The Medal That Came Back From The Creek

His mother gave it to him at the Greyhound station in Wytheville the morning he left for basic training. She was a plain, tough, church-every-Sunday woman who did not hold with fuss. She pushed it into his palm, closed his fingers over it, and said, “Patron of travelers. Don’t lose it.” That was the whole speech.

He wore it two years. He scratched his initials, F.D., into the back with a pocketknife one night in the barracks because he was homesick and had nothing else to do with his hands. When he came home he hung it on a nail by the window of the first rented house we had, and it stayed on a nail by a window, house after house, until the day our boy left for the Army.

Drew was eighteen. We drove him to the same station in Wytheville because Ferrell would not hear of anything else, and while we waited on the bench for the bus, Ferrell took the medal out of his shirt pocket. He had taken it off the nail that morning and said nothing to me.

“Your grandmother gave me this on this very bench,” he said. “Patron of travelers.”

Drew rolled his eyes. He was eighteen and embarrassed in front of the other recruits. But he put it over his head and tucked it inside his shirt, and I saw him touch it through the cloth when the bus pulled in. I saw Ferrell see it, too. My husband was a man who wiped his eyes with the heel of his hand and then looked at the heel of his hand as though it had done something without asking him.

That medal went to Fort Benning, and to Fort Campbell, and to Iraq. He had made staff sergeant by then and had men under him, and in the spring of his second tour the clasp on the chain broke. He did not want to lose it on a patrol, so he mailed it home in a little padded envelope. The note inside was four lines in his square pencil printing, and I kept it folded under the medal and read it every morning for nineteen years, so I know it word for word.

Mama, Dad’s medal got me this far. Chain broke. Hold it for me, Mama. I’ll wear it when I get home. Love, Drew.

It came on a Tuesday. I opened it standing at the kitchen counter and a small round piece of silver slid out into my hand, warm from the mail truck, with the chain tangled up behind it and the clasp bent open like a tiny mouth.

Four weeks later two soldiers in their dress greens walked up this same sidewalk.

A major and a chaplain. They carried their caps under their arms. I was at the sink with my back to the window, and I looked up and saw them come around the corner of the porch, and I turned the water off and stood there with my hands dripping. I knew before either of them opened his mouth. Every mother who has a child over there knows what that particular walk looks like.

A roadside bomb, outside a town I had never heard of. He was twenty-six. His whole squad lived, and I have thanked the Lord for that every day since, because I know what it cost those boys to carry it.