The Flag Man of Platte County
On the second Tuesday in March I read that Harlan Wehrbein had died at the age of 88. Harlan was a Navy man who served on a destroyer in Korea and then farmed near Lindsay for sixty years. The service was Friday at ten, at a country cemetery north of Duncan where the road turns to gravel.
I told myself I wasn’t going.
At nine-thirty on Friday morning I was in my truck. I did not go in. I parked on the gravel by the cemetery gate, a good hundred yards back, where I could see the tent through the windshield and nobody would see me. I kept the heater running and a thermos of coffee on the seat, which Dr. Kessler would have approved of, and a blanket over my knees.
I watched the detail come up the lane. Merle, with the colors. Seven riflemen. Dwayne at the head of the casket. At the foot, in my place, in the white gloves, Cody Brockhaus.
When the volleys went off, three of them, I felt every one in my teeth and I jumped in my seat like a boy. Then they folded the flag.
I know that fold the way a man knows his own signature, and I know when it is wrong. Cody started well. The lengthwise folds were clean. The first few triangles were sharp. But on the ninth fold he let the point wander, just a quarter inch, just enough that the stars would drift when the cloth came together at the end. It would not show to anyone in that cemetery but a man who had done it 1,210 times.
He knelt in front of Harlan’s daughter. I could not hear him from where I was. I saw his mouth move and I saw him stop after the words. He looked up at the sky for a second like he was hoping something would be written there. Then he put his head down and got up.
When it was over, the detail broke. Cody stood by the tent a minute, and then he took off his cap and looked out at the gate, and he saw my truck. I don’t know how. It’s a gray Ford, and there are a lot of gray Fords.
He walked down the lane in his white gloves, all the way down, a hundred yards of gravel. He stopped at my window and tapped on the glass with one knuckle. I rolled it down two inches.
“Was it right, Sergeant?”
I could have lied.
“The ninth fold,” I said. “You’re letting the stars drift.”
His face did something. I couldn’t tell whether it was relief or the other thing.
“Will you show me?”
“I can’t kneel.”
“You don’t have to kneel to fold,” Cody said.
The heater ticked. A crow walked along the top of the cemetery fence.
“Tuesday,” I said. “Four o’clock. Bring your own flag.”
He came every Tuesday for six weeks. He brought a practice flag, a cotton three by five he’d bought at the farm store for nineteen dollars, and I cleared the oilcloth on the kitchen table, the one with the little blue roosters that Audrey put down in 1994. I sat with my coffee. He stood.
He is a tall young man, Cody, with a farmer’s neck and a way of listening with his whole forehead. He did four years in the Army and one tour in Kuwait, and now he works for a grain outfit out of Humphrey, and he drove in on his own time to stand in an old man’s kitchen.