The Colonel Her Family Wrote Off

Hometown Honoree

By the next morning, the Grand Island station had it. Forty seconds at the top of the six o’clock local news, a soldier from Hall County set to be recognized in a statewide broadcast, no name given yet, the anchor promising more details as the ceremony approached. It is not a large media market, and a hometown general is not a story that comes along more than once in a career for a station like that.

My mother watched that broadcast at her own kitchen counter and did not connect it to anything. My father laughed at a message on his phone in the next room and never once looked up at the television. Neither of them, in a county with maybe forty thousand people in it, thought to wonder whether the soldier the news anchor meant might be sleeping in a motel ten minutes from their own front door.

Travis, I would learn later, had a harder time not knowing. He had been the one who drove the Bronco to the scrap buyer’s lot in Kearney himself, because our father didn’t like to drive that far, and he had sat in his own truck in our parents’ driveway that same night for the better part of an hour before he could make himself go inside, the way a man sits with something he already suspects is going to catch up to him.

The town, meanwhile, was doing what small towns do better than anywhere else, which is talk. Mr. Krenshaw at the feed store had a cousin stationed with the Nebraska National Guard who had put two and two together by lunchtime. Pastor Lindqvist at the church my parents attended every Sunday of my childhood had gotten a call from a deacon who’d served twenty years back and recognized my old command sergeant major’s name on a community post about a homecoming gathering at the Fonner Park expo hall, organized fast, the way these things get organized when a town realizes it is about to be part of something.

By the time the sun went down two days later, half of Hall County had heard the name before my own parents had, and every one of them was walking into that hall already knowing something my family did not.