The Medals My Sister Sold
I started asking. I called the estate crew Darlene had hired and got nowhere, they did not take names at a cash table. I went up to the VFW, Post 4714, where I have been a member for forty years myself as a peacetime Army vet, two years I did in the seventies that I never once thought measured up to Roy’s, and I told the men there what had happened, and I watched their faces change. These are not men who think a folded flag is junk. They started asking too. Somebody knew a fellow with a blue Ford out by Cutler. Somebody else thought it might be the young man who taught history over at the consolidated high school, that he drove an old truck like that. I wrote it all down in a spiral notebook I kept on the seat of my truck, and for nine days I drove and I knocked and I asked, and I prayed, which I am not always good at, and I did not find him.
He found me.
On the tenth day, a Tuesday, late in the afternoon, a blue Ford pickup turned off the county road and came up my lane, slow, the way a stranger drives when he is checking the number on the mailbox. I was out at the fence with the dog. The truck stopped and a young man got out, and I knew him before he said a word, because he had the box in his arms. Roy’s box. Walnut and navy felt and my brother looking off camera. He carried it against his chest with both arms underneath it, careful, the way you carry a thing that has a weight beyond its weight.
He was younger than I expected up close, maybe twenty-eight or thirty, with a haircut that was still half military and a way of standing that I recognized. He came to the bottom of my porch steps and he stopped, and he did not come up, and he held out the box to me and he said, Mr. Keller. My name is Caleb Hoyt. I believe this belongs to your family. I have been looking for you for over a week.
I could not speak. I reached out and took the box in both hands, and it was like taking a child, and I had to turn away from the young man for a minute because a grown man of seventy-two does not want a stranger to see him come apart in his own yard, except of course the young man had already seen, and he had the grace to look off at the fields while I got myself together.
When I could talk I asked him to come up and sit, and I called to Carol, and she brought coffee out to the porch, and the three of us sat, and Caleb Hoyt told me how he had come to be standing at that card table.