The Truck Waiting at the Curb

“Folks, before we step off, I want to tell you who’s leading today.”

Rick’s head came up.

“Home from deployment just two weeks. A lance corporal in the United States Marine Corps. In the truck he rebuilt, with his grandfather’s tools, by himself, over the same summers his grandfather wasn’t here to see it.” Hank cleared his throat. “Cody Hale.”

I had one hand on the dash, and I felt the engine come up through the floorboard as Cody put her in gear.

Gwen unrolled the banner out the window, and two Scouts ran up and took the ends and held them wide.

Welcome Home Lance Corporal Cody Hale.

Main Street stood up. I cannot say it any better than that.

The old men in the folding chairs got up one at a time, the way old men do, with a hand on a knee, and then the people on the curb, and then the whole sidewalk, three and four deep, until I could not see a face that was not looking at my son.

Somebody yelled his name. The drum line started a cadence. A little girl on her father’s shoulders waved a flag with both hands.

Cody did not wave back. He drove with both hands on the wheel, looking straight down Main, and I saw his jaw working. His eyes were wet.

He was twenty-two years old and he drove my father’s truck down the middle of the street he grew up on at exactly five miles an hour.

I did not look at the reviewing stand. I want to be clear about that, because I am not proud of everything I felt that morning and I would not like you to think I looked.

Rick stood there in front of the whole town with the clipboard in his hand, and he did not move, and he did not speak.

I did not have to look to know it. Everyone near the stand saw. The men from his church saw it, and the men from the post, and two of the crew from the gravel yard.

Hank was waiting at the platform steps when the truck pulled even. Rick had not moved.

Hank climbed up beside him, and I heard it only because the microphone was still live and the street was quiet enough to carry it.

“Rick,” Hank said, quietly, “I’ll take that clipboard.”

Nobody laughed. Nobody said a word. My brother stood there a long moment with his hand tight on the board and his hat in the other. Then he gave it to him.

Cody lifted two fingers from the top of the wheel as we passed.

It was Daddy’s wave, the one he gave every truck on every county road for fifty years. He did not turn his head, and he did not smile.

We rolled on. Gwen did not look back either.

She was holding the banner out the window with both hands, and she was crying with her mouth shut tight, which is how a woman cries who has decided to keep her feet.

At the end of the route, at the fairgrounds, the post served chili and cornbread out of the back of a stock trailer. Men came by the truck one at a time.