The Name I Read From the Bleachers

The color guard

For a second nothing happened. The band teacher froze with her arms still up.

A little boy in the front section turned all the way around on the floor to look at me. I could hear the clock over the scoreboard.

Then Jaden Ochoa moved.

Jaden was the captain of the student color guard, seventeen years old, a senior, a tall boy who rides my Route Six bus every morning and always says “Thank you, ma’am” when he gets off, every single morning since kindergarten.

He was standing at the front of the color guard near the stage with the American flag.

Three other kids stood with him, one with the Kansas flag, one with the school’s blue banner, and one with the Legion’s rifle. They had been standing at attention through the whole program.

Jaden did not look at Lonnie. He did not look at the principal.

He looked straight across the floor at my father, and he said one quiet word to the other three, and the four of them turned.

They did it the way they had practiced on the football field all fall, a slow quarter wheel, the flags dipping just a little and coming back up, until the whole color guard was facing the first chair on the left in the front row.

I will never forget the sound that came next. It was not clapping. It was four hundred pairs of sneakers on a gym floor.

It started in the senior section and rolled toward the little kids like wind going through standing wheat.

They stood up. All of them. The seniors first, then the juniors, then the middle schoolers, then the little ones on the floor, who did not know exactly why but saw the big kids do it and scrambled up with their teachers’ hands on their shoulders.

The teachers stood. The cooks in the kitchen doorway stood. Old Arlo, who farmed east of us for forty years and still wears his seed cap to church, stood up in the bleachers across the way with his cane and his oxygen and his wife holding his elbow.

And on the stage, at the podium, with the microphone in front of him and nowhere at all to look, Lonnie Pruett stood at attention too.

He had to. Everyone in the building was standing. He was the only person in the gym still holding the paper.