Dale Whitfield did not say the name of the lieutenant out loud in the church. He did not have to. He lifted his cane an inch and pointed it, at a white haired man in the sixth pew, in a blue blazer with a gold pin on the lapel, who had been sitting very straight and very still since the middle of the service. I turned in my seat and looked at him. He was eighty four years old, tanned, with the clean pink scalp of a man who had been taken care of all his life. His name was Harlan Boyd, and everybody in Muskogee knew it.
He owned the largest car dealership in three counties. His name was on the scoreboard at the football field. He had written the check for the new band room in 1996, and my father, who directed that band, had stood on the stage and shaken his hand in front of the whole town. I remember the photograph in the paper. Two men in suits, smiling, a trumpet case between them. My father had known every second of that handshake what the man was. And he had smiled anyway, because of a threat from 1969.
Harlan Boyd stood up. A hush spread down the pews. He did not run, and he did not shout. He walked slowly down the aisle with his hands at his sides, past the casket of my father, and stopped in front of Dale. He was shaking visibly. He said, in a thin dry voice, “Dale. I would like to speak to you outside.” Dale answered, “Say it here.” For a long moment the two old men looked at each other, one in a cap with a Purple Heart, one in a blazer with a gold pin.
A man who keeps his promise through fifty seven years of silence has not failed. He has simply carried the weight until it could be lifted.
“I was twenty seven,” Boyd said, and he looked around at the faces in the church, at my mother in her wheelchair, at the ushers, at me. “I was a second lieutenant and I was afraid. We took a bag out of a village that I should never have touched. Your brother Robert was shot through the leg. He was alive. Raymond was carrying him. I ordered him to put him down, and I told him I would shoot him if he did not. I have not slept a full night since. I built a business on that bag. I have given thirty million dollars away in this town trying to sleep.”
The church was so quiet that I could hear the fluorescent lights hum. Dale did not move. Then his shoulders began to shake, and he bowed his head, and the cane fell onto the floor with a clatter. Boyd bent to pick it up, with a groan, his knees creaking, and held it out. Dale took it. He did not forgive him. He said only, “I want you to tell the Army where my brother lies.” Boyd nodded. He said, “I have known the coordinates for fifty seven years.”
That was a Saturday. The following Monday, he drove himself to a lawyer in Tulsa and dictated a four page statement, which he signed in front of a notary and sent to three places: the Department of the Army, the Defense POW and MIA Accounting Agency, and the newspaper of Muskogee. It named himself. It named the village, the date, the order, and the hill. It gave coordinates, in latitude and longitude, to the fourth decimal place. At the end, in a different pen, he wrote, “Raymond Albertson is not guilty of anything but obedience, and I alone am responsible.”
The Army corrected the record in March. They rescinded the finding that my father had abandoned a wounded soldier, and they reviewed his service. A colonel from Fort Sill drove down in dress blues and sat in our living room with a velvet case on his knees. Inside was a Bronze Star with a V device, which the Army said should have been awarded in 1969. He read the citation aloud, for conspicuous bravery in attempting to carry a wounded comrade under fire. My mother, who had hardly spoken since the funeral, put her hand on the case and said, “Ray would hate the fuss.”
The remains of Robert Whitfield were found in June. A team of anthropologists and Vietnamese guides had spent three weeks on the hill in Quang Tri, and on the nineteenth day, under a bamboo thicket, they found a boot. Dale flew to Hawaii in July for the identification ceremony, and he asked me to come with him. We stood together in a hangar at Pearl Harbor while an honor guard carried a flag draped case across the floor, and a sergeant read the name. Dale put his hand on the flag. He held it there for a very long time.
They buried Robert at the national cemetery in Fort Gibson on a hot day at the end of August. Four hundred veterans came, most of them old, some on canes, all in whatever they had left of their uniforms. Harlan Boyd sat in the back row alone. Nobody spoke to him. When the service ended, Dale walked straight to the back of the cemetery, stood in front of him, and shook his hand once, hard, without a word. Then Dale turned and walked away. It was not forgiveness. It was something older and smaller, and perhaps more real.
On the eleventh of November, I stood alone on the fifty yard line of the football field at Central High, in the dark before dawn, in the old green field jacket of my father. It was too big for me. I had borrowed his trumpet, which I had not played in twenty years. Dale was sitting in a folding chair at the edge of the grass, with his cane across his knees. As the sky turned from black to gray, I lifted the horn and played twenty four notes. The last one rang across the empty bleachers and hung there, and I heard Dale say, very softly, “Good morning, Robert.”
