The Honor Guard That Refused to Fold

They knew about the detail. For years it had been common knowledge around town that Merle and I were the last two men left who could still shoulder a rifle at a graveside, and that the roster of names willing to stand with us had gotten so thin that Otis Crenshaw, at seventy eight and with a hip that ought to have retired him a decade earlier, still put on his good trousers every time the funeral home called. Nobody said it plainly, but everybody understood that when Merle or Otis or I finally went into the ground ourselves, there might not be anybody left standing over us to do the same thing we had done for four hundred families before.

I did not know a stranger was watching from the tree line at the edge of the cemetery until the service was over.

He was younger than my grandsons, dressed plain, standing with his hands folded in front of him the exact way you stand when somebody taught you right. When our little line broke up and folks started drifting back to their cars, he walked over, not to me first, but to Otis, and he asked if the detail was short a rifleman for the walk back to the hall. Otis looked at him, looked at his boots, looked at the way he carried himself, and said we sure were. The young man fell into step beside us like he had always been there.

His name was Desmond Whitlock. He told me later, over church coffee that nobody in Ash Fork makes strong enough, that he had grown up two counties over, done six years in the Army as a staff sergeant, two combat tours in Iraq, and had just moved back to this part of Missouri to take a job at the grain co-op because his wife’s people farmed outside of town. He said he had heard from somebody at the feed store that a Vietnam veteran’s honor guard still did every funeral in this county the old proper way, and he had wanted to see it before he introduced himself. What he saw instead was two old men trying to bury their own without enough hands to do it.