The Bronze Star Clyde Gave Back

Clyde came to the bed. He did not say anything. He laid his hand over Vernon’s, the left one, where it rested on the blanket beside the tags. I watched Vernon’s thumb move once against the old man’s wrist.

“Army?” Vernon said. The word came slowly, in two pieces. “Army,” said Clyde. “Sixty-eight, sixty-nine. Fourth Infantry. And you?” “Twenty-four. Desert.” Vernon’s mouth worked. “Chain.”

Clyde nodded as if that were a whole speech, and perhaps for them it was. Before he left, Clyde stopped at the door.

He looked back at the table where the medal lay, with its ribbon spread out like a small blue road.

“You hold onto that, Vernon,” he said. “It’s worth a good deal more than three hundred dollars.” Vernon closed his eyes and smiled. I should say what became of Jarrod, because people ask, and because I think about him every day.

I do not know where he went that Thursday. On Monday, the second of November, the intake woman at the recovery center called me. She could not tell me much.

She said a young man had called on his own and come in with one bag and a bad cough, and that if I wanted to know more, I would have to ask him.

It has been a few days now. It may be a few weeks before I hear anything. I am not counting.

But I will tell you that the index card is gone, and the key is on the kitchen table, and the box of his things is still in the garage where I put it, with the lid folded down and nothing taken out.

Whatever he does, I made my choice on that porch.

I did not go to the sheriff. I did not put a charge on a boy who had already lost almost everything.

But I did not give him my husband’s bedside, either, or his father’s hand, or a place at the table where the medal used to hang.

He lost those. He lost them on a Tuesday, for three hundred dollars, and he knows exactly what they were worth.

The way back to his father is not closed. It is just not easy.

It runs through thirty days of getting clean, and a hand that does not shake, and the courage to walk into a hospital room and say the one thing that he has not yet said.

I will be waiting on the other side of that door. So will Vernon. Vernon stirred and half opened his eyes. He looked at me, then at the box.

“Nor,” he said. “Ah.” “I’m here.” “Still.” He reached for the medal, and his fingers found the ribbon, and he closed his hand around it like a man holding the end of a rope.

“Yes,” I said. “It’s still here.” He slept.

I sat there a long time in the yellow light, with my husband’s hand wrapped around the ribbon and a quiet in me that I had not felt since Sunday, the quiet of a thing returned.

Outside the window a freight train went by on the line below the hospital, long and slow. I counted the cars, as I did when I was a girl.

I got to forty-one before it was gone.