The Friday I Drove Dad to Rolla

The Legion Hall

We pulled into Rolla at eleven forty in the morning. The Legion hall sits on a side street off the main road, a low tan brick building with a flagpole out front and a paved lot beside it.

The lot had maybe a dozen pickups in it, a couple of them with Arkansas plates and one from Iowa. The sky was the blue you only get in October, with not a cloud in it.

The flag was out straight in the wind, snapping on the pole. Two old men were standing by the front door in their jackets, smoking and talking, and they both turned to watch us come.

I zipped up my gray co-op work jacket against the wind and came around to Dad’s side and opened his door.

He swung his legs out and sat there a second, getting his feet under him. Then he reached up and put his hand on my arm.

“Don’t let me fall in front of these boys,” he said, low, so nobody could hear but me.

“I won’t, Dad. I’ve got you.”

We walked across the lot together. He was slower than he used to be, but he walked straight up, and his hand was light on my arm, more for show than for need. He was looking at the door the whole way.

One of the men by the door was tall and stooped. He looked at Dad’s cap and then at Dad’s face, and he dropped his cigarette and stepped on it and pulled the door open for us, and said, “Morning, Sergeant.”

Dad had been a sergeant. I had forgotten that, or I had never really known it. He nodded to the man and said, “Morning,” and we went in.

Inside, the hall smelled like coffee and floor wax and somebody’s crockpot.

There were long tables set up with white paper on them and folding chairs all around, and a flag in the corner, and pictures on the walls of men from every war.

There were nine men there, from the battalion. I counted later. Some had wives with them, and some had sons or daughters, and one had a great-granddaughter about four years old in a pink coat running between the tables.

At the far table, a heavy old man was sitting with a cane hooked over the chair beside him.

A young man about twenty was next to him, peeling an orange. The old man looked up when the door closed behind us.

That was Virgil Stamper. I knew it before anybody said so. He was eighty-three years old, and his grandson had driven him four hours up from Arkansas that morning because his own wife could not make the trip anymore.

Virgil did not say hello. He did not wave. He put both hands on the table and pushed himself up out of his folding chair, slow, all the way to standing, and his grandson half rose to help him and Virgil waved him off.

Then Virgil brought his right hand up to his brow and held it there.

The room went quiet. Not all at once, but table by table, the way a church gets quiet when the pastor stands up. Even the little girl in the pink coat stopped running.

Dad let go of my arm. He stood up as straight as I have ever seen him stand, and he brought his hand up and returned it.

They held it a long second, two old men across a room. Then they both brought their hands down.

Nobody clapped. Nobody said anything. The man from the door, the tall one, cleared his throat and said, “Well, all right then,” and the talking started up again.

Dad walked to Virgil’s table by himself. I let him. Virgil’s grandson pulled out the chair next to his grandpa, and Dad sat down in it, and the grandson came over and stood with me.