The Welcome Home at the Elevator

The road

Cole wanted to drive his own truck, an old blue Ford I had kept running for him for three years, changing the oil on the first Saturday of every month. I rode in the passenger seat. Sheila and Maddie followed in the van.

For forty minutes he did not say much. He rolled the window down and let the Ohio air in.

Bean stubble stretched on both sides, gold and flat, and the corn that was left stood brown and rattling. A hawk sat on a fence post. He watched every mile of it.

“Where are we having it?” he asked, around Marion. “The VFW?” “There’s been a change.” “Dad.” “You’ll see.” He gave me a long look, a sideways one, the way his grandfather used to.

Two hours north of the airport, we turned off the state route at Ridgeton. We passed the feed store, and the church, and the Dollar General.

The first mile of County Road 12 was empty. Cole slowed down. “Is something wrong?” “Keep going.” Then I saw the lights.

A red fire engine sat on the shoulder at the top of the rise, its light bar turning slow and bright in the daylight. Another one sat behind it. Then the tanker, white and red.

Then the people. They stood on both sides of the road. One deep at first, then two deep, then more than that. Men in seed caps and Carhartt vests.

Women in church coats. Kids on their fathers’ shoulders. Teenagers in letter jackets. They held small flags on sticks, big flags on porch poles, a flag on a hoe handle.

A farmer I did not know held a flag in each hand and wept without bothering to hide it.

The six kids from the band stood on the bed of a flatbed hay wagon, brass flashing in the sun. They began the Marines’ Hymn as we came up the rise.

Cole’s breath caught. “Dad.” “I know.” “Dad, who is all this?” “Everybody, I think.” His hand was shaking.

He gripped the wheel at ten and two like he was seventeen on a driving test.

Somewhere past two hundred, I quit counting. A man on the left had a bedsheet banner with Cole’s name on it in blue spray paint.

A girl at the end of the line held one side of it. I realized she was the teller from the bank.

The elevator stood at the end of the road, white and tall against a hard blue sky.

The lot below it was packed with trucks and cars and long tables, steam rising off the roasters, the scale house door propped open with a cinder block.

At the entrance to the lot, in a wheelchair, in his old Army field jacket with the Korean War patch faded to almost nothing, sat Vern Tolliver. He is ninety-two years old. He had been my father’s neighbor for fifty years.

He was already trying to stand. “Dad, he can’t.” “Watch.” Cole stopped the truck. He got out. He did not remember, I think, to turn off the engine.

He walked up to the old man in his utilities with his cover in his hand, and he stopped about five feet away. He put the cover on. He came to attention.

Vern got to his feet with one hand on the arm of the chair and the other on a young man’s shoulder. It took him a full ten seconds.

Then he lifted his right hand slowly to his brow and held it there. Cole saluted him back. The whole road went silent. Three hundred people, and I could hear a flag snap on the pole.

“Welcome home, son,” Vern said. My boy’s face broke, just once, at the corner of the mouth. He held the salute for another second.

Then he dropped it, bent down, and put both arms around that ninety-two-year-old man like he was made of glass.

I heard Gloria Schaefer behind me say, “Oh, Lord.” I heard Sheila crying. I did not look at either of them.

I was looking at my son’s back, shaking, in the middle of a gravel lot in Ridgeton, Ohio, and I thought: this is what I wanted. This is the one thing I wanted.

I wanted somebody to say it out loud to him, in front of everyone.