The Medals My Sister Sold
Forty dollars. That is what my brother’s Purple Heart, his Bronze Star, and the flag they folded off his coffin in 1969 were marked at on a card table in our mother’s front yard, in a walnut shadow box my father had built with his own two hands. Forty dollars, written on a scrap of index card in my sister’s round handwriting, propped against the glass like a price on a lamp. I did not see that card until the box was already gone, carried off down the gravel driveway in a stranger’s arms while I stood at the fence with a paper plate of somebody else’s potato salad going warm in my hand, too stunned to run.
I need to tell you who Roy was before I tell you what my sister did, because if I start with the forty dollars you will think this is a story about money, and it was never about money. Money is the smallest, cheapest thing that happened on that lawn.
My name is Dale Keller. I am seventy-two years old, and I have lived my whole life inside the same forty miles of Dunmore County, Nebraska, a flat stretch of corn and soybeans and two-lane roads where the biggest building in town is the grain elevator and the second biggest is the Methodist church. I was born in the back bedroom of a farmhouse outside the town of Oakridge, and I expect I will die somewhere close to it. My brother Roy was eight years older than me, and for the first ten years of my life he was the whole sky.
Roy Keller was born in 1947, the first child, and I came along in 1955, the last. In between there was our sister, Darlene, born in 1951. So Roy was the oldest, Darlene was the middle, and I was the baby, the one nobody planned for, the one Roy used to carry on his shoulders down the lane to the mailbox so I could feel like I was tall. I have a memory, one of my first clear ones, of sitting up there with my hands fisted in his hair, and him telling me to hold on, cowboy, and me holding on, and the gravel going by under us, and feeling, for the length of that lane, completely safe in a way I have spent the rest of my life trying to feel again.
Roy was the kind of older brother a small boy invents in his head, except he was real. He taught me to throw a baseball in the side yard until it was too dark to see the ball. He taught me to bait a hook, to drive the old Ford tractor sitting in his lap before my feet could reach the pedals, to whistle through a blade of grass. When our father got hard, and our father could get very hard, it was Roy who stepped between us, who took the words and sometimes worse so that I did not have to. He was not a saint. He wrecked a truck once and lied about it. He had a temper that came up fast and went down just as fast. But he loved me in the uncomplicated, total way that an older brother can love a little one, and I built most of who I am on the foundation of being Roy Keller’s kid brother.