The Medal That Came Back From The Creek
The knock came at ten minutes past two on a Saturday in October, and I almost did not answer it.
I was standing on a step stool in my new kitchen with a roll of shelf paper in one hand and a pencil behind my ear. I had been back in my own house exactly three days. The cabinets still smelled of sawdust and the doorbell had not been wired yet, so whoever it was had to knock on the frame of the screen door, three slow raps, the way a person knocks when he has been working up to it.
I figured it was one of the church men. They had been coming and going for months with levels and shop vacs and thermoses, and I had stopped being embarrassed to be seen in my housedress.
“Coming,” I called. “Hold your horses.”
I climbed down, wiped my hands on my apron, and went to the door.
It was a boy. Nineteen, maybe, with a farmer’s tan that stopped at the collar of a faded flannel shirt and a feed-store cap he had taken off and was turning around by the bill. His hair had been cut by somebody who loved him and owned a pair of clippers. His other hand was shut up tight at his side, the knuckles pale, like he was holding a bird he did not want to lose.
There was a white pickup truck in my lane with the engine off. I did not know the truck. I did not know the boy.
“Mrs. Dossett?” he said.
“That’s me.”
“Wilma Dossett? Drew’s mother?”
I put my free hand flat against my chest. Nobody had said my son’s name on my porch in years, not like that, not like a person coming to see me about him.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m Drew’s mother.”
“Ma’am, my name is Aaron Latham,” he said. “I’m sorry to just show up. Mrs. Sheehan at the church office told me you’d be home by Saturday.”
Then he stood there. He had clearly practiced something in the truck and it had left him.
I will tell you what was in his hand. But being seventy-one years old and having buried a husband and a son, I have learned that some things do not make sense unless you walk up to them the long way around. So let me go back.
My son’s name was Andrew Ferrell Dossett, and nobody ever called him Andrew except the Army. He was Drew from the day he could answer to anything. He was my only boy, born when I was twenty-six, after four years of trying and one baby we did not keep. He left wet towels on the bathroom floor until the day he enlisted, and he sang bass at St. Agnes like a man trying to start a stalled tractor. But he was kind to old people without being asked, and he never once forgot my birthday, even in Iraq.
My husband Ferrell had been a soldier too, a short stretch in the early seventies. He was stationed in Germany for two years and never talked about it except to say the winters were worse than ours and the bread was better. What he brought home, besides a taste for dark rye, was a small round medal of Saint Christopher on a thin silver chain.