The Flag Man of Platte County

When the last note was finished, Dwayne and Cody folded it with me kneeling there between them. Merle came around the casket and crouched beside me, his knee cracking like a rifle bolt.

“Ray, you stay put.”

“I’m presenting it.”

“Not this time.”

Cody took the folded flag and went to Marcella and knelt in front of her chair. He said the words the government gives us, and he said them right. He did not say anything after, because I had never shown him that part.

Marcella took the flag in both hands. She did not look at Cody. She looked past him at me, still down on one knee, and she waited. Anybody in this county who has been to more than two veterans’ funerals knows there is a sentence that comes after the words, and that it comes from me.

So I said it from the snow, as loud as I could make it. “Lester pulled four neighbors’ cars out of the ditch with that old Farmall in the winter of ’78, and never took a dime from any of them.”

Gary Hoefs laughed, once, and put his hand over his mouth. Marcella nodded the way a person nods when someone has finally read her the right number.

That was the last one I said.

Dwayne and Cody got me into the cab of my own truck, and Merle drove me to the hospital in Columbus himself, because he said it was the only vehicle in the county he trusted to do eighty without rattling. I was wearing my dress coat and my white gloves in the emergency room. A nurse asked me if I knew what day it was. I said it was Thursday, February the twelfth, and I had a flag to fold.

People ask how a man ends up folding 1,211 flags. The honest answer is that nobody else wanted to learn, and Emil Sladek was running out of time.

Emil had been the flag man at our post since 1946. He was a rifleman in Italy in the Army, and he came home and drove a milk truck and never said ten words about the war. By 1985 he was 69, with a tremor in both hands that got worse every winter, and he could not get the thirteenth fold to sit right anymore.

I was 33 that year. I had come home from Vietnam in 1972, a sergeant in the Army who had spent a year driving a truck on roads I’d just as soon not describe, and I had not walked into a veterans’ hall since. My father had died the winter before. My wife Audrey said I needed to be around men who had been somewhere, and she said it in the voice that ended arguments.

So I went. The first night Emil looked me over from the end of the bar and said, “You have big hands. Can you keep them still?”

I said I thought so.

He taught me in the back room with a bedsheet, because he said you do not learn on the real thing. Thirteen folds. Lengthwise twice, and then triangles from the striped end, over and over, tight as a cigar, until there is nothing left showing but the blue field and the stars.

He taught me the words next. They change with the branch, and I learned all of them. They thank the family on behalf of the President and a grateful nation. Then he said the thing I have thought about nearly every day since.