The Name I Read From the Bleachers

Dad at the kitchen table

I drove out to Dad’s place that Saturday afternoon to bring him groceries.

It was a clear day, cold and blue, and the wheat was up green and even in the field across the road, the way it is in November when the fall rains come right.

He was at the kitchen table with the card from the second graders propped against the sugar bowl. He had his reading glasses on and he was counting the flags.

“Thirty eight have the right number of stripes,” he said, without looking up. “Two of them have nineteen. One of them gave up at six and drew a dog.”

“That’s not bad for second grade,” I said.

“It’s better than the Army did.” He set the card down. He took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes.

I put the milk away and the bread and the coffee, and I sat down across from him. The kitchen clock ticked.

Out the window, a pickup went by on the gravel and left a long brown tail of dust in the sunshine.

“You didn’t have to do that, Charlie,” he said. He is the only person alive who still calls me Charlie.

“I know.”

“I’d have been all right. I’ve sat through worse than a man not saying my name.”

“I know you have, Dad.”

He was quiet a long time. Then he said something he had never said to me before in fifty eight years, not once, not at Mom’s funeral and not on any Veterans Day.

“There was a boy in my company from Iowa,” he said. “Nineteen years old. Freckles like a turkey egg. He used to read the roll for the platoon in the mornings, because the sergeant couldn’t pronounce half of us.”

I did not move. I was afraid if I moved he would stop.

“He always said my name right,” Dad said. “Wendelin. Everybody else said Wendell. That boy said it right every morning. And then one morning in the spring of ’53 the sergeant read the roll himself, and he got to that boy’s name, and nobody answered.”

He picked the card back up and looked at it, at the dog on the sixth stripe.

“When you stood up in those bleachers,” he said, “you said it right. Wendelin. Every syllable. That’s the first time anybody’s read it out loud like that since that boy from Iowa.”

I reached across the table and put my hand on his, on the scar from the combine belt, on the old big knuckles. He turned his hand over and held mine.

We sat there like that a while. Neither one of us said anything. The sun came across the table and lit up all those crooked little flags.