Every Pontoon on the Cove Flew One

The Flag

I should tell you about the flag, because it matters, and because people have asked me since why I made such a thing over a three by five piece of cotton that cost Brady twenty-two dollars at the hardware store in Versailles.

Brady bought it the summer Drew was born. He came home with it in a paper sack and said a boy born in June ought to have a flag on his daddy’s boat by the Fourth.

It was nothing special. Sewn stripes, embroidered stars, a canvas header with two brass grommets.

He flew it every Fourth of July for nine years. Not all summer, just the Fourth. He clamped the pole to the back rail of the pontoon that morning, and he took it down at dark after the fireworks over the main channel, and he folded it and put it in the console with the life jacket whistles and the sunscreen.

By the ninth year the red stripes had gone a soft pink from the sun, and the end that flew loose had worked itself into threads.

Brady said a flag that looked like that had been out in the weather doing its job. He said it the way his dad said things, like it settled the matter.

He died in May, the year before all this, on a Saturday morning, mowing the slope down to our dock.

An aneurysm, the doctor said. He was thirty-eight. Drew found him. I am not going to write more about that day than that.

That first Fourth without him I did not take the boat out at all. The second Fourth, Drew asked me in June whether we were going in the parade, and whether we could fly Dad’s flag, and I said yes to both before I had thought about either one.

So when Willa pulled it off the rail, she was not pulling off a faded rag, no matter what it looked like from the point.

She was pulling off the one thing my son had asked me for that whole year.