The morning of the fourteenth came in cool and clear, the kind of September morning that made the fields along Highway 47 look rinsed. James Walter Harris stood in the small bedroom he had shared with Maggie for forty-one years and buttoned his shirt with hands that were steadier than he had expected them to be. The shirt was white and pressed. Sarah had pressed it the night before at the motel and brought it over in a garment bag, and she had not asked him if he wanted help. She had simply hung it on the back of the door and said, "It's there, Dad," the way Maggie used to say things that were not really about the shirt.
Downstairs he could hear David moving around the kitchen, making too much coffee the way he always did when he did not know what to do with his worry. Noah was already outside. Through the window James could see him in the yard in his dress uniform, standing by the motorcycle, not touching it, just standing there with his cap in his hands like a man on guard duty who had assigned the post to himself.
"You ate?" David called up the stairs.
"I'm about to," James said.
"You said that twenty minutes ago."
"Then it's twice as true now."
He heard David snort, and it loosened something in his chest. On the dresser, in a small wooden box Maggie had bought at a church sale in 1987 and declared too good for cufflinks, lay the brass insignia. He picked it up. It was heavier than people expected when he handed it to them. Most insignia was. Most memory was, too, if you were honest about it. Twelve notches filed along the lower edge, none of them perfectly even, because Sammy Ruiz had filed them by hand in a tent that smelled of oil and wet canvas, with a file he had borrowed and never returned.
James turned it over. On the back, scratched so fine you had to tilt it to the light, were initials Sammy had put there without asking permission. J.W.H. Underneath, smaller still: SO WE DON'T LIE ABOUT THE NUMBER.
He closed his fingers around it.
"We're ready when you are," Sarah said. "No rush."
"There's a rush," James said gently. "They start at ten whether I'm sentimental in my bedroom or not. Army's funny that way."
Lily came in and, without ceremony, pinned nothing, fixed nothing, just reached out and straightened his collar where it had folded under. Her hands were cool. "You look like a photograph," she said.
"Old photograph."
"The good kind. The kind people keep."
He wanted to answer that properly and could not find a way that did not sound grand, so he nodded and put the insignia into his breast pocket, over his heart, where it would ride to Fort Callahan the way it had ridden on the motorcycle for more than fifty years. He would take it out when they asked him to. Until then it stayed close.
Fort Callahan had dressed itself without making a fuss about it. That was Colonel Daniel Ortiz's doing, James suspected. A lesser commander might have ordered bunting on every fence post and a band large enough to drown conversation. Daniel had ordered the grove cleared, the grass cut, rows of folding chairs set in the shade of the young oaks that had been planted the previous spring, and a simple lectern with a microphone that a young private was testing with the haunted expression of a man who knows a microphone can betray an entire ceremony with one screech.
"Sergeant Major." Daniel Ortiz came across the gravel in his dress uniform, and for a moment James saw not the colonel, not the commander of the post, but Miguel Ortiz's son at fourteen, all elbows, standing in Maggie's kitchen asking whether Vietnam had really been as hot as his father said, and whether his father had really once fallen asleep standing up. Daniel shook his hand and then, protocol be damned, embraced him carefully, the way younger soldiers embrace very old ones, mindful of ribs and dignity in equal measure.
"You came," Daniel said into his shoulder.
"I said I would."
"I know what you said. I also know what today costs." He stepped back and looked at him plainly. "If at any point you need to sit down, or step out, or tell the whole program to go to hell β you do it. I'll handle the program."
"You've got a chaplain and about two hundred people, Daniel."
"Then I'll handle them too."
Noah took his place with the honor detail near the flag, spine straight, face set in the particular blankness young soldiers wear when they are determined not to cry in formation and have not yet learned that nobody in the formation would think less of them if they did. James caught his eye once. Noah did not smile. He gave the smallest nod, a professional courtesy between soldiers that happened also to be between a grandfather and a grandson, and James returned it and then looked firmly at his program so that both of them could get through the next hour.
The program was plain. Welcome. Invocation. Remarks. Unveiling. Reading of the names. Remarks by the guest of honor β James winced every time he read that phrase β and then the presentation of the flag and a reception in the hall. Plain on paper. Nothing about it was plain.
Daniel stepped to the lectern first. He did not begin with James, and James was grateful. He began with the grove.