The Flag Man of Platte County

Dr. Kessler was a small woman with reading glasses on a chain who said everything one time. She pulled up a picture of my heart on a screen and told me it was pumping about a quarter of what it should. I am 74 years old, and until that week I had never been sick a day I could not work through.

“Heart failure,” she said. “It has probably been getting worse for a couple of years. The cold did what it did because your heart cannot answer when you ask it to.”

I asked her what that meant for the detail.

“No standing in the cold. No standing in the heat. No more than about five minutes on your feet at a time. And no kneeling, Mr. Soukup.”

“A graveside runs twenty-two minutes,” I said.

“Then that is the problem,” she said.

Pills came in a plastic box with the days of the week on it. I was supposed to stop eating salt, which meant Audrey’s recipe cards were suddenly suspect.

Terri wanted me to move to Lincoln, where she had a basement room fixed up and two boys who would be glad of me.

“This is my house,” I said. “Your mother painted that ceiling.”

“Dad, you collapsed in a cemetery.”

“I did not collapse. I knelt.”

She put her hands over her face and laughed, and then she stopped laughing and left for Lincoln with her mouth shut tight.

The week after, Merle came. He is 81, a Navy man, a Seabee in the sixties, and he showed up on my porch with a casserole from the auxiliary ladies and his cap in his hand.

He did not talk about my heart. He talked about the price of corn, and then he cleared his throat and said they had been thinking.

“Post chaplain,” he said. “Or we make it official. Flag Sergeant Emeritus. You sit in a chair and you tell the young ones what they did wrong.”

“I’m not going to sit in a lawn chair at the edge of a grave and wave at it like it’s a parade,” I said.

“Nobody said wave.”

“I’m done, Merle.”

He looked at the green ledger sitting on the table between us, where it had lived since the day I bought it. He didn’t touch it.

“You’ve got the book,” he said.

“I’ve got the book.”

He put his cap back on and left the casserole. It was a good casserole. I didn’t tell him.

I want to say honestly what the next month was like, because the easy version makes me sound wiser than I was. I did not know what a man is who does not fold the flag. I hadn’t been anything else in public since 1985. I was a retired feed truck driver and a widower and a father who lived too far away to be useful, and I was a flag man. Take that last one off, and the rest did not add up to enough to stand on.

The house was very quiet. The phone did not ring about funerals, which is something I had not known the sound of until it stopped. Later I found out Merle had told everyone not to call me. He thought it was a mercy. My beagle, Scout, followed me from room to room like I might leave. I read the obituary page every morning, looking for the word Army or Navy or Marine, the way a man looks for his own name.