The Name He Left Off the Wall

Harold

Harold sat at the head table with the gavel in front of him. He did not say anything for a long time. June was sitting in the front row of the Auxiliary chairs along the side wall, and she did not take her eyes off him.

Finally Harold held out his hand. “May I see that picture?” he asked.

I walked it up to him. He took it in both hands, the same way Walt had, and looked at it.

“She used to cut my hair,” he said, to nobody in particular. “On the back porch, with a towel around my neck. Every two weeks, till I left for basic. She used to say, ‘Hold still or I’ll take an ear.'”

Somebody in the room laughed, softly, the kind of laugh that is half something else.

Harold set the photograph face up on the table in front of him, next to the gavel. He put his reading glasses back on. He cleared his throat.

“I was wrong,” he said.

He said it to the whole room, not just to me. Loud enough for the back row.

“I had a picture in my head of what a veteran was,” Harold said. “Got it when I was nineteen. I never changed it. Not when my own sister came home. Not when June told me. Not when this young lady,” and he stopped, and looked at me, and started again. “Not when Sergeant Dunn walked in that door.”

He was quiet for a second.

“Is there a second on the motion?” he asked.

About eleven hands went up at once. Jeff was first. Earl was second.

“All in favor.”

Every hand in that room went up. Harold put his up last, slowly, and held it there.

“Opposed.”

Nothing. Not a sound.

“Motion carries,” Harold said. He picked up the gavel and tapped it once, very gently, as if he were afraid of breaking something.

Tom’s Students

The brass plates on the wall had all come from a trophy shop in Point Pleasant that closed years ago. Tom said he would handle it.

He took it to his shop class. He told those kids who Margaret Pike was, and why it mattered that she had been left off. Then he let them build the frame.

They made it from black walnut off a tree that came down on the Kessler farm in a windstorm. They cut the miters and rubbed in three coats of oil. A quiet junior named Kayla, whose grandfather had been a Marine, engraved the brass plate on the school’s machine, three tries until it was perfect.

It said: 1LT MARGARET A. PIKE, ARMY NURSE CORPS, VIETNAM, 1967 to 1968.

Tom brought it home the Friday before Veterans Day wrapped in a moving blanket. He laid it on our kitchen table and pulled the blanket back, and I had to sit down.

“Those kids,” he said, and that was all he could get out.