The Medal That Came Back From The Creek
By sunrise the creek had taken the back half of my house.
I do not mean it was flooded. I mean it was gone. The kitchen, the back porch, a wall of the bathroom. The water went through the way a hand goes through a paper bag. I stood on the hill with Hobie’s coat around me and watched my own refrigerator turn slowly in the current and ride off across the bottomland with its door hanging open, like it was waving.
I figure the saucer went in the first hour, and the note with it. The windowsill went. The sink went. The counter went. All of it went out into the brown water and down toward the river, and I did not see one plate of it again.
I stood on that hill a long time. I did not cry. I think I was past it.
The front room survived, mostly, under a foot of mud. The flag in its triangle case came out dripping, and the Legion post got me a new one that summer, because a flag can be replaced and they know it. The medal could not be.
By the end of that week I was staying with my sister Genie in Marion, in her sewing room, under a quilt that smelled of cedar. The first night I said out loud to the ceiling, “Lord, I held it nineteen years. Thank you for the nineteen years. I will try to be grateful.”
I think He knew I was lying a little. I was grateful. But I was also grieving it like a second funeral.
Genie wanted me to put out a notice. There was a Facebook page for the flood, and a corkboard at the feed store with people’s lost things pinned to it, a wedding album, a dog, a set of dentures. “Somebody will find it,” she said.
“Find what?” I said. “A little silver medal, in a creek that empties into a river that empties into another river? People lost houses, Genie. I’m not going to ask a county to go through the mud for my keepsake.”
The truth is I did not want anyone searching. If they searched and did not find it, I would have to lose it twice.
So I let it go. I said a Hail Mary for it on my rosary in the mornings, and I thanked God for the nineteen years. And when the Mennonite Disaster Service crew came down from Rockingham County in June, with their hammers and their quiet manners and their hot lunches, and started framing the back of my house all over again, I stood at the edge of the work and kept my mouth shut and my chin up.
Those men worked six days a week for the better part of the summer and would not take a dime. The youngest could not have been seventeen. He planed the new kitchen windowsill out in the yard, rubbed it down with a rag, and said, “Ma’am, I wasn’t sure what you’d want to set on it.” I told him I would think about it.
I never did think of anything. That sill sat bare for weeks, a long clean board of pale pine, and I would go and stand beside it the way you stand next to a person who has stopped talking.