The Medal That Came Back From The Creek
Then I took the medal out of my apron and set it on the table between us, in a square of afternoon sun.
We both looked at it.
“Can I ask about your people?” I said.
He said there was just his mother, Marla, who cleans rooms at the motel out by the interstate, and his grandfather, who has a place up Dry Fork and a lung condition. His father had gone to Ohio for work when Aaron was nine and sent money for a while. Aaron said all this flatly, the way you recite a mailing address, without asking for a thing.
“I want to go to the community college and do the diesel program,” he said. “I’ve got two classes to save for. That’s why the fence.”
“Nobody pays you to look for what’s lost, I suppose,” I said.
“No, ma’am. I’d have found it anyway. It’s not like I went looking.”
“That’s right,” I said. “You didn’t.”
He picked the medal up and held it close to the window, the way you hold a thing you’ve been afraid to look at. He found the F and the D and ran his thumb over them, and I watched him do it.
“Somebody carried this a long time,” he said.
“A mother handed it to a soldier,” I said. “He handed it to his son. His son mailed it to me. I have been holding it ever since.”
I told him about Drew then. The towels on the floor, and the bass voice. The summer he was fifteen and drove Ferrell’s old Ford pickup into the Maddoxs’ pond and came to the kitchen door and said, “Mama, I have to tell you something, and I want you to stay calm.” How he mowed old Mrs. Fenwick’s yard for nothing for six years, and how she came to his funeral in a wheelchair and said, “He never let me pay him a nickel.”
I do not know how long I talked. I did not plan it. When I stopped, the sun had moved off the table and onto the floor.
“Would you show me?” I said.
He drove, and I rode in the cab of the white truck with my pocketbook in my lap and my hand in my apron pocket. It smelled of fence staples and oil. Aaron drove the Gap Road under thirty miles an hour, as though I might break.
Vernon Selman was out on his porch when we pulled in, an old man in bib overalls who rose to his feet when he saw who was in the truck. We had waved at each other from our vehicles for forty years. I do not think we had spoken a hundred words.
“Wilma,” he said.
“Vernon.”
“I heard you were home.”
“I came to see where my medal was.”
He nodded as if this were an ordinary errand, and put on his hat, and walked with us down the lane.
The bottom field lay flat and yellow in the afternoon, the second cutting already off and the stubble ruffled by wind. Along the road the old fence was gone and a new one stood in its place, straight as a ruled line, with silver wire and bright steel posts. At the near end Aaron had rolled up the old wire in big rusted coils, and there they lay in the weeds, taller than my knee, matted through with cornstalks and rags.