Sixty Wreaths on the Hill

Before I could answer, Noble stepped up beside her in the snow. “I made that one,” he said. “By myself. Grandma said it’s good enough for a general.”

Then he took his mother’s thin glove in his mittened hand, and he said, “You can help me.”

Just like that. Like it was the easiest thing in the world. So the two of them laid it together, my grandson and his mother, kneeling side by side in the snow.

Kaylee held it steady and Noble pushed it up snug against the stone.

And Kenna read her great-grandpa’s name out loud in a clear voice, every word of it, and United States Army at the end, the way she had practiced all the way down the row.

That was sixty. Noble said so. “That’s sixty,” he said, to nobody in particular.

Then the Legion cars came up over the rise and turned in at the gate, and it was eleven o’clock.

There were six of them that year. Ephraim has been post commander as long as I can remember, and he is eighty-four.

Otto carries the flag. The four others were all past seventy, in their blue Legion caps and heavy coats.

Ephraim stood at the gate and looked up the hill at all sixty wreaths, every red bow standing up against the snow. He looked for a long time. Then he took off his cap.

He knew. Of course he knew. Verlie’s sister is married to his cousin, and in our part of the country that is about as private as the church bulletin.

He walked up the row with Otto and the flag behind him. He walked slow, because of his hip.

And he stopped right in front of Kaylee, who stood up out of the snow to face him.

I held my breath. Ephraim is not a hard man, but he served on a Navy ship at nineteen and he has buried a great many friends. He does not suffer foolishness about the dead.

He looked at her for a long moment. Then he said, “You must be Josh’s wife.”

She said she was. Her chin was up, and her thin gloves were wet through.

“Most of these men up here don’t have anybody left to say their names,” Ephraim said. “Marlys says them. These kids say them. Now you’ve heard them said.”

“Yes, sir,” Kaylee said. She did not cry. I will give her that. She stood there in the cold in front of six old men who all knew what she had done, and she took it.

Ephraim nodded once, like a man closing a gate behind his cattle, and he put his cap back on his head.

Then he said, “Next December, you come help her make them.” It was not a question. Kaylee said, “Yes, sir,” again, and that was all.

That was the whole of it. Out here, that is enough. It has always been enough.

The Legion formed up at the top of the hill by the spruce trees.

Otto raised the flag, and it hung there in the still air, and then a little breath of wind lifted it.

Ephraim said a short prayer, the same one he says every year. He asked the Lord to keep these men, and to keep the rest of us worthy of them. We all bowed our heads.

Then they fired the three volleys. Noble jumped at every one of them and held onto his mother’s coat with both hands, and she put her arm down around him.