The son of Sergeant Whitaker set the boots on the white tablecloth side by side, toes toward Sterling, and the light of the restaurant slid over the leather like water. They were Army combat boots of the old kind, lace up, with heavy soles worn thin at the heel, and they had been polished to such a black mirror that I could see the chandelier in them. The son is sixty, stout, in a plain gray suit. Behind him, propped on a cane, in a Korean War veteran cap, stood the old man himself, ninety one, with eyes as bright as a bird. “Mr. Sterling,” said the son, “my father wants to say a few words. He will say them sitting down.”
Sterling had his glass of wine held out, a smooth, handsome man of sixty with a deep tan and a gold watch, and the toast he had given about Mateo still hovered over the table like cologne. He had said that his driver made more than Mateo and sat down all day. The table had laughed. Mateo had cut his steak. Beside the old man stood his grandson Dante, six foot three, broad as a door, in a navy blazer. He had played running back for Denver and signed with the agency of Sterling five years before. He was the only client of Sterling in the room. He was not smiling.
“I did not want to go to Washington,” said Sergeant Whitaker. His voice was thin and exact. “My son put my name in. On the way home, our flight changed planes at the Denver airport. I wore the boots I wore at the Chosin Reservoir in 1950, because my son said I must. They had not been polished since I took them off in 1953. I walked along the B concourse, and a young man at a stand said, sir, would you permit me? I said, for what? He said, for your boots, sir.”
A pair of polished worn black Army boots stood on a white tablecloth at an engagement party and gave one grandfather the length of a dessert course to bring a sports agent back to his grandson.
“He knelt on the floor of the airport,” said the old man. “It took him forty minutes. He used a rag, and a can of polish, and a toothbrush for the stitching, and he did not say one word. When he finished, he stood up, and he saluted me, and he said, Sergeant, thank you for your service.” He stopped. His son laid a hand on his back. “I have not been thanked in seventy years. The men who came home did not talk about it, and nobody asked. I cried in the B concourse. Forty men of my flight cried with me, standing in a ring, in front of ten thousand people going to Cancun.”
“That is the boy you said kneels at the feet of people,” said the son quietly. “My father wore those boots home. He slept that night, the whole night, for the first time in ten years. He has talked about the war every day since. He has told my children what Chosin was.” He looked at Sterling, and there was no anger in it. “We flew in from Wichita today. I told my father it was a long way to come to tell a man a thing he might not wish to hear. He said, a long way is nothing. I have walked farther in worse boots.”
Dante had not spoken. Now he stepped forward, and he spoke to Sterling in a low voice that carried to the back of the room. “When I signed with you, I asked you one question. I asked, do you respect where I come from? You said, son, I respect every man who works. I believed you.” He glanced at the boots. “My grandfather did not tell me about Chosin until last June. I am twenty nine. I do not think you understand what that boy at the stand gave my family.” The glass of Sterling was shaking. He set it down in the wrong place, on the bread plate.
Sterling stood. He is not a stupid man, only a man who has spent forty years in rooms where the loudest voice is the truth. He walked around the table to Sergeant Whitaker, and he did a thing that I will not forget. He took the hand of the old man in both of his. “Sergeant,” he said, “I apologize. To you, and to your grandson.” He turned to Mateo. “Son, I made a joke about your knees. I think I owe you my own.” Mateo shook his head. “Mr. Sterling, you do not owe me anything,” he said. “Shine one pair, then we can talk.”
I am the grandfather of Mateo, and seventy eight is old enough to give an order at an engagement party. On the Saturday of the next Honor Flight, I said, Sterling would kneel at the stand at the Denver airport with a rag and a can of polish and shine every pair of shoes that came through the B gates, for as long as there were shoes. And Dante, if he would, might see whether his foundation could do something to put more stands in more airports. Sterling nodded. The old sergeant lifted his cane an inch off the floor, which I understood, from a man of his age, to be applause.
Sterling knelt in the airport in June in a pair of nine hundred dollar trousers, and shined one hundred and twelve pairs of shoes in nine hours. A Vietnam veteran of seventy six, on a cane, with a Silver Star on his cap, wept when Sterling saluted him, and Sterling had to stop and wipe his face on his sleeve. Mateo handed him the toothbrush without a word. By evening, the knees of Sterling were ruined. “I did not know it was this hard,” he said, and Mateo said, “It is not hard. It is just low.” They sat down together on the stand and watched the planes.
Honor Shine has stands now at three airports, in Denver and Kansas City and Wichita, paid for by the foundation of Dante, with a plaque that gives no one a name. Mateo is the program director, at fifty five thousand dollars a year, with benefits and a title that makes his mother cry on the phone. The boots of Sergeant Whitaker stand on a shelf at the Denver stand, behind glass, under a small card in the hand of the old man. It says, Polished by Mateo, May the eighteenth. Thank you for your service. It is the only thank you I have ever read that was aimed the right way.
