The Medal That Came Back From The Creek
“It’s about eight tenths of a mile from your house,” Aaron said. “I measured it on my phone afterward. By the road. I don’t know how far the water took it, going around the bends.”
He had been working for Mr. Selman since the first of September, he said. The flood had laid the whole bottom fence down, forty rods of it, and the posts had gone with it. Vernon Selman is a man of eighty who has been farming that ground since Eisenhower, and he would not touch the fence until the money came. The Farm Service Agency has a program that pays part of the cost when a flood takes your fence, and the paperwork had to be finished and the man had to come out and look before a single post could be pulled.
“So it sat there all summer,” Aaron said. “Just like the creek left it. Mr. Selman didn’t even let the cows in that field.”
The check came at the end of September. Aaron was the one hired to do the work, because Mr. Selman’s back was bad and his own grandson had a job in Roanoke. Aaron works the parts counter at the farm co-op Monday through Friday, and on Saturdays he strings fence.
“It was the second of October,” he said. “A Friday evening. I was pulling the old wire off the line to roll it up. The flood had left a mat on the bottom strand a foot thick, cornstalks and a bedsheet and pieces of somebody’s shingles, all of it wound into the wire and dried hard as a basket. I was cutting it loose with the bolt cutters. And there was a little chain in the middle of it, tangled up in the barbs, with the leaves packed around it. I thought it was a necklace.”
He stopped. He rubbed the back of his neck.
“It was right where the water had slowed down, you see. The fence caught everything that came across the field. I figure it came down the creek in the dark and went over the bank when the whole bottom filled up, and it just hung on the wire till somebody came and cut it down. If Mr. Selman hadn’t waited on the check, I’d have found it in June, I guess. If he hadn’t waited for the man from the government, the wire would have gone on the burn pile.”
“It was still on the wire.”
“Yes, ma’am. Five months.”
“Nobody walked that fence?”
“Mr. Selman did, a few times. Looked at it. Didn’t know what he was looking at, a mess. He’d have cleaned it up come spring, I guess, and it would have gone with the rest.”
I held the medal in my fist. It was as ordinary as that, and I could not have told you why it made it harder to bear and easier at the same time.
He did not know whose it was, he said. He did not know what it was, exactly. He asked Mr. Selman, and Mr. Selman looked at it a good while and said, “That’s a Catholic thing. Take it up to Saint Agnes. They’ll know what to do with it.”