The Flag Man of Platte County

It was nine degrees at Lester Hoefs’s grave, and the wind coming across the cornstubble went straight through my dress coat and out the other side.

I had folded the flag at 1,210 funerals before that one, so I knew what nine degrees does. It stiffens the white gloves and makes the fingers inside them stupid. It makes Taps sound thin. It turns a widow’s face the color of the sky.

Lester was 91. He flew in the tail of a B-17 for the Army Air Forces, came home to Platte County in 1945, and farmed a half section three miles down the road from my place for fifty years. He never once let me leave his kitchen without a jar of something.

His wife Marcella sat at the edge of the tent in a wheelchair with a blanket over her knees and her son Gary standing behind her. She was 89. She had her chin up.

We took our places the way we always did. Seven riflemen on the rise to the east. Merle Stuhr, our post commander, at the head of the grave with the colors. Dwayne Pospisil at the head of the casket and me at the foot, each of us holding our end of the flag taut over the box.

Dwayne and I have held opposite ends of that cloth for thirty-one years, and we have never spoken during it. You don’t.

The riflemen fired three volleys. I felt each one in my teeth. Then the bugler lifted the horn, and Taps came across the field, and I stood with my arms out and my eyes on the stripes and tried to keep my breathing quiet.

Somewhere in the second line of it, the edges of everything went white.

It did not hurt. That is what I tell people, and they never believe me. It was more like somebody turning down the lights in a church, slowly, from the sides in. I could see the flag and nothing else. I could hear the note, and I could not feel my feet.

I remember thinking, very clearly, you do not let it touch the ground.

Not a thought about my heart, or my daughter, or whether I would embarrass myself in front of Marcella Hoefs. Just that. Forty years had worn a groove in me, and the groove said keep the flag up.

So when my knees went, I went down slow. I kept my arms high and my elbows locked, and I folded myself down under that flag like a man ducking under a clothesline, until my right knee found the snow.

I did not let go of my corner. I want that on the record, because nobody else is going to put it there.

A hand got under my elbow. It was Cody Brockhaus, who is 27 and had been standing the rifle line that morning, and who had broken from it, which you do not do.

“I got you, Sergeant.”

“Let go of my elbow,” I said.

He did not let go. With his other hand he took my corner of the flag out of my fist, one finger at a time, and raised it himself.

That is what I did not see until later, when Terri told me, and then Dwayne, and then Merle. Dwayne never moved his end. Cody held my corner up with one hand and my arm with the other. The bugler played every note, and the last one hung out over the field until it was gone. Nobody let that flag down. They held it up around a man kneeling in the snow, and it never touched the ground.