Sixty Wreaths on the Hill

From the gate you could see them running in rows down the hill like stitches in a quilt.

Dwain stood and looked at them with his cap in his hand before he started unloading.

I had worn my navy wool coat, the good one, because I always wear it on wreath Saturday.

My father bought me that coat the last Christmas he was alive. It is too warm for church and not warm enough for chores, and it is just right for this.

I tucked my short gray hair behind my ears, and we started.

We began at the west end, the way we always do, with the Union soldier.

The kids took turns, the way they always do. One child carries the wreath, and one child reads the name off the stone.

Then we kneel down and set the wreath against the stone, bow on top, and we say, “Thank you for your service,” and we go on to the next one.

Kenna read the first name. Her voice was small in all that cold air.

She read his rank and his name, and his Wisconsin regiment, and the years. Then Garland laid the wreath.

It takes a long time to lay sixty wreaths properly. That is the point.

You are supposed to say every name out loud, so the hill hears them one more year.

There were the farm boys from the First World War, and the ones from the Second.

There were three from Korea. There was my father, and the four others from Vietnam.

Bernadine read the name of a boy who died in France in 1918, at nineteen.

She stopped and read the dates again to herself. Then she said, “He was only seven years older than me.”

By half past ten we had fifty-nine laid. The sun was all over the snow by then, so bright it hurt to look, and the bows stood out like drops of red paint up and down the rows.

Noble’s wreath was the last one. I had held it back on purpose. We always end at my father’s stone, in the newest row on the east side, where the hill starts down toward our place.

I had decided the night before that Dad was getting Noble’s wreath. Dad would have loved that wreath more than any I ever made him in fifteen years.

He was a man who fixed fence with baling wire and wore his good shirt inside out in the field to save it.

He threw nothing away that might be good for something.

He would have held that lopsided thing up to the light and turned it around and said, “Now who built this one? This here is a working wreath.” I could hear him saying it.

Noble carried it down the row in both arms like it was a baby. His cheeks were bright red, and his stocking cap was down over his eyebrows.

Kenna walked beside him, reading the stones under her breath to practice, because she wanted to be the one to say her great-grandpa’s name.

She had asked me twice how to say Army right.

I knelt down in the snow at Dad’s stone. It is plain gray granite, nothing fancy, with his name and his years and the words United States Army.

Below that is my mother’s name, because she has been there with him four years.

I like to think they argue about the weather up there the way they did in the kitchen.

I took the wreath from Noble and was setting it against the stone when I heard a truck door shut down at the gate. Then another one.