The Footlocker Nobody Threw Away

Carried In

It was a block and a half from the Veterans of Foreign Wars hall to Lyle’s driveway, and I have never seen the town of Alder Creek behave as it did that night.

Word had gone down the phone tree again. By the time Lyle’s pickup backed out of the driveway, with the footlocker in the bed on the folded blanket and Duane riding beside it with his hand on the lid, there were eleven trucks behind it with their lights on in the dusk.

Nobody honked. Nobody said anything. The line crept down Main Street at walking pace past the feed store, the hardware store, and the Dairy Queen, which was closed for the season, and people came out onto the sidewalks and stood.

The post hall is a low cinder block building with a flagpole, a bar, and a bingo board on the wall. On a Wednesday night in November, nineteen people were in it who had no reason to be there except my father.

Four men carried it in. Duane took one corner, Lyle Kuehn took another, and a retired Marine named Gene took a third. A boy of about nineteen from the Legion post, who had never met my father, took the last, and his hands were shaking.

They set it down on the long table at the front, under the framed photographs of the post’s dead going back to the Second World War.

“Now,” Duane said.

I took the brass key out of my purse. I had carried it for three days. It fit the padlock without a sound, and the hasp swung up, and I put both hands under the lid.

The room had gone completely quiet.

I lifted it.

The Letter Under the Flag

On top, in a dry cleaner’s bag, lay my father’s Army dress jacket. It was the green coat of his own service, pressed and folded with tissue in the sleeves. I did not touch the front of it. I could not.

Under that were his dress shirt, a pair of his old boots wrapped in a pillowcase, a black beret nobody could explain, and a mess kit. A small tin of bootblack that still smelled the way the back room of the feed store had always smelled.

Under the clothes was a bundle of letters tied in kitchen twine. They were in my grandmother’s hand, a hundred of them maybe, each one numbered on the envelope.

And in a clear plastic case, folded in the old crisp triangle, was a flag.

I knew it before anyone said. I had seen it exactly once, when I was nine, in my grandfather’s casket procession. The faded blue field with its stars showed on the outside of the fold, and it still looked as if somebody had pressed it that morning.

“That’s Stanley’s,” I said. My voice sounded like somebody else’s. “My grandfather drove a supply truck in the Army in France. They gave Dad the flag at the funeral. Dad never had a wall for it.”

“He never wanted to hang it by himself,” Duane said, very low.

Underneath the flag lay a plain white envelope. It had one word on it, in the square capital printing I had known all my life from birthday cards and the lids of mason jars.

Jodi.

I sat down on a folding chair. Ken knelt beside me.