The Uniform My Mother Tried To Ban

A lie is easiest to believe when it comes wrapped in a widow’s mourning. Nobody wants to be the one who interrupts a grieving woman to ask for proof.

I think about my father a great deal when I think about that stretch of silence, because he was the one person in Hartsell who would never have let a story like that stand unchallenged, and he was the one person who was not there to challenge it. He taught me to shine my first pair of boots on the back porch when I was nine, sitting beside me with a rag and a tin of polish, telling me that a man’s boots and a man’s word ought to be kept in the same condition, because people judge both of them the same way, quickly and from a distance. He wrote me a letter every single week of both my deployments, even the stretches when the mail took a month to catch up to wherever I was, because he said a soldier without word from home starts to forget what he is fighting to get back to. He was proud of this uniform in a way that had nothing to do with showing it off. He wore his own dress uniform exactly twice a year, Veterans Day and the Memorial Day service at the county courthouse, and both times he stood so straight in it that younger men half his age found themselves straightening up too, without ever being told to.