The Veterans I Took Out on the Hayrack

Walt

Saturday came in cold and bright and still, the kind of October day you would order if they let you.

I had the church wagon washed and the hay fresh and loaded, bales broke open and spread deep and soft. Dale had the tractor, Pop’s old tractor, no, we did not have Pop’s, Chet had that one. We used Harlan’s, a green John Deere that Harlan backed up to the wagon himself and hitched with his own hands and then handed me the seat with a little bow like I was gentry.

“Field road’s clear all the way to the river and back,” Harlan said. “You go slow past the low spot, there’s a wash. Otherwise she’s smooth.”

We went and got Walt first, like I said we would.

Walt Pruitt lives in a little white house in town with a flag bracket by the door and no flag in it anymore, because he cannot get up the step ladder to run it up and will not ask. He came to the door in a VFW ball cap and a jacket with his unit on it, and he had his good shoes on, and I understood when I saw those shoes that Bud had told him and that Walt had been up since dawn getting ready.

“They sent a pretty girl,” Walt said. His voice was a thread. “What’s the occasion.”

“We’re taking you for a ride, Mr. Pruitt. Out the river road. There’s cider.”

He stood in the door and looked past me at the wagon in the street. The oak sides and the hay, Bud already up in it waving, the other men.

I watched his face do the thing a face does when it does not trust what it is being offered.

“Nobody’s taken me anywhere in two years,” he said. He said it plain, the way you would say the date. “Not since Marie. The kids are in Des Moines. I go to the box and back.”

“Then you’re overdue,” I said, and I held out my arm.

It took three of us to get Walt up into the wagon, Dale and Bud lifting and me steadying, and we sat him in the front corner with his back against the oak and a wool lap robe over his knees, and Walt Pruitt put both his hands flat on that robe and looked at the men around him, nine old soldiers in the hay in the cold bright air, and he did not say one word for a long time.

Then he said, “Well, I’ll be.” And that was all, but it was enough to go on.