The Medals My Sister Sold

They brought him home two weeks later. The whole town turned out. The VFW did the honors at the cemetery, the rifle volley and the bugle, and two soldiers in dress uniform folded the flag off his coffin into that tight triangle and went down on one knee in the wet grass and handed it to my mother, and said the words, on behalf of a grateful nation. My father stood with his hat over his heart and his jaw set so hard I could see the muscle jumping in it, and he did not make a sound, and he never, as long as he lived, spoke more than a sentence or two about Roy ever again. Grief took my father like a slow tide. He died in 1981 of a heart that the doctors said was fine, which I have never believed.

My mother, Opal Keller, was made of something else. She grieved Roy every day for fifty-six years, out loud and without apology, and she built a kind of small shrine to him that she tended the way some women tend a garden. My father built the shadow box that first winter after the funeral, out in the barn, the same way he did everything, without a word about it. Walnut, because that was the good lumber he had been saving for something. He sanded it over I do not know how many evenings until it was smooth as glass, and he lined it in navy felt, and my mother arranged Roy’s Purple Heart and his Bronze Star in it, and behind the medals she set the studio photograph of Roy in his uniform, the one taken at Fort Lewis, where he is looking just slightly off camera with the ghost of a smile, like somebody just off to the side told him to loosen up. The folded flag she kept with it, in the cedar chest at the foot of her bed, wrapped in tissue, and the shadow box hung on the wall of the front room, low, at eye level, where you stand close to a thing rather than up high where you hang a thing to be admired.

For fifty-six years that box hung on that wall. My mother dusted the glass every Saturday. Every Memorial Day she set a little flag in the planter by the front steps and she would stand in front of the box with her coffee and talk to it, to him, out loud, telling Roy the news of the family as though he had only stepped out to the barn. She told him when I married Carol. She told him when my kids were born and then when my grandkids were born. She told him when Darlene’s first marriage ended and when it started up again with a different man. She kept my brother alive in that house by sheer force of a mother’s will, and I think some part of me believed, the way a child believes, that as long as that box hung on that wall, some thread of Roy was still in the world.