The Town That Remembered Walt Kessler

The riflemen came back in and stood along the wall with their rifles at order arms. The bugler, a boy no older than seventeen from the high school band who Boone had asked special because Millbrook had no bugler left of its own, lifted his horn and played the twenty four notes of Taps into air gone completely still, and I watched seventy people, most of whom had walked in not knowing a single fact about Walt Kessler beyond the four lines Lavonne had printed in the Courier, stand with their hands over their hearts and their eyes wet.

When the last note had faded, Boone raised his hand. Two of his men stepped to the casket and lifted the flag that had been draped over Walt Kessler, blue field at the head and over his left shoulder the way it is always laid, and began the fold, lengthwise first, in half and then in half again, and then into the long line of triangular folds that any one of us who has stood in enough of these chapels over enough years has watched a hundred times and still feels the weight of every single time. Thirteen folds. By the last one, there was nothing left showing but the blue field and the white stars, no red, no white stripe, folded in on itself until it sat in Boone’s two hands like a cocked hat, tight and square and perfect.

Boone turned, flag held flat across both palms, and walked the few steps toward the front pew, where I stood because there was no widow, no son, no daughter for him to kneel in front of. He knelt anyway, in front of me, the way he would have knelt in front of any next of kin in this country, and he held the flag out level.

“On behalf of the President of the United States, the United States Army, and a grateful Nation,” he said, his voice carrying clean through that silent chapel, “please accept this flag as a symbol of our appreciation for the honorable and faithful service of Walt Kessler. He will not be forgotten.”

I took that flag into my arms the way I have never taken anything in thirty one years of this work, and I will tell you plainly, I did not expect the weight of it, folded that small, to feel the way it felt.

It was only after, standing out front in the cold while people filed past to offer their condolences to a woman who was not family but was the closest thing the room had, that Les finally got to me with what he’d been holding since before the service started.