Ward grew up hearing that field was stolen from his family — so for four years he quietly paid himself back, out of other people's burial ground.
He stood behind the obelisk with his name badge on its lanyard and his face going flat and empty when he finally understood what he'd done.
The plot holders took a show of hands right there on the grass. Ward Stetler was removed from the board before the service ended.
The four families were given real plots in the new south field, at no charge.
The money came back out of the monument company's bond.
And then the board asked Elmer Vance to take a title he'd been doing the work of for twenty-six years — his father's title. Cemetery sexton. On paper at last.
Elmer held the map up so the light hit the thread. His hands weren't steady.
That's when Gladys turned the linen over in his hands, and everybody close enough saw there was writing on the back — the original drawing, the one Roy made before there ever was a linen copy.
Nobody in that family has ever turned that map over.
What did Roy Vance write on the back of the first map?
And what did that 1974 handshake actually promise before both men were gone?
The rest of that Memorial Day morning — and the words on the back of Roy's map — are in the full story below.
Advertisement