The Honor Guard That Refused to Fold

I found out later he had stood at the tree line for a specific reason. His own grandfather had been buried without any honor detail at all, forty miles from here, because the county he died in did not have one left, and Desmond had sworn to himself somewhere over there in the desert that if he ever came home to a town that still had one, he would not let it slip away on his watch without at least trying to stand in the gap.

I did not tell him that week what came in the mail four days later. I did not want him to think that was why we let him in.

The letter came from the state VFW office, typed on letterhead, addressed to me as post commander because nobody else would take the job anymore. It said that Ash Fork Post membership had fallen to eleven active members following Merle’s passing, below the minimum of fifteen required under the organization’s bylaws to hold an independent charter, and that unless we brought the roster back into compliance within sixty days, the post would be formally consolidated into the Ozark County post thirty four miles away. Our hall, our records, and our equipment, including the flags and the ceremonial rifles that Merle and I had bought new in 1996 with money we raised selling barbecue plates out of the hall parking lot, would transfer with it.

Nobody at the state office meant any cruelty by it. It was a rule written for a hundred posts in a hundred towns, not aimed at us. But I sat at my kitchen table and read that letter three times and felt something close to my heart the way a barn door closes in a wind, because I understood exactly what it meant. A post thirty four miles off was not going to drive out to Ash Fork at six in the morning to bury a farmer’s father the way we always had. The detail Merle and I built, the one thing in this town that never once in thirty years missed a funeral, storm or drought or Christmas week, would not survive a drive that long.