Driving to the Post
The VFW post in our town is a low brick building out by the grain elevator, and Bud Hollis has been the post commander there longer than I have been married.
Bud was Navy, a gunner’s mate on a destroyer off Vietnam, and he is seventy eight now and still stands like the deck might pitch under him any second. I found him in the post hall folding flags, and I told him what I meant to do.
He listened all the way through without a word. Then he set the flag down square on the table and looked at me.
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“Pop’s ride,” he said.
“Pop’s ride. Saturday. The church wagon, out Harlan Voss’s road. I’ll drive. Cider at the gate. Free, the way it was. I can seat fourteen.”
Bud’s jaw worked. He is not a man who shows much.
“We lost Kowalski in March,” he said. “And Dale Simmons in July, not your Dale, the other one. There’s maybe nine of us left who could climb up in a wagon. Walt Pruitt’s ninety two. He hasn’t been out of that house since Marie passed.”
“Nine’s a good load,” I said. “The church wagon seats fourteen.”
“Nine’s what I’ve got. Ray Dietz still drives himself. The Ferris boys, both of them, though neither one’s a boy now. Carl. Gene. Me.” Bud counted them off on his fingers the way a man counts a muster he has stood too many times. “And Walt, if Walt will come. Walt’s the one I worry over. He’s the oldest and he’s got the least reason left to say yes to anything.”
“Then Walt’s the one we go get first,” I said again, because I meant it, and Bud heard that I meant it.
“Then we’ll go get Walt first,” I said.
Bud looked at me a long moment, and something moved in his face that I had not seen on it before, and then he picked the flag back up because a man like Bud needs his hands busy when he is about to feel something.
“I’ll make the calls,” he said. “Saturday. What time?”
“Two. The color’s best at two.”
“We’ll be ready.” He folded the flag down to its triangle, that tight blue triangle with the stars, and he set it on the stack. “Rhonda. Chet know you’re doing this?”
“Not yet.”
“He’s going to.”
“I know it.”
“Good,” Bud said, and for just a second the old gunner’s mate showed through the church-social manners. “Let him.”