The Medal That Came Back From The Creek
“My granny was Catholic,” Aaron said. “She had one like it on her rearview mirror. So on Monday I took it up to the church office on my lunch hour.”
Rita Sheehan has run the parish office at St. Agnes since before the last two priests, and she keeps a roll of butterscotch candies in her top drawer for crying children. She looked at the medal through her reading glasses, and then she took the glasses off and did not say anything for a minute.
“Where did you get that?” she asked him.
He told her. She picked it up with two fingers like it might break.
“I believe that’s Wilma Dossett’s,” she said.
“How can you tell?” Aaron said.
“Because she showed it to me, years ago, the day the Legion hung her boy’s picture in the parish hall,” Rita said. “She took it out of her purse and put it in my hand and didn’t say a word. See that smooth place on the shoulder? That’s her thumb. I have never forgotten it.”
“And then she told me you were at your sister’s in Marion,” Aaron said to me, “and that you’d be back in your house on Wednesday, when the cabinets were in. She said she’d hold the medal and put it in your hand herself at Mass on Sunday. It’s what a person would do.”
“Rita is a sensible woman,” I said.
“Yes, ma’am. But she said something else.” He looked at his boots. “She said, ‘Don’t give it to me. You go tell her where it was. She will want to know where it was, and I can’t tell her that. Only you can.'”
I understood her at once. When something has been lost to the water, you do not only want it back. You want to know the road it took.
“I didn’t want to just hand it over and have it be a thing that happened to somebody else,” he said. “I didn’t know what to say. I still don’t. So I waited till Saturday.”
“You waited a whole week with it in your hand?”
“In my shirt pocket. I wore the same shirt to work four days.” He ducked his head. “My mother said something.”
I laughed. It came out short and wet, half a sob, and it loosened something in my chest that had been wound tight since April.
I stood up slowly, with my hand on the glider arm. I put the medal in my apron pocket where my thumb could stay on it, and I opened the screen door.
“You’re coming in this house,” I said.
“Ma’am, I don’t want to put you out. You just got home.”
“Aaron Latham, I am seventy-one years old and I have not had a young person at my table since the Fourth of July. You are coming in.”
He looked at me. I think he could see I meant it.
He sat in a kitchen chair that did not match anything, in his work boots, with his cap on his knee. I cut him a slab of apple stack cake that Hobie’s wife had left on my counter under a dish towel, and I poured him milk because I had no coffee made. He ate it in four bites and looked guilty about it, and I cut him another piece without a word.