The Name He Left Off the Wall

Veterans Day

We hung it on the eleventh of November, at eleven in the morning, the way you are supposed to.

The hall was full. Walt came back over the bridge with his daughter. Kayla came with her grandfather. Earl sat right under the wall, because he said he wanted the best seat in the house.

There was an empty space on the wall that I had never noticed until June pointed it out to me. It was near the end of the Vietnam row, between a Marine named Collins and an Army man named Sizemore.

“He left that space when he built it,” June told me quietly. “Back in 1998. He told me it was for balance. I knew better.”

Harold climbed the stepladder himself. Jeff held it steady, and Tom stood at the bottom with the frame, and handed it up when Harold was ready.

Harold hung his sister on the wall with his own hands. He set the wire over the hook and straightened the frame and stepped back down one rung to look at it. Then he stepped back up.

He put out his right hand and touched her name on the brass plate. He traced it, slowly, with one finger, the M and then all the rest. He left his hand there flat on the plate for a moment, the way you would put your hand on somebody’s shoulder.

“Hold still,” he said, so quietly I am not sure anybody heard it but me and Jeff, “or I’ll take an ear.”

Jeff looked down at the floor. I looked at the floor. Down at the bottom of the ladder, Tom had his hand over his mouth.

When Harold came down, June was waiting. She did not say anything. She just took his arm and held onto it, and they stood there together looking up, two old people in a cinder-block hall with a flag on a stand, while the whole room stood up behind them.

The Parking Lot

After the sheet cake, I was loading folding chairs into the Silverado when Harold came across the gravel lot with his hands in his cardigan pockets. The river was gray behind the hall.

“Sergeant,” he said.

“Harold.”

He stood there a minute, looking at the truck instead of at me.

“I handed you that Auxiliary form,” he said. “A year and a half ago.”

“I remember.”

“I’ve been thinking about why I did it,” he said. “It wasn’t that I thought you were lying. It wasn’t even that I thought you were less. I just never had a place in my head to put you. So I put you where I put Margaret.”

He finally looked at me.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “To you and to her. I should have said it a long time ago.”

“Thank you,” I said. “I accept that.”

“And you could have made a fuss,” he said. “That first day. I saw your face. You could’ve made a real fuss.”

“I could have,” I said.

“Why didn’t you?”

I thought about it. The river was moving slow behind him, and a barge was coming around the bend, low in the water with coal.

“Because I wanted to be one of you,” I said. “Not just on the list.”

Harold nodded slowly. He patted the tailgate of my truck twice, the way Earl pats my hand in the truck, and he went back inside.