Every Dock
It took me three weekends. Some families were only there on Saturdays, and some came down from Kansas City once a month, and I wanted to put a flag in every hand myself instead of leaving it on a dock box.
I walked the shore path with a canvas carrier’s bag over my shoulder, the old kind, the one I used my first year on the route before I got the car.
I had the flags rolled on their poles with the clamps rubber-banded on, sticking out of the top of the bag like cattails.
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I did not make a speech at any dock. I just said, “This is for the Fourth, if you want to fly it in the parade. It’s on me. Brady always flew one.”
Most people did not need more than that. Agnes Hagen hugged me so hard my bag swung around and hit Heath in the knee.
Old Mr. Kessler at the far end of the cove, who is ninety-four and has not taken his boat out in four years, held the flag in his lap a long time.
He said he had flown one on a Navy landing ship off Korea when he was nineteen. He said his grandson would take the boat out for the parade if he had to drag him down from Columbia.
A young couple from Blue Springs who had only bought their place that spring tried to pay me.
I would not let them. The wife cried a little and said they did not know anyone on the lake yet. I said they did now.
At one dock a man I did not know well, a retired trucker who keeps a bass boat beside his pontoon, asked me straight out if this was about what Willa did.
I said no. I said it was about Brady. He looked at me a minute and said, “All right,” and took the flag, and that was honest of both of us.
By the third Saturday I had one flag left in the bag. I had saved her dock for last on purpose. I had driven past her box on the ridge every day for ten months, putting her electric bill and her seed catalogs in it, and I still did not know what I was going to say.