The Flag Man of Platte County
I will tell you what I learned in those Tuesdays that I had not learned in forty years of doing it. A person who has done a thing 1,210 times cannot see how he does it. I had to watch it done wrong to see the thing I did right.
“Your thumbs,” I told him, the third Tuesday. “You’re using your fingers on the ninth. Use the thumbs. Pinch it, and hold it, and let the cloth come to you.”
He tried it. The point stopped wandering.
“There,” I said. “Don’t make it go. Let it come.” I heard myself say it and thought it sounded like Emil.
He knew the words. What he did not know was how to find the sentence.
“I just say the words and it’s over,” Cody said. “I don’t know what comes after.”
So I showed him the ledger.
I slid it across the oilcloth, and he opened it carefully, like it might break. He read down the page for a long time, the sentences in my square handwriting getting smaller over the years as my eyes got worse.
“These are all true?” he said.
“Every one. A man can’t say a false thing at a grave.”
“How do you find them?”
“I ask,” I said. “That’s the whole trick. You ask somebody who knew him what he was like when nobody was looking, and then you pick the shortest true thing they say.”
He turned pages so long that I went to the sink to fill the coffeepot. When I turned around, he had stopped on a page near the middle.
“Number 917,” he said.
It was February of 2016. I did not need to look.
“Emmett Brockhaus,” he read. “Army. He taught three boys to shoot straight and not one to lie.”
I put the coffeepot down.
“That was your grandfather,” I said.
“I was seventeen.” Cody turned the book around so I could see my own writing. “My dad stood there and didn’t say a word the whole time. Then you said that. And my uncle Dean, who hadn’t cried at the hospital or at the church, put his hand over his face.”
“I do,” Cody said. “I told them I wanted to do the flag when I joined the post. I think I just wanted somebody to say something true about my grandpa one more time, to somebody else’s family.”
He closed the ledger and set it down square on the oilcloth, the way you put back a thing that belongs to someone you respect.
I would like to say I said something wise. What I said was, “Ninth fold. Again.”
He laughed. He did it again, with his thumbs, and it was right.
For forty minutes that afternoon I sat in my own kitchen and watched the thing I know better than anything on this earth being done carefully by a young man who wanted to do it right, and I was happy. It’s a strange feeling, to be happy about a thing you can no longer do yourself. It’s smaller than the old kind. But it holds a weight.
I told no one. Scout the dog knew, because he sat under the table through every minute of it, with his chin on Cody’s boot.
Terri came down the third Sunday in April with a pot roast, and she let me have one piece. She did not bring up Lincoln, which was the first time in two months.