The Purple Heart in the School Gym

The gym

The elementary school sits at the north end of town by the water tower.

It is one story of tan brick, built in 1961, with an addition from the nineties where they put the gym and the cafeteria together.

I parked in the visitor lot at eight forty. The program was at nine thirty.

It was a gray morning with a wind coming across the football field and a few dry leaves skittering along the curb.

Don’s pickup was already there. So was Earl Becker’s Buick, and the Olson brothers’ old Chevy, and three or four other cars I knew from the post lot on Friday nights.

I had not told Don what day it was. I had not told anybody.

Michelle must have, or Ethan, or Mrs. Halvorson had called the post. I never did find out, and I never asked.

Inside, the gym smelled like floor wax and the cafeteria’s cinnamon rolls.

The fourth grade had made paper flags, hundreds of them, red and white stripes in crayon, taped all along the cinder block walls.

The children came in by classes and sat cross-legged on the gym floor in long rows, the little ones in front, the fifth graders in back.

Mrs. Halvorson told me later there were three hundred and four of them.

The parents and grandparents filled the pull-out bleachers on one side. I saw Michelle near the top, in her red coat.

Greg was beside her in his work clothes, a gray quarter-zip with his agency’s name on it.

He saw me looking. He nodded once. I nodded back. Neither of us smiled, but there was nothing hard in it either.

Just two men who knew something was coming that neither of them could stop.

There were not enough seats for everybody, so the men from the post stood along the back wall under the scoreboard.

Don, Earl, the Olson brothers, a few more. Seven men in VFW caps with their hands folded in front of them.

Mrs. Halvorson met me at the side door. She is a tall woman with reading glasses on a beaded chain around her neck, and she shook my hand in both of hers.

“Mr. Kowalski,” she said. “I had your daughter in my first class, the fall of 1990. She cried every morning for a week. Ethan tells me you were a mail carrier.”

“Thirty-one years,” I said.

“Then you can talk to anybody,” she said. “Ethan is going to introduce you. He asked to. He wrote it out himself, and he’s been practicing it in the coat room all week.”