The Veterans I Took Out on the Hayrack

Through the Color

I let the clutch out slow and the wagon rolled, and we went down Walt’s street and the length of town with people coming out on their porches to see, and then we were out on the river road with the maples coming down red and gold on both sides and the sun through them like light through a church window.

I drove with my hand easy on the wheel and I kept looking back.

By the first mile they had started.

It was just like Pop said. They sat quiet past the elevator and quiet past the edge of town.

Then somewhere out where the corn started, one of them, it was Ray Dietz, Marines, Korea, said something low. The man next to him laughed. And then they were all going.

I heard about a Christmas in a place so cold the coffee froze before you could drink it. I heard about a dog that followed a company for nine miles and what they named him. I heard two of them argue, laughing, about whose outfit had the worse food, and it went on for half a mile and settled nothing.

Ray Dietz leaned over to Walt and said something I did not catch, and Walt almost smiled. The man named Gene started a song, an old one, and got four words in and lost it and laughed at himself, and two of the others picked it up and carried it a line further than he could.

I understood then what Pop meant about getting to be back with his own. These men had wives who loved them and children who called and grandchildren who hugged them at the holidays. And none of that was this. None of that could be this. There is a room in an old soldier that only another old soldier can walk into, and the ride was the one afternoon a year somebody opened the door.

Walt did not talk. Walt sat in his corner with the robe on his knees and watched the color go by, and about halfway out, where Harlan’s corn stood tallest and goldest against the blue, Walt reached up with one spotted hand and caught a maple leaf out of the air where it had come down over the wagon side, a big red one, perfect.