FBR 84: There was a man at the cemetery . . .

Yesterday was my mother's birthday, the second since she passed away last year, so I went to visit the graveyard. Not far away I saw a man kneeling in front of an upright stone, blasting away at it with some kind of tool attached to a gasoline-powered compressor. His truck was nearby. It was all pretty noisy, the grumbling motor of the compressor in his truck, the sound of the machine at his side, and the high pitch — like the sound of a hose full blast — of the tool he was using. A cloud of charcoal-colored stone dust flew up and over the yard. I walked over to see what he was doing. I assumed at first that he was adding the terminal date to the wife's listing on the stone, but perhaps he was engraving all of her information. A template (which looked to have been made out of metal) included all of it: her name, birth date, and death date (June 1, 2010), and it had been duck-taped over the stone. The man was moving his blasting tool over the template, not in exact movements but in a brushing manner, and I knew that what he was doing could not be responsible for the V-shaped indentation of the final letters. He had a cushion on the ground in front of the stone that he used to kneel on. His hair was gray or dirty white, he was stooped over, with old leathery skin — what I could see of it. He wore a kind of gas mask on his face and noise-canceling head phones. During a pause, he went back to his truck for more . . . stuff. It looked like sand. He emptied the stuff from what seemed to be the handle-part of a cut-off detergent bottle into a canister on the machine at the grave site. I asked him what he was doing, "Adding the date?" He said nothing, but nodded quickly and pointed to the taped off section of the marker. I threw out the word "template?" partly to try to get more information from him and partly to seem knowledgeable about work done at markers, but he was done with me. He reattached by means of a hose the instrument he was using, settled back on the cushion, and drew what might have been a bee-keeper's shroud over his head. Then he dug into his shirt pocket for a small rectangular plate of glass. Wiping it clean on both sides, he slid it into an open frame on the shroud, a window for him to see, started up the machine again, and was back to work. I walked over to my mother's stone. It sits next to my brother's. Before going over to see what the man was doing I had wiped away the leaves and nuts that had fallen from the trees above, but more leaves were back. It's a nice spot, shady.