The Flag Man of Platte County

On Monday morning I went to the kitchen table to write down my weight, and the green book was gone. The place where it had lain for a month was just a clean rectangle on the oilcloth.

I called her at the hospital. She picked up on the second ring, whispering.

“Dad, I’m at work.”

“Did you take my ledger?”

There was a pause I could hear.

“I took it to the library,” she said. “To scan it. In case of a fire, Dad, or a flood. It’s forty years of your handwriting, and it’s the only copy.”

That was a true thing. It was also not the only thing. She has her mother’s pause.

“I want it back by Friday,” I said.

“You’ll have it by Friday.”

On Wednesday morning Merle called.

“Saturday,” he said. “One o’clock at the hall. Post business. Wear your good jacket.”

“Is this about the book?”

“Wear the good jacket, Ray.”

He hung up before I could ask anything else, and the answer arrived all at once, the way the obvious thing does. They wanted my cap. They wanted my white gloves, and my name off the list, and this was how a post says goodbye. A hall, a cake, a handshake.

I decided I would take it standing up. That is a figure of speech. I could not stand five minutes.

The ledger was not back by Friday. I went to bed furious in the particular way old men get furious, with no one to say it to and the dog looking at me.

Saturday was seventy-one degrees, the first warm day of the year. Terri showed up at the house at ten in the morning, in her good dress, with my gray jacket on a hanger. It was the one I’d worn to Audrey’s funeral.

“I’m driving,” she said.

“I can drive.”

“Dad.”

It did not occur to me to wonder why a nurse would give up a Saturday morning and an hour and a quarter of highway for post business. I put on the jacket. She had also brought my ledger. I saw it on the back seat, wrapped in a clean dish towel, and she did not say a word about it, and neither did I.

A quarter mile before the hall, the pickups started, parked on both shoulders with their tires in the ditch grass. Farm trucks and church minivans, a school bus.

“Somebody’s funeral,” I said. “Who died?”

“Nobody, Dad.”

The lot was packed. People stood on the lawn in their church clothes. Men in clean seed caps, women in spring coats, kids in 4-H jackets with their hair wet-combed. I saw a woman near the door holding a wooden case against her chest with the glass catching the sun, and I knew the case. I knew the shape of it.

Then I saw another one. And another.

They parted for me. Nobody said a word, not one, in a crowd that size. I could hear the flagpole rope ticking against the pole.

Inside, every folding chair was taken and the walls were lined three deep. The hall smelled like coffee and floor wax, the way it has since 1985, and the ladies of the auxiliary stood along the back with sheet cakes that nobody was touching.

Merle stood at a microphone at the front, in his good black cap. He didn’t smile.

“Ray,” he said. “Sit down for me.”

I sat. There was one empty chair in the front row, and it was mine.