The Medal That Came Back From The Creek
So that is the long way around, and now I can bring you back to my porch in October.
Aaron stood on the bottom step and I stood on the top one, and we looked at each other through the screen.
“Come up,” I said. “Don’t stand out in the heat.”
He came up. He did not open his hand. He was a head taller than me and I could see sweat on his lip, and I understood it was not the weather. He was afraid of me, or afraid of what he was about to do.
“Take your time, son.”
“I got it all worked out in the truck,” he said. “Now I can’t remember the first part.”
“Start in the middle, then.”
He almost smiled. Then he looked at his own closed hand as if it belonged to someone else.
“Ma’am, before I tell you where it was, I should say I cleaned it with my mother’s toothbrush. And some dish soap. I looked it up first. I’m sorry if I should have left it alone.”
He opened his hand.
It lay in his palm the way a leaf lies on a puddle. A small round medal on a thin tarnished chain. It was dark with age, nearly black at the edges, but he had scrubbed the face of it, and in the afternoon light it stood out plain. A big man wading across a river with a child on his shoulder. And on the left shoulder of the big man, a smooth worn hollow the size of a thumbprint.
The clasp at the end of the chain was bent open like a tiny mouth.
I do not remember sitting down. I remember the porch glider was behind me, and then I was in it, and the boy was down on one knee in front of me with his hand out, and I was looking at it without breathing.
I put out my hand. It was shaking so hard it could not find his.
He moved his palm to meet mine and tipped it, and the medal slid into my hand, light as a coin, cold from the shade and then not cold at all. My thumb found the worn place on the shoulder without my looking.
Aaron Latham knelt on my porch and said nothing, bless him, and did not once try to fill the quiet. I have thought since that he must have had a good mother.
“Turn it over,” I said finally.
He did not need to. I did. On the back, under the tarnish, I could feel the scratched letters with my fingernail. An F and a D, crooked, cut with a pocketknife by a homesick boy in a German barracks more than fifty years ago. And around the rim, in letters smaller than grains of rice, the words Saint Christopher protect us.
“Where was it?” I asked.
He told me.
“You know Mr. Selman’s bottom field?” he said. “Vernon Selman, on the Gap Road?”
I knew it. Everyone does. A long flat stretch of hay ground that runs down to the creek where Cabin Branch bends away from my place and goes under the county bridge. I had driven past it twice a week all summer, on the way to Genie’s and on the way to Mass, and each time I had looked at the ruin of the fence along the road and thought nothing about it at all.