The Honor Guard That Refused to Fold
The first funeral Desmond led was for a farmer named Emmett Drury who had served two years in the Army in the early sixties and never talked about it much, survived by a wife and four grandsons who had grown up hearing almost nothing about that part of his life until a seven person honor guard showed up at his graveside on a bright Tuesday morning in April. Camille stood in the rifle line. A young National Guard sergeant carried the flag steady across the grass. I stood where Merle used to stand, at the caller’s position, and I watched Desmond kneel in front of Emmett’s widow with that flag squared perfect in his two hands, and I heard him say the words on behalf of a grateful nation in a voice that did not shake at all, because he had not yet buried anybody he loved the way I had buried Merle, and I found myself grateful, truly, that it was still his voice doing the shaking instead of mine.
Idette Adkisson was in the third row that day. She told me afterward that watching a stranger’s grandson kneel in the grass the same way Merle used to kneel was the first time since the funeral she had cried without it hurting.
We hold the detail’s training mornings in my yard every other Saturday now, and some weeks there are so many trucks parked along my fence line that my neighbor jokes I ought to charge for parking. Nineteen members grew to twenty six by summer. We bought a new bugle with the money left over from a barbecue plate sale that Camille organized outside the hardware store, the same way Merle and I raised the first one thirty years ago, and we have not missed a funeral yet, not one, not in this whole county.
I am seventy nine years old now. My knees do not do what Merle’s or mine ever used to do at attention, and there are mornings I need Desmond’s arm to get up off a folding chair. But I do not stand at the head of that rifle line alone anymore, and I have not had to fold a flag by myself since the day we buried my oldest friend with only one other set of hands beside mine.