Driving the town’s economy, my brother had given me to understand, was, or at least had been, a trade in tombstones, in which he himself naturally had a hand. The quarries still brought up stone for this purpose, a dwindling number of carvers still carved it, and the finished stones were sent to mark the resting places of the dead all across the country.
Irony that death is a source of revenue when the narrator's family members were killed there or taken away to be killed
