The one thing I meant to do was straighten the flags.
It was near the Fourth, and the little flags on the veterans always leaned after a week of wind, and I had straightened them every summer for thirty-one years. A new administrator could hand my contract to a cheaper crew, but that crew would not know to do it, and I could not stand the thought of those old soldiers lying under crooked flags because of a fight over tools I never touched. So I drove up before the gates opened and walked the veterans section in the gray light, setting each flag true.
That is when I found them.
The tools. The ones I had supposedly made off with. They were in the equipment shed behind the far hedge, the little one the seasonal kid used and never told anybody about, right where he had left them before he quit and drove off for the summer. Not stolen. Just a boy who did not put things back and did not answer his phone.
I stood in the dew with a rake in one hand that I had been called a thief over, looking at every last tool exactly where a careless kid had dropped it, and I started to laugh, because thirty-one years of honest work had nearly ended over a boy who could not close a shed door.
I did not have to say a word, as it turned out.
A woman was up there early too, at a stone in the veterans section, a widow I had walked to her husbands grave more times than I could count back when she could not find it through her tears. She saw me straightening the flags on my last morning, and made me tell her why it was my last morning.
That woman knew half the county, and every one of them had a father or a husband on that hill I had tended like my own. By the time the county folks arrived for their Friday luncheon, they had heard from more angry families than they knew what to do with, and somebody had walked them out to that far shed to see the tools sitting there in plain sight.
The administrator did a lot of quiet backpedaling. He does not decide the contract anymore.
They asked me to stay on. I told them my knees had about thirty-one years in them and not much more, but that I would keep coming up near the Fourth as long as I could drive, to set the flags true on the veterans, and they could not have stopped me if they tried.
Some work you do because somebody pays you. And some work you do because those old soldiers deserve their flags standing straight, and there is nobody left to see to it but you.
