The Purple Heart Came Home to Main Street

“We can’t really say what’s on loan over the phone, bud. Not without a police report.”

“We don’t take military stuff.”

“Try back next week. Things move around.”

A woman at a shop in Miami, Oklahoma, was kind to me. She went and looked through her case while I waited, and came back and said she was sorry. A man in Springfield laughed and said I’d find it on the internet for three hundred dollars. I hung up on him.

By Wednesday I had called all forty-one. Thirty-four said no. Seven never called back. I made a mark next to every one.

Phil, my boss, caught me on the phone on Tuesday and asked what was going on. I told him. He is not a talker. He stood there with his hands on his belt for a minute.

“Take a long lunch if you need it,” he said. “Just get the shed wired by Friday.”

Grandpa did not ask about it. Not once. He knew I was calling, because I had left the list on his table. But at supper he talked about the weather and the price of propane and the Chiefs, and he never asked.

That was worse than if he had asked. I would have known what to say if he had asked. I did not know what to say to a man who would not.

Thursday I got off early because we were waiting on an inspection. I went over to his house at two in the afternoon to fix the porch light, which had been flickering for a month. Grandpa sat on the porch swing and watched me while I worked.

It was warm for the end of October, almost sixty, and the sun was on the porch. He had his coffee and his reading glasses pushed up on his head. I had the fixture down and was looking at a wire nut that had worked loose.

“I was nineteen,” he said.

I stopped what I was doing. He was looking out at the street.

“It was July,” he said. “Hot as anything. We were on that hill four days. They came at us at night and we pushed them back in the daytime. Over and over. I don’t remember much about it. I remember the noise.”

He was quiet for a while. I did not move.

“Boy next to me was from Ohio,” he said. “Danny. Danny Shea. We’d been together since Fort Ord. He was talking about his girl. Then he wasn’t.”

A car went by. Grandpa watched it go.

“I got hit the next morning,” he said. “Didn’t feel it at first. Thought somebody’d thrown a rock at me. They got me down the hill and onto a truck, and then onto a plane, and I woke up in Japan.”

“Is that where they gave it to you?” I asked.

He nodded. “A colonel came through the ward with a box of them. Read my name off a clipboard and pinned it on my pajamas. Took about ten seconds. I didn’t think much of it.”

He drank some coffee.

“Your grandma thought a lot of it,” he said. “That’s the truth. She had it engraved at the jeweler’s in Pittsburg the year we got married. Said if I was going to get shot for it, the least it could do was have my name on it.”

He almost smiled.

“I don’t wear it for me,” he said. “I wear it for Danny. And for her. She used to pin it on me. Every year, the morning of the parade, standing in the kitchen. After she passed, I had to learn to do it myself.”