The Purple Heart in the School Gym

Friday at the post

Our VFW post meets in a block building out on the state highway, next to the implement dealer.

Friday night there is a fish fry, perch or cod, coleslaw, rye bread, and a potato pancake if you ask for it.

My friend Don has been running the fryers for nine years. He is seventy-seven, a year older than me, and he was in the 25th Infantry Division in 1968.

We did not know each other over there. We met in this building in 1979.

I told him about Sunday while he was wiping down the steel table after the rush.

I did not mean to tell him the whole thing. It came out anyway, the way things do with Don.

He listened without stopping his rag. When I was done he folded the rag in half, and then in half again, and he set it on the corner of the table.

“So what are you going to do about it?” Don asked.

“Nothing,” I said. “What is there to do? Argue with my son-in-law about whether I got shot? I’m not going to stand in my daughter’s kitchen and show him my scars.”

“No,” Don said. “You’re not. But that boy is going to grow up believing his grandpa is a liar, Len. Or he’s going to grow up believing his dad is one. One of the two.”

That stopped me. I had not thought about it that way, that Ethan was going to have to pick, and that there was no way for him to pick that did not cost him something.

“You never told anybody, did you,” Don said. It was not a question. “Not even at the post. Thirty years of fish fries and I don’t know how you got that medal.”

“No,” I said.

“Well,” Don said, and he picked his rag back up, “maybe it’s about time somebody asked you right.”

The phone call

Somebody did. It was Ethan, the next Thursday after supper, on Michelle’s phone.

I could hear the television going in the background and his mother telling him not to stand in front of the door.

“Grandpa,” he said, “Mrs. Halvorson says every class has to find a veteran for the Veterans Day program. Somebody to come and talk. She says the veteran has to talk to the whole school.”

“That’s a big job,” I said.

“Tyler already asked his great-grandpa, but he’s ninety-three and he can’t do the bleachers,” Ethan said. “So Mrs. Halvorson said maybe I could ask somebody.”

He stopped. I waited. I could hear him breathing the way kids breathe when they have rehearsed something in their room and are now afraid of it.

“Would you come?” he said. “And would you tell about the medal? I want to know which one is true. Dad says one thing, and you never say anything. I want to know which one is true.”

I sat there with the phone to my ear in my own kitchen.

The clock over the stove was the one my wife bought at the Ben Franklin store the year Michelle was born. It said six forty.

“I’ll come,” I said. “And I’ll tell it true, Ethan. All of it that a school can hear.”

“Okay,” he said, and then, very fast, “I’m sorry about Tyler. I’m sorry I said it.”

“You said what you heard from somebody you love,” I said. “That isn’t something to be sorry for. You just wait for Wednesday.”