The Purple Heart in the School Gym

Who stood up

For a second nobody did anything. Three hundred children sat cross-legged on a waxed floor and looked at an old man in a navy coat, and nobody was sure what was supposed to come next.

Then, along the back wall, Don came off it. He took two steps forward onto the gym floor, put his heels together, and came to attention.

He brought his right hand up in a salute and held it there.

I have seen Don salute a hundred times at a hundred funerals.

I had never seen him salute like that, slow and square, his old hand flat and shaking a little at the brim of his cap.

Earl Becker stepped out beside him and did the same. Then the Olson brothers.

Then the rest of them, seven old men in a line under the scoreboard, standing at attention for Jimmy Fisk.

The gym was so quiet I could hear the wind against the high windows. Mrs. Halvorson had her hand over her mouth. A few of the teachers had their hands over their hearts.

Then I heard the bleachers creak.

I looked up. Greg was on his feet. He stood there a moment, up near the top, in his gray work quarter-zip, and every parent in that section turned to look at him.

Then he came down. He came down the bleacher steps one at a time, the metal ringing under his work boots, and he walked across the end of the gym floor, behind the fifth graders.

He did not look at me. He went to the back wall and stood at the end of the line, next to the youngest of the Olson brothers.

He had never served a day. He put his hand over his heart.

After that the parents started standing, row by row, all up the bleachers. Then the teachers.

Then the fifth graders, who did not know quite why, and then all three hundred of those kids, the little ones last, grabbing each other’s hands to get up.

Nobody clapped for a long time. I think they did not know if they should. Then Mrs.

Halvorson started, and the whole gym came in behind her, and I stood there at the microphone with my hand on my grandson’s shoulder and could not see much of anything.