The Medal That Came Back From The Creek
I will not walk you through the funeral. You have been to one. You know the casket and the folded flag, and the Legion bugler playing Taps from the far end of the hillside cemetery behind St. Agnes, so far off in the cold that the notes came across the stones a little late. A young soldier knelt in front of me and said the words, on behalf of the President and the Army and a grateful nation. He was not much older than Drew, and he said them without looking at the card.
I had the medal in my coat pocket, wrapped in a handkerchief, and I kept my fist around it through the whole service. When the last car had gone I stood by the grave and thought: He asked me to hold it for him. So I will.
I kept it in a saucer on the kitchen windowsill. A plain white saucer with a chip on the rim. I set the medal in it every night and took it up every morning and rubbed my thumb across the face of the saint. Over nineteen years my thumb wore a little hollow into the left shoulder of that tiny silver man, the one carrying the child across the water. I never said so to anyone. It was between me and my son and the Lord.
Ferrell died in 2013, in the recliner, with the ballgame on. He went peacefully, which is a mercy I do not take for granted. After that it was the house and me and the saucer. The Gold Star pin on my church coat. The Memorial Day Mass, when Father reads the names of the parish dead from every war, and Drew’s name falls between a Korean War man and a boy from Vietnam, and I hold the medal in my fist in the pew.
That was my life, and I did not complain about it. I knew women whose lives were harder.
Cabin Branch is a narrow, lazy, brown creek that runs along the back of my property on its way down to the river. In forty-eight years I had never seen it get above its banks. The old man who sold us this place in 1978 stood on the porch and said, “Never floods. Never once.”
In April we had nine inches of rain in four days, and on the fourth night the creek came up.
I woke to a low heavy rushing, like a freight train that would not stop. I put my feet on the floor and they went into water, cold and brown, past my ankles, in my own bedroom. I did not think about the medal. I thought about my glasses, and the telephone, which was dead. I got a coat on over my nightgown and waded to the front door in the dark, and the door would not open against the water.
Hobie Maddox, my neighbor of forty years, came across the pasture in his fishing waders with a flashlight and a rope. He got the bedroom window open from the outside. He is seventy-six years old and he lifted me out of that window like a sack of feed, and his wife is still baking me pies about it.