“Jim was my friend.”
“That’s why I came myself.”
“That doesn’t make this easier.”
“No.”
Richard said.
“I suppose it doesn’t.”
After his truck disappeared down the road, Margaret stayed at the kitchen table another half hour.
Then she stood.
Put on Jim’s old canvas coat.
Walked outside.
Not toward the barn.
Toward the north pasture.
The land looked exactly the same as it had that morning.
Gray limestone.
Thin grass.
Bare places where rain washed soil down between exposed shelves.
For years, Margaret had looked at those stones as enemies.
Jim certainly had.
Every spring, he filled the tractor bucket with fieldstone.
Dumped piles along fence lines.
Cursed rocks that broke disks and damaged mower blades.
His father cursed them too.
Margaret remembered Sunday dinners when her father-in-law would say the devil had emptied his pockets across that part of Kentucky.
But her grandmother Ruth saw them differently.
Ruth had grown up the daughter of a stonemason near Glasgow.
When Margaret was little, Grandma Ruth would collect flat pieces of limestone and stack them into tiny walls beside the garden.
No mortar.
Just balance.
“Stone has manners.”
Ruth used to say.
“You just have to learn them.”
Margaret never understood that either.
She was remembering those words when late-afternoon sunlight hit the northern outcrops.
The limestone turned pale gold.
Fossils appeared in some surfaces.
Small spirals.
Stems.
Shell impressions.
Grandma Ruth once told her those marks were older than anything humans had ever built.
Margaret bent.
Lifted one stone.
Heavy.
Dense.
Fine-grained.
She carried it home.
Placed it on the kitchen table beside Richard’s financial folder.
Then she started making calls.
The first mason laughed politely.
“Fieldstone?”
“Yes.”
“How much?”
“Forty acres full of it.”
“Ma’am, everybody in Kentucky has rocks.”
The second asked whether she wanted a retaining wall.
“No.”
“I want to sell you stone.”
“Oh.”
Pause.
“Not really how I work.”
The third explained transportation cost.
The fourth said surface stone was too inconsistent.
The fifth asked for photographs, then never returned her call.
Margaret kept calling.
Stone yards.
Landscape companies.
Historic restoration contractors.
Masonry suppliers.
A quarry outside Elizabethtown.
Nobody insulted her.
That almost made it worse.
They simply had no interest.
Too remote.
Too unprocessed.
Unknown quality.
Extraction too expensive.
Not enough volume.
Wrong size.
No market.
After two weeks, Jessica visited.
She found her mother surrounded by telephone numbers.
“What are you doing?”
“Selling rocks.”
Jessica stared.
“Okay.”
“You could at least pretend that sounds normal.”
“I’m deciding whether this is grief or entrepreneurship.”
Margaret handed her a piece of limestone.
Jessica turned it over.
“Mom.”
“Grandma Ruth’s father built houses with this stuff.”
“Lots of people built houses with limestone.”
“Exactly.”
“That doesn’t mean somebody is going to pay eighty-two thousand dollars for rocks in your field.”
“I don’t need one person to buy eighty-two thousand dollars.”
“I need a way for the land to earn enough that I don’t lose it.”
Jessica sat.
“Have you eaten?”
“That is irrelevant.”
“It’s never irrelevant with you.”
Margaret eventually found Dale Warner because her cousin Ruth Ann in Tennessee knew a contractor who knew an architect who knew a mason.
“He does restoration work.”
Ruth Ann said.
“Fancy houses.”
“Old churches.”