The Purple Heart Came Home to Main Street

The cedar box was empty. Grandpa stood at his dresser with the lid in one hand and the other hand flat on the dresser top, like he needed it to hold him up.

It was the fourth Saturday in October, a little after ten in the morning. I had come over to clean his gutters before the oak in the side yard finished dropping everything it had. I came in for a glass of water and found him like that.

“Grandpa?” I said from the bedroom door.

He did not turn around. He looked down into the box for a long time. Then he set the lid back on it, square and careful, the way he does everything, and walked past me into the kitchen.

I went and looked. I knew what was supposed to be in there. I had known my whole life. The box was cedar, about the size of a loaf of bread, and it smelled the way it always smelled when you lifted the lid.

His discharge papers were in it, folded in thirds. A photograph of him and Grandma at the Pittsburg train depot in 1954. Her wedding ring, which he kept there after she passed. A pocketknife with a yellow handle.

The purple ribbon and the heart were not in it. The little blue case the medal lived in was there, open and empty, the satin pressed flat in the shape of something that was gone.

My grandfather is Walt Brandvold. He is 92 years old. He was nineteen on Pork Chop Hill in July of 1953, with the Seventh Infantry Division, in the last month of the Korean War, and a piece of mortar shell went into his side.

They pinned the Purple Heart on him in a hospital in Japan. He came home to Cherokee County, Kansas, married June Ostrander, laid brick for forty-one years, and raised my dad. Then, after my dad died, he helped raise me.

Every Veterans Day of my life, he took that medal out of the cedar box and wore it to the parade on Main Street. He did not wear a uniform or a cap with patches. Just his good coat and that one medal.

I went into the kitchen. He was standing at the sink looking out the window at the bird feeder. He had not run any water.

“It’s gone,” I said.

“I saw,” he said.

“Did you move it? Did you take it somewhere?”

He shook his head once. He did not say anything else, and he did not have to. There was only one other person living in that house.

I should explain about Jared, because people always ask why he was there at all.

My dad, Kermit Brandvold, died on Highway 400 when I was eleven. A grain truck crossed the center line in the fog. Mom and I lived with Grandpa and Grandma for almost two years after that, and Grandpa taught me how to do most things a man does with his hands.

When I was fourteen, Mom married Seth Kessel. Seth is a decent man. He drives over the road for a freight company out of Joplin and is gone three weeks out of four. He came with a son, Jared, who was nineteen then and already more trouble than Seth could handle.

Jared is my stepbrother. He is thirty-four now. He has been married and divorced, has worked at a tire shop and a feed mill and a body shop, and has lost all three jobs for the same reason. He drinks. He quits, and then he does not.