The Flag Man of Platte County

I let out a breath I had been holding since the cemetery gate.

They finished the thirteenth. Cody took the last bit of cloth, and before he tucked it in, he stopped. He reached into the pocket of his dress coat with his gloved hand, and I saw him take out three brass rifle casings.

I know what they are. The rifle party saves them for me, three from the last volley, and I tuck them in the fold before the last tuck. Some people say they stand for duty and honor and country. I never said that to anybody. It seemed like the kind of thing a flag ought to have in it.

He set them inside the triangle. He tucked the corner. He held the flag out flat on his two palms, and he went down on one knee in front of my chair.

His knee made no sound at all. He is 27.

“Sergeant Raymond Soukup,” Cody said.

His voice shook on the first word. He stopped, and he began again.

“On behalf of this post, the families of Platte County, and a grateful nation, please accept this flag as a symbol of our appreciation for your honorable and faithful service.”

It was close to the words, changed in two places where he’d had to. He said it clean.

“There’s a sentence that comes after,” Cody said. “A man taught me that. I asked around to find the true one.”

“Ray Soukup never let a flag touch the ground. Not in the blizzard of ’96, not at 106 degrees in 2012, not at Lester Hoefs’s grave on the twelfth of February, when he went down on one knee and held up his corner of it like it weighed nothing. These are the three from that day.”

I understood then what was in the fold. They were not the three that went into Lester’s flag. Cody had picked up three more out of the snow at Lester’s grave, after the third volley, on the morning I went down. He had kept them in the cupholder of his truck for ten weeks.

I took the flag.

I have handed over 1,210 of them, and I had never once held one on the receiving end. A folded flag weighs about as much as a loaf of bread. It was warm, from Cody’s hands, and something inside it shifted, a small dry sound against the cloth.

Behind me, Terri made a noise I had not heard from her since she was a baby. I didn’t look. If I had looked I would have gone to pieces in front of the families, and the one thing I know is that you don’t. So I kept my eyes on the stars, and I held it in my lap.

Merle held out the microphone.

I don’t make speeches. I took it anyway, and I waited for a true sentence to come, because Emil said you find one. I had nothing. I looked at three hundred and seventy-one people.

“Emil Sladek told me to keep it short,” I said. “Thank you.”

Somebody in the back laughed, and then the whole hall did, a good broken laugh that turned into the sound of people sitting down.

They came by one at a time after that, while the ladies cut the cakes. Nobody told them to line up. They took my hand and said their veteran’s name, and then they said what I had said about him. They had been carrying my sentences around in their heads for years. Some for thirty.