The Purple Heart Came Home to Main Street

Grandpa saw it in my hand. He knew what I was doing, the way he always knew.

“No,” he said.

“Grandpa, he stole it.”

“He’s family,” he said. “Your mother’s family. Seth’s boy. I’m not having him in the county jail over me.”

“It’s not over you. It’s over what he did.”

“Cody.” He turned from the window and looked at me. He has pale blue eyes that have gone a little milky in the last few years, but they still work fine when he wants them to. “I said no.”

There was no arguing with that. There never had been. I put the phone back in my pocket.

Later I found out what that cost us.

A man at a shop in Pittsburg told me that if we had filed a report, a deputy could have run Grandpa’s name and the description through the pawn database the shops all report to, and probably found it in five minutes. But there was no report, and there was not going to be one, so nobody was going to look for it but me.

I called Mom that afternoon from my truck, parked in front of Grandpa’s house. She cried. She said she would call Seth, who was somewhere in Texas with a load of pipe. Seth called me back that night, from a truck stop outside Amarillo, and he sounded like a man who had been punched.

“I’ll be home the ninth,” he said. “I’ll deal with him.”

“I’m not waiting till the ninth,” I said.

“No,” Seth said. “I don’t guess you should. Find it, Cody. Whatever it costs, I’ll pay it.”

I told him I would find it. I did not tell him I had no idea how.

I work for Phil Mercer Electric out of Columbus. I am in my fourth year as an apprentice, which means I pull a lot of wire and bend a lot of conduit and get yelled at less than I used to. We were doing a new machine shed out east of town that week, and a remodel on a house in Baxter Springs.

Sunday after church, I sat at Grandpa’s kitchen table with a legal pad and my phone and started looking up pawn shops. I started in Joplin and Webb City and Carthage, because that is what Jared said. Then I kept going.

I drew a circle on a road atlas, a hundred and fifty miles out from Grandpa’s house. It took in all of southeast Kansas, the whole corner of Missouri up past Springfield, and a good piece of northeast Oklahoma down past Tulsa. When I was done, I had forty-one shops on the pad.

Grandpa came in while I was writing. He looked at the list over my shoulder for a while and did not say anything. Then he poured two cups of coffee and set one by my elbow and went out to sit on the porch.

Monday I started calling. I called on my lunch break, sitting on an overturned bucket in the machine shed with a sandwich on my knee. I called on my afternoon break. I called from the truck at four thirty before I drove home.

Most of the time a person answered. Sometimes I got a machine and left a message.

“I’m looking for a Purple Heart medal,” I would say. “Korean War. It might have come in on a loan in early September. There’s a name engraved on the back.”

“Purple Heart? No, sir. Not that I’ve seen.”