The Purple Heart Came Home to Main Street

Veterans Day came up bright and cold. Thirty-one degrees on the bank sign when I drove through town at eight. No wind. The sky that hard, clean blue you only get in November, when every bit of haze is gone.

Main Street in our town is three blocks of old brick storefronts, a few of them empty now. There is a hardware store, a cafe, an insurance office and the Legion hall. The town puts American flags on every light pole the week before Memorial Day and the week before Veterans Day.

The parade steps off from the school at ten. It is not a big parade. The high school band, the fire trucks, the Legion color guard, a few tractors, the Scouts, the Shriners from Pittsburg in their little cars, a float the FFA kids build. It takes twenty minutes to go by. Everybody comes anyway.

I picked Grandpa up at nine fifteen. He was waiting on the porch in his navy blue wool coat, the good one, buttoned to the top. His thin white hair was combed flat with water. He had his gloves in his pocket and his folding lawn chair leaning against the porch post.

He had nothing on his coat. A small, flat spot over his heart where something should have been.

“Ready?” I said.

“Ready as I’ll be,” he said.

I put his chair in the back of my truck and helped him up into the cab. On the drive over he did not say anything. He looked out the window at the flags.

I parked behind the hardware store and carried his chair around front. We took the same spot we always take, on the east curb, in front of the cafe. A few people were already there with their chairs and their coffee. Folks he has known for seventy years.

“Morning, Walt,” a woman said.

“Morning,” he said.

I set the chair up on the curb and he sat down in it, slow, with his hand on my arm. I tucked a blanket over his knees. He let me.

I looked across the street.

Jared was there. He was sitting in a green lawn chair outside the insurance office, directly across from us, alone. Seth stood a ways down the curb from him, by the bank, with his arms crossed. Jared had a stocking cap on and his hands jammed in his pockets, and he was looking at the pavement.

Grandpa saw him. He did not nod or wave. He just saw him, and then he looked up the street toward the school, where the band was starting to warm up.

I knelt down on the curb beside Grandpa’s chair. The concrete was cold through my jeans. I reached into the inside pocket of my Carhartt jacket and took out the little white box and held it out to him.

“What’s this?” he said.

“Open it,” I said.

He took his gloves off one finger at a time and put them in his lap. Then he took the box. His hands are big and spotted and knotted up at the knuckles from all those years of brick. He got the lid off on the second try.

He looked into it for a long time. He did not say anything. His face did not change much. His mouth moved a little at the corner. Then he took the plastic bag out, and the medal out of the bag, and turned it over in his palm.

He read the back. He ran his thumb over Grandma’s letters.

“Where,” he said. Then he stopped.