The Name He Left Off the Wall

The Wall

The next meeting was the second Tuesday in May. I came in at six forty-five, got a cup of coffee from the big urn by the kitchen, and sat in a folding chair near the back.

Harold opened the meeting with the gavel and the pledge and the prayer. When he got to new members, he read my name off a sheet Jeff had handed him. He read it the way you would read a name on a casserole dish.

“Rachel Dunn,” he said. “Welcome, young lady.”

A couple of men clapped. One old fellow in a Korea veteran ball cap turned around in his chair and gave me a thumbs up. That was Earl Varney, 93, and he would become the best friend I made in that hall.

While Harold went through the old business, I looked at the wall.

It ran the whole length of the north side, above the wood paneling. Eighty-some framed photographs, each with a small brass plate, of men from that town and the hollows around it who had served in wartime.

Every one of them was a man. I counted twice to be sure.

I did not say anything about it that night. I just filed it away.

Two Years of Fish

I am not going to tell you that I changed that post by making speeches. I did not make one speech in two years. What I did was show up.

The post ran a fish fry every Friday night, and it paid most of the light bill. I started breading cod the first Friday in June, next to a retired Navy cook named Dale who showed me how to keep the batter from clumping.

I joined the honor guard in July. In a town like ours, the honor guard goes to a lot of funerals.

My first one was a Korea veteran named Lloyd, buried in the rain up a gravel road. I stood with the old rifle on my shoulder while the water ran down the back of my neck.

Harold was the one who presented the flag to the widow that day. He knelt in the wet grass on a bad knee and said the words, and his voice did not shake once. I remember thinking, whatever else he is, he knows how to do that right.

Afterward, at the cars, he nodded at me. “Good job today, young lady,” he said.

It was meant as a compliment. I took it as one. But I noticed he never said it to the men.

Earl and the Road to Huntington

The thing I did the most, in those two years, was drive.

The VA medical center in Huntington was about forty miles downriver, and a lot of our older members could not drive themselves anymore. Their kids had moved to Columbus or Charlotte.

So I drove them. I had a Silverado with a bench seat and good tires, and I had Tuesdays and Thursdays mostly free, since I worked three days a week at the feed store doing the books.

Earl Varney was my regular. He had cataracts in one eye and a hip that had been replaced twice. He had been an artillery man in Korea, in the cold, and he talked about the cold the way some people talk about an old enemy.

“You never get warm again,” he told me once, on Route 2 with the river flashing through the trees. “Seventy-some years and my feet still remember it.”

“I was the other way,” I said. “I was so hot over there I thought my boots would melt to the floorboards.”

Earl laughed so hard he had to wipe his eye. “Well, ain’t we a pair,” he said.

He was the first person in that town I ever told about the day the truck in front of mine went off the road near Tikrit. He did not say anything when I finished. He just reached across the bench seat and patted my hand, twice, and left his hand there until the next stoplight.

One afternoon in the VA parking lot, waiting for the pharmacy, Earl fell asleep with his head on my shoulder. He had hold of my hand, the way you would hold a grandchild’s hand crossing a street. I sat there forty minutes so I would not wake him.

When he woke up, he was embarrassed. “Sorry about that, Sergeant,” he said.

It was the first time anyone at the post had called me that. I had to look out the windshield for a minute.