The Medal That Came Back From The Creek
“I was going to burn that Monday,” Vernon said.
“I know it,” I said.
“I wasn’t looking for anything. I never would have found it.”
“No. You wouldn’t have.” I wasn’t being unkind. “Neither would I.”
Aaron showed me the place. A stretch of the old bottom strand, three posts down from the corner, where the field dipped slightly toward the creek. The ground was still dark with silt there. A little sycamore sapling had come up since spring, the width of my finger, in the very spot, leaning toward the road.
I stood there with my hand on the new top wire and looked down the length of the field toward the creek, and I could see it. Not the medal, but the water. The whole field under it in the dark, spread out wide and slow, and every kind of small thing that belonged to somebody carried across it and laid against the wire.
“Your refrigerator ended up in my corn,” Vernon said, after a while.
“I know it did. I watched it go.”
“I hauled it out to the road with the tractor in May. Didn’t know whose it was.”
“It was mine.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t come over.”
“There was nothing to bring,” I said. “It was nice of you to haul it.”
He looked at the ground. He is eighty years old and I do not think anyone in a long time had told him that something he did was nice.
“There’s a crate of odds and ends in my barn,” he said. “Spoons. A shower curtain with ducks. A child’s boot. I couldn’t throw it out. You come on up and look, if you like.”
“I’d like that,” I said. And on Thursday I did. I did not find the saucer. I found three of my own spoons, bent flat, and a dish towel with a rooster on it that I had embroidered myself in 1989. I put the towel through the wash and hung it over the oven door.
Aaron drove me home. The sun was low behind the ridge, and I let my hand lie on the medal in my apron pocket all the way, and neither of us said much.
At the porch he came around to help me down from the cab, and then stood in front of me with his cap in both hands.
“I’m glad I came,” he said.
“So am I.”
“I almost didn’t. I’d stand there at the pickup with it in my pocket, Monday through Friday, and think, what if she doesn’t want it? What if it’s too late, and it just makes it worse?”
“It could not have made it worse,” I said. “The worst had already happened to it.”
He nodded, but I could see it did not quite fit in him yet. He was nineteen.
“I’ll tell you what you could do,” I said.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“My doorbell is not wired.”
He looked at the doorframe. He looked at the little white button the Mennonite crew had set in the casing in August with the two loose wires hanging out of the back of it.