I read the letter in the wind, holding it flat against the top of the stone of Del, and I read the last line twice because my eyes did not trust it. Department of the Army, Awards Branch. Approved after review of the sworn statements of three witnesses. A medal for valor, fifty six years late. The name of a colonel. A phone number. And at the bottom, a line I will remember as long as I live. This is the fifth notice mailed to this address. We have received no reply.
Travis took off his hat and turned it round and round. “Mama,” he said, “they started coming the year after Daddy died. The first one came by registered mail, and Brandi signed for it. She thought it was a collection notice. We were behind on the truck and the house, and she was ashamed, and she put it in a drawer. Then the second came, and the third. She said if we opened it, it would only be one more thing we could not pay.” He swallowed. “Last month Cody went looking for a stapler and found the drawer.”
Cody still held the velvet box in both hands, and now he lifted the lid. Inside, on a bed of white satin, lay a star of bronze on a ribbon of red and white and blue, and next to it a folded card with the seal of the Army. “Gran,” he said, in a voice that kept slipping, “I read all five. I called the number on the last one. The colonel said he has been waiting a long time to hear from somebody in this family. He said they found three men from the squad of Grandpa, in Ohio and Georgia and Idaho, and every one of them wrote a statement.”
I took the medal from the box. It was heavier than I expected. I thought of the man who laid brick in this county for forty years and came home every night with his hands scraped raw and never once said a word about a rice paddy or a river or a night in the mountains. Once, in 1983, drunk on his own birthday, he said that he had carried a boy out of the dark. That was all. He wept for ten minutes and never mentioned it again. I closed my fingers over the star and felt the whole hill go quiet.
Honor delayed is still honor, but only if somebody is brave enough to open the envelope.
The gate squeaked. A white SUV had stopped at the foot of the hill, and a woman in a gray coat was walking up the gravel with her arms folded across her chest. Brandi. She stopped ten feet from the stone and could not seem to come closer. Her face was blotched and her eyes were swollen. “Geneva,” she said, “I put the flag in the trash because I could not stand to look at it. Every time I saw anything of his, I saw those letters in the drawer. I am the one who should have been in that can.”
I did not speak right away. I looked at her for a long time, the girl who had shut a door in my face on the day that mattered most. I thought of the tight little house and the payments they could not make and the fear that makes sensible people do cruel things. “Come stand over here by Del,” I said. She came. I told her that I forgave her. Then I told her that she would carry that flag, folded, in both arms, to the front of the VFW post on the day of the ceremony. “And you will not let go of it,” I said.
Cody called the colonel from the cemetery, with the phone on speaker and the wind whistling past. The man answered on the second ring. His name was Reyes, and his voice was warm and slow, a man from the same country as my husband. He said the Army would hold the presentation at the post in Lampasas on the first Saturday of December. He said the three men from the squad were already making plans to come. He said, “Mrs. Hollis, it is the honor of my career.” I could not answer. Travis put his arm around my shoulders.
The day came cold and bright. The hall of the post was packed to the walls, three hundred souls, men in the hats of the First Cavalry and women in church dresses and boys in clean shirts. The three old soldiers came down the aisle in their Sunday best, one of them pulling an oxygen tank behind him like a small dog. They stood at attention while the colonel read the citation, and when he came to the line about carrying a wounded man a mile through enemy fire, a sound went through that room like wind in tall wheat.
Brandi carried the flag, as she had promised, folded in thirteen folds with the stars out, and she did not let go until I took it from her. I laid it in the oak case with the brass plate. Then the colonel pinned the star on a ribbon in the case beside it. Afterwards we fried four hundred pieces of catfish in the kitchen of the post, and Brandi stood at the next fryer in an apron with her hair tied up, flipping fish beside me, and neither of us said a word, and it was the best conversation we had ever had.
On Veterans Day of the next year, in the morning, I gave the flag to Cody. I did it on the hill, beside the stone, with the post honor guard and a small cold wind. He was seventeen by then, tall and solemn. He took it from me with both hands and held it against his chest for a long time. I had promised Del in the hospital. I told Cody that I had kept my word, and that now it was his to keep. He nodded, and his jaw trembled, and he said, “Yes, Gran. I will.”
The dog tags of Del still hang off the mirror of the F 150, and they click against the glass every time I cross a cattle guard. Travis drives it now on Sundays, and sometimes I ride beside him. On Fridays I fry fish at the post, with Brandi at my elbow, and the flag case hangs over the register where the whole room can see it. When the tags click, I look at the window and say what I never got to say. They came, Del. They finally came. And I opened every one of them.
