By Crispin Sartwell

One of the kindest acts I ever witnessed was something I didn't see until it was over - at which point, it amounted to a pile of stones.

My stepfather Richard died early this year. Born in 1920, in Concord, New Hampshire, he grew up wanting to be a farmer. Concord has a history of commitment to nonviolence that stretches at least to Nathaniel Rogers, the radical abolitionist who was born there in 1794. When Richard was a kid, he and a particular friend - as is typical among boys of spirit - had a more or less daily fistfight. At some point Richard realized that he didn't think fighting was right. So he offered no resistance and got left in a ditch with a black eye.

By the time Richard was drafted for World War II, he was a practicing Quaker and a conscientious objector. He was assigned alternative service in a logging camp in Oregon. Polio broke out in the camp, and Richard, contracted the disease. He spent a year in an iron lung, emerged paralyzed from the waist down, and was confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life.

Pa spent his working years as a masterly public school teacher of social studies. He worked for peace and for civil rights. He counseled young men on how to avoid the draft during the Vietnam War. And when he and my mother retired, he farmed: a small organic vegetable operation in Virginia, near the ridge. He built his own stone walls and made his own cabinets in his own shop. He did all this with the steady rhythm of a New England craftsman, and as though it was as simple for a paraplegic as for anyone else.

Richard wanted to be buried on his own land, and he wanted no involvement from the funeral industry, which he despised. And so it happened that my brother Jim and I picked up his body at the loading dock of the Culpeper hospital and placed it in a pine box. Richard made that box for himself in 1997. He used wood from a white pine in which he had built a tree house when he was a kid in Concord. When the ancient tree blew down in a storm, a childhood friend shipped Pa some of the roughcut boards.

Jim and I, with a few friends, dug his grave the night before the service. In a state of emotional and physical exhaustion, we left it unfinished, resolving to return in the morning.

When we came out at eight with our shovels, we saw that the hole had been finished, squared and marked by a series of structures of dry fieldstone, something between a New England stone fence and an ancient altar. Arranged in a semi-circle and supported by low walls, the standing stones spoke of the life of the land and the stone, and of the life of my Pa. The thought struck me that it was what Pa would have made for himself; and he would have doubted that any of the rest of us could have done the job right.

As we thought about who could have erected this monument, our speculation focused pretty quickly on a cousin, who lives in the same rural Virginia county as my parents. He had been a bit estranged from our side of the family, including me; I hadn't seen much of him lately. Something of a wastrel, though a great charmer, he has a tendency to screw up. In a typical act of bravado and stupidity, for example, he once drove a brand-new car off a mountain. But he works beautifully with his hands, and had worked with Pa on numerous occasions, building cabinetry and framing sheds. Come to think of it, we realized we'd seen his truck, late.

I believe that, if we hadn't thanked him, he never would have mentioned it.