The cemetery here is like rural cemeteries across the state.
Carved out of farmland a hundred years ago, it is still hedged on three sides by hay fields.The breeze that roars in the cemetery pines and rustles its maples carries the sweet tang of fresh cut hay across the graves in September.
The sounds of planting, growing and harvest dominate the cemetery from May through September. On summer nights, the rhythmic pulse of field sprinklers marks the hours from dusk to dawn, the water from the end sprinkler splashing over the cemetery fence. The roar of harvesting mowers throbs through the cemetery three times each summer as farmers claim their crop from the land.
Farming is no longer the primary livelihood in Richmond. It has ceased to be in most Utah towns.
But it colors town history, yearly harvests serving as markers for the past. Such and such happened the same summer the hail beat down the wheat, townspeople will say. People who never held a pitchfork remember the year rain rotted the cut hay and drought stole the sweet from the corn.
In a town where death usually comes softly to the old, people never forget the fatal harvests.
Richmond and the surrounding towns have seen a lot of deadly harvests. Cache County ranked second in farm accidents among Utah counties, according to a 1988 survey of Utah hospital emergency rooms.
Townspeople can stand in Richmond's tiny cemetery and point out the headstones of those who died wringing a living from the land.
The latest grave is 7 weeks old. Kirt Nelson, 17, is buried there. Small squares of sodstruggle to take root there.
A few rows east, Ron Christensen, 21, is buried. He died in a farm accident 22 years ago. During the intervening years, three other people were killed. Two youngsters - brothers - were damaged for life.
The worst spate of accidents in town history began with Ron's death. The oldest son of a second-generation farmer, Ron loved farming, almost as much as he loved horses. Almost as much as Richmond loved him.
Ron never did anything by half measures. He liked horses, so he bought seven, rode in rodeos in Utah, Idaho and Wyoming and raced his teams in cutter races. Townspeople took pictures.
Still hungry for time on a horse, he built an arena on his father's land when he was 16 and held his own rodeos on summer evenings. He used his father's calves for the calf roping and his father's bulls for the bull riding.
The townspeople came to watch.
That same year he met a Wyoming rodeo queen. They bounced their five-year courtship from Star Valley to Cache Valley, mingling horses with romance.
During an LDS mission to Arkansas, Ron phoned his father to say he'd found two mules he'd like to own. He asked his father to send him enough money to buy them and, oh, yes, could his dad please drive out to Arkansas to pick them up.
The year 1969 was to have been the best yet. In June, Ron married his rodeo queen, Donna Vee. "Dovy" he called her. They honeymooned for a week in a covered wagon, an old-time sheep camp drawn by Ron's Arkansas mules.
"Star Valley or Bust" the sign on the wagon said. The mules, Fletch and Shack, took them there.
Four months later, they took Ron's body to the Richmond Cemetery.
Dawn broke clear on Oct. 27, 1969. Ron did early morning chores, dashed home to breakfast with his Dovy and returned for more work.
Midmorning he loaded the carcass of a dead animal onto the bucket loader of a tractor and drove it to a ravine on the hillside, intending to dump it.
No one knew what went wrong. He was alone.
When Ron didn't return, his father, Garr, got in a truck and followed the tracks left by Ron's tractor. He found his dead son pinned below the toppled tractor at the bottom of the ravine.
"That picture is still there, just as plain," said his father, his cheeks wet.
The town hadn't stopped missing Ron when two more farmers - a father and son-in-law - died 21 months later.
It was May 1, 1971. Marigene Peart's birthday. Her husband, Quent, 51, planned to take her out to dinner that night after he and son-in-law Dean Smith, 35, finished the evening chores.
Dean and Quent co-owned the large dairy on the west end of town. The two worked late most evenings, milking then feeding 125 cows.
That night chores ran even later. There was trouble in the silo. The men had to fix it so they could get silage out to feed the cows. Quent stopped by the house to tell Marigene he couldn't make dinner. The spring evening turned to night, and still Quent didn't return. More ominously, a loud buzzer in the silo - signaling a malfunction - continued to blare.
Marigene hiked over to the dairy. She shouted first her husband's name, then her son-in-law's. She grabbed a shovel and banged it on the side of the silo, hoping to attract their attention over the whine of the buzzer.
No one answered.
She summoned a neighbor, Howard Andersen. He climbed through an upper silo door and discovered the two men sprawled on the silage below. "I think they're gone," he told Marigene.
The men apparently died after inhaling poisonous gas from the fermenting crop stored in the silo. From body temperatures, doctors speculated that Dean collapsed first. Quent died trying to get him out.
Andersen lived a short mile down the road from the Pearts. Tragedy didn't have far to go when it struck there next.
Like the Christensens and the Pearts, the Andersens took up farming generations ago. Iris Andersen never worried much about it being dangerous. It was life. Her life. Her children's life.
Life got hard for Iris in September 1971. She can't remember the day, the date or what her 8-year-old son, Troy, was doing out by the cattle.
But she will never forget the moment a hired hand ran into the house yelling that Troy had fallen while climbing into the back of a truck.
When Iris reached him, Troy was bleeding out of his ears, nose and mouth. He was already in a coma.
"The doctors said he was brain damaged, and this was the Lord's way of putting him to sleep so he wouldn't feel so much pain," Iris said.
Troy slept for four months. Iris spent the fall by his hospital bed, watching from a chair as autumn burnished the hills with color and winter stripped them bare.
Doctors finally told Iris they could do noth-ing for Troy and sent the unconscious boy home.
Iris worked over him at home, coaxing him out of his stupor. He came out of the coma in January 1972. "He got so he could answer me by nodding his head." By middle of the year, Troy could feed himself and walk to the bathroom.
"But he had to be watched," Iris said. "If you left him alone for just a few minutes, he would squash eggs all over the kitchen or turn on the stove and burn plastic bags. He killed his brother's goldfish and a little duckling he had won."
Iris seldom left the house. Once when she did, tragedy called again.
It was a fall day in 1972, barely a year after Troy's accident. Iris was visiting a neighbor when word came that her 10-year-old son, Judd, had fallen into an auger.
The Andersens used the auger to take silage out of the silo. Judd was trying to crawl over it when it caught his snowsuit, pulling him into the spiraling blades.
The family bundled the hemorrhaging boy into the car and raced to the Logan hospital. Like Troy, doctors pronounced Judd critical and transferred him to the McKay-Dee Hospital in Ogden.
Surgeons there tried to salvage Judd's mangled left leg, sewing the sliced arteries behind his knee and suturing gashes up to his hip.
But gangrene set in, and three days after the accident doctors operated again, amputating the leg at the knee.
Iris watched another autumn pass from a chair by another hospital bed.
Now almost 29, Troy is legally blind, partially paralyzed and hedged in by mental and emotional limitations. He lives in a nearby group home.
His brother, Judd, just turned 30. Aided by an artificial leg, Judd works the farm with his father and brothers.
Tragedy took a holiday. Farming didn't kill anyone in Richmond for nearly two decades.
Wounds healed. The first Christmas after Ron died, his 4-year-old brother, Bret, asked to have a Christmas tree on Ron's grave. It became Bret's tradition. Each Christmas he took a tiny tree up to Ron's grave and, standing with his mother in the cold, decorated it.
But Bret grew up. Dean Smith's widow, Elaine, remarried. Troy Andersen received a hard-won high school diploma at 27.
Townspeople liked to think a new age had come. A safer age. Maybe kids were smarter and men more careful.
Then in June 1990, a 14-year-old boy was killed. Thirteen months later, a 17-year-old boy died.
From the time he got a tractor tricycle when he was 2, Kevin Webb wanted to be a farmer. "His dream was to tie grandpa's farm with ours and him and me run it together," said his father, DeMoyne Webb.
To that end, Kevin learned everything he could about farming. He started feeding calves when he was 8. By 14, he had worked up to plowing, chopping, drilling and baling. He did it all.
Sometimes he sketched out his plans for the farm he and his father would run. He even decided which tractor they would buy first: a Case Magnum. DeMoyne had a picture of the Case Magnum etched on Kev-in's headstone.
June 4, 1990, was the first day of summer vacation. After breakfast with his mother, Kevin rode his bike down to the Harris farm where he worked.
The Harris men planned to drive equipment down to a field they were farming a few miles away. They asked Kevin to drive a small Case tractor down to the field. Kev-in spent a lot of time on that tractor, even building a scraper during a shop class in school.
Kevin headed down to the field on the little tractor. Water from irrigation and sprinklers pocked the road.
Kevin tried to drive around one of the larger puddles. He got too close to the edge and the tractor began slipping into a gully. Kevin tried to get it back on the road. Instead it flipped over, pinning him beneath.
Zan Harris went looking for Kevin, finding him dead under his favorite tractor.
Harris wrote about that tractor for Kev-in's funeral. Kevin loved driving tractors, he wrote. "I think his favorite was the little Case tractor. . . . Many times in his spare time I would find him on the little Case scraping the corrals. I think of all the ways Kevin might have chosen to go back to his Father in heaven, it would have been on his favorite little Case and scraper."
The morning of the funeral, Harris got up early and scrubbed another of Kevin's favorite tractors, a Case 2290. The red tractor was parked in the cemetery waiting for Kevin when the funeral entourage pulled through the gate.
The families' farewells to their sons and husbands - the tractor in the cemetery, Ron's mules carrying his casket - and the etchings on the headstones bespeak a passion for the land that even death failed to dim.
Ron's headstone is etched with a horse grazing by a stream in a pasture. Behind the pasture the foothills east of Richmond are drawn in stone - the foothills where he died.
Quent Peart's and Dean Smith's headstones are identical. Etchings of wind ruffling a pine bough mark the upper corners.
On Kevin's stone, the tractor he dreamed of owning plows in perpetuity the land he hoped one day to farm.