The Honor Guard That Refused to Fold

Last month the post voted, without me asking for it and without me knowing it was coming, to put a small brass plaque on the wall of the hall, right above where the folded flags from our earliest ceremonies are displayed in their triangle cases. It reads simply that the Ash Fork detail was founded in 1996 and carried forward by every veteran who has ever answered when it was needed most. Merle’s name is on it. So is mine. So, now, is Desmond’s, and Camille’s, and every young veteran who walked through that door on a Tuesday night because a stranger in the coveralls thought a town’s word ought to still mean something.

This past Memorial Day, twenty six of us stood in formation at the Ash Fork cemetery for the first time in longer than I care to admit, a full color guard, a real bugler, a rifle line eight deep, reading every name on our county’s veteran roll one by one while the whole town stood in the grass with their hats off. Idette Adkisson stood in the front row in a folding chair Desmond carried out for her himself, and when we read Merle’s name, she did not need me to hold her hand. Camille was standing right beside her.

I think about the letter from the state office sometimes, the one that nearly ended it. I am not angry at it anymore. It did the one thing none of us could have done on our own. It told a room full of young men and women, most of whom had never met me or Merle or Otis, exactly how much this town needed them, and they came.

Every funeral, we still fold the flag thirteen times. It still weighs nothing at all on a scale, and it still feels like the whole sky every single time it leaves the casket. The difference now is that I am never the only one holding it up.