The Footlocker Nobody Threw Away

“The Army thing,” Craig said. “My nephew helped me carry it down. It went out with the mattress.”

“It had my grandfather’s flag in it.”

That was the only time something moved across his face. It was not guilt. It was more like a man doing sums and not liking where they came out.

“I didn’t know that, ma’am,” he said. “Nobody told me. A footlocker’s a footlocker.”

Then he asked whether I would mind signing for the new keys, since the old ones were mine to return.

I did not scream. I want that said, because I have thought about it many times since. I am not a screamer, and my father was not either, and I remembered that standing in the street.

I took the keys out of my coat pocket, the ones the hospital had handed me in a clear plastic bag with his wallet and his reading glasses, and I set them in his palm.

One of them stayed in my other hand. It was small and brass and it fit a padlock. I had been holding it all day without letting myself think what it was for.

A Civil Matter

I called the Marathon County sheriff from Craig Steffen’s driveway, because I did not know what else a person does.

The deputy who came was a young man named Tyler, with a gentle voice and a Packers lanyard for his keys. He listened to all of it. He wrote down the address, the time, and the word footlocker.

Then he stood on the sidewalk with his thumbs in his belt and told me the truth, which was not what I wanted.

“Ma’am, I’m real sorry. That’s a civil matter. He didn’t break in and he didn’t steal anything. It was his unit.”

“It was my father’s things.”

“Yes, ma’am. And that’s what a lawyer would be for.”

I called one the next morning, a woman in Wausau who did estate work and who gave me twenty minutes for free. I will always be grateful that she did not pretend.

“Say you win,” she said. “The footlocker is gone. They’ll put a price on it. Used footlocker, some old clothes, a few keepsakes. Four hundred dollars, maybe five.”

“How long?”

“Small claims, with a hearing, in this county? Eight months. More if he asks for a continuance, and he will.”

I did not sue.

I know some people reading this think I should have, and I have gone back and forth on it myself at three in the morning. But I looked at it from every side and I always came out in the same place.

A judge could give me a check. A check would not have a flag in it, and it would not have my father’s handwriting in it either, and by the time anyone signed the check the thing I wanted would have been under a hundred feet of county garbage for most of a year.

I was not asking a court to put a price on my grandfather’s flag. I wanted to find it. That was the only thing I wanted in the world that week, and it did not seem like something a lawyer could do.

So I thanked her, and I hung up, and I went looking.