The Purple Heart in the School Gym

The medal in his hand

After the program the children went back to their classrooms by grades, and the parents came down out of the bleachers, and the men from the post came up to shake my hand.

Don did not shake it. He put his arms around me, which he had never done in forty-seven years, and he held on and patted me twice on the back, hard, the way men our age do.

“Took you long enough,” he said in my ear.

“You set that up,” I said. “The seven of you. You set that up.”

“We just came for the cinnamon rolls,” Don said. Then he let go of me and went off to find the cafeteria, wiping his eyes with the back of his wrist like the rest of us were blind.

Mrs. Halvorson let Ethan stay behind with me for a few minutes. The gym was mostly empty by then, the custodian already folding up chairs, the paper flags still taped to the walls.

Ethan stood in front of me with his hands in his pockets. He looked at the medal on my coat for a long time before he said anything.

“Grandpa,” he said. “Can I hold it?”

I unpinned it. My fingers did not want to work the clasp, and it took me a while, and he waited.

Then I took his hand and turned it over, palm up, and I laid the medal in it.

He did not close his fingers on it right away. He just looked at it. George Washington in gold.

The purple ribbon. He held his hand very flat and very still, the way you would hold a bird’s egg.

“It’s heavy,” he said.

“It is,” I said.

“Was Jimmy your best friend?”

“He was,” I said. “For about seven months he was the best friend I ever had. Then I had your grandma. Then I had your mom. Then I had you.”

Ethan closed his fingers on it then, slowly. He held his fist against his chest, against the button-down shirt, and he leaned his whole forehead into the front of my coat, and he did not say anything at all.

I put my hand on the back of his combed head. I had held that head when he was two days old.

I stood in the middle of that gym with him and thought of my wife, and how long she had waited, and how I had made her wait.

“I’m sorry I said it,” he said into my coat. “To Tyler. I’m going to tell him I’m sorry.”

“That’s a good man’s thing to do,” I said.

The parking lot

Greg was waiting by my truck. Michelle had gone back in to sign Ethan out for the rest of the day, because he wanted to come to lunch with us, and she had said yes without asking anybody.

Greg was standing by the tailgate with his hands in the pocket of his quarter-zip and his collar turned up against the wind. When he saw me coming he took his hands out.

“Len,” he said.

“Greg.”

He looked at the parking lot. He looked at the water tower. He looked anywhere but at me for a while, and I let him, because I knew the feeling.

“My dad was in the Army,” Greg said finally. “Sixty-six to sixty-eight. My whole life he told stories about Vietnam. The jungle. A buddy who died in his arms. He had a whole drawer of stuff. I used to take it out and look at it.”

“Okay,” I said.

“He died when I was twenty-six,” Greg said. “We wanted the honor guard at the funeral, so my mom had to find his discharge papers for the funeral home. The man from the funeral home read his service out loud at the service.”

He swallowed. “He was a clerk. He typed. Two years at Fort Hood, Texas. He never left the country. Every single story was something out of a movie or a book. Every one. And the whole church heard it, all in one minute.”

I did not say anything. There was nothing to say that would have been any use to him.

“My mom never got over it,” Greg said. “I didn’t either. I decided right then every old guy with a war story was full of it. It was easier. Then I wouldn’t ever get fooled again.”

“And then you married into a family with an old guy who wouldn’t tell any,” I said.