The Purple Heart Came Home to Main Street

I did not tell Grandpa. I thought about it. But I had been wrong once already that month, about something mattering, and I did not want to get his hopes up and then find out it was a different Walter Brandvold, or that something had gone wrong.

I left at seven thirty Saturday morning. It is about forty minutes from Grandpa’s town to Joplin, over the state line through Galena. The sun was coming up behind me, and there was frost on the fields, and a few combines still out in the soybeans.

I passed the turnoff to Jared’s old apartment in Galena. I did not think about him much on that drive. I thought about Grandma, standing in the kitchen with a safety pin, and about a boy named Danny Shea from Ohio.

Lonnie’s shop was a low block building on Range Line, between a tire place and a Mexican restaurant. It had bars on the windows and a neon open sign that was not lit yet when I pulled in at ten till nine. I sat in the truck and waited.

At nine exactly the sign came on. I went in.

Lonnie was in his sixties, a big man with gray hair cut short and reading glasses hanging on a cord around his neck. He was behind a long glass case full of rings and watches and a few handguns. Guitars hung on the wall behind him. It smelled like coffee and old wood.

“You’re the grandson,” he said.

“Yes, sir. Cody Brandvold.”

He went in the back and came out with a small plastic bag. He set it on the glass between us and opened it, and he laid the medal out on a square of black felt.

There it was. The purple ribbon with the white edge. The gold-colored heart, and the purple in the middle of it, and George Washington’s face in profile. I turned it over. Walter J. Brandvold, in little slanted letters. And under that, smaller, a date Grandma had added. 1955.

I had to look at the guitars on the wall for a minute.

Lonnie gave me the time. He pulled a little cardboard tag off the ribbon and looked at it.

“It came in on September fourth,” he said. “Sixty-dollar loan, thirty days. I held it the extra time the state gives, and then some, because I don’t like putting these out. Nobody came. Had to go in the case.”

He showed me the tag. It said $160.

“I know that’s more than the loan,” he said. “That’s what they go for. People collect them. There’s men who’d pay three hundred.”

“I’ll pay it,” I said. I had brought two hundred in cash in an envelope, because I did not know what it would be.

“Who’s the fellow?” Lonnie said. “Your grandpa. Tell me about him.”

So I told him. Pork Chop Hill. Nineteen years old. The hospital in Japan. Forty-one years laying brick. The parade every November 11 in his good coat. Grandma and the jeweler in Pittsburg. I did not tell him about Jared. I did not need to. He had the ticket.

When I was done, Lonnie took his glasses off and let them hang. He rubbed his eyes with his thumb and his finger.

“My dad was in Korea too,” he said. “Marine. He never talked about it. Not one word, his whole life.”

He took a pen out of his shirt pocket. He pulled the tag off, tore it in half, and wrote out a new one in block letters. He turned it so I could read it.

$140.

“Mr. Lonnie,” I said, “you don’t have to do that.”