The Name He Left Off the Wall

Young Lady

Harold was never rude to me. He held doors. He asked after Tom. He bought a pie from me at the Christmas bake sale.

But he called me young lady. Every time. In front of everybody.

He never called me a veteran, not once. When the district commander came down for an inspection the first fall, Harold walked him around the hall and stopped at the fish fry table, where I had flour to the elbows.

“And this is Rachel,” Harold said. “She’s a big help to us.”

Jeff was standing right there. He set down the tray of cole slaw he was carrying.

“Rachel’s a member, Harold,” Jeff said, quiet but clear. “Staff Sergeant. Two tours in Iraq.”

The district commander shook my hand and asked where I had been stationed. Harold stood there smiling, his ears gone a little pink.

Then he walked on to the next table. He did not say a thing to me about it, then or later.

I went home that night and told Tom I was thinking about quitting.

He was sanding a rocking chair in the garage, for the Christmas raffle. He set down the sandpaper and blew the dust off the arm.

“Are you quitting because of Harold,” he asked, “or because of Earl?”

“What do you mean, because of Earl?”

“I mean, if you quit, who drives Earl to Huntington?”

I did not quit.

June

Everything changed on a Friday night in October, the second fall. Around six thirty the fish fry rush died down, and I sat at the end of a long table, under the wall, with my coffee and my feet aching.

June Pike sat down beside me.

June was 76, tiny, with her white hair set every Friday morning at the beauty shop on Main Street. She had run the Auxiliary longer than I had been alive.

She had flour on her sleeves, from the hush puppies. She did not have a plate. She just sat there a moment with her hands folded on the oilcloth, looking at something I could not see.

“Has Harold ever talked to you about the wall?” she asked.

I looked up at it. I had looked at it every Friday for a year and a half.

“No, ma’am,” I said.

“He hung every one of those himself,” June said. “He started it in 1998. He went to every family in this county with a man who served in wartime and asked for a picture. Drove all over these hollows. Took him three years.”

“It’s a good wall,” I said, and I meant it.

“It is,” she said. Then she turned and looked at me straight. “He left one off on purpose, Rachel.”

“Who?”

June looked across the hall. Harold was behind the bar in his cardigan, wiping down the counter with a rag, slow and careful, the way he did everything.

“His sister,” she said. “Her name was Margaret.”