A Tribute to Bravery Lost

To this day I don’t remember the old man’s name, though I’m sure he was a distant cousin of some sort. That’s the nature of small-town life. Everyone’s related. In my little girl’s memory, the old man had lived a rickety life in an old rickety house the color of ashes down the road past Mr. Fred Springs’s store where my sisters and I bought penny candy by the ton. He meant nothing to me. But to others he had been someone, done something worthy of an honor beyond my childish comprehension. Many had come, like my parents, to huddle under that Rowson Funeral Home canopy and be sad over his passing.

Opposite the old man’s house there grew corn, high and green on the day the hearse carrying his body pulled down the dusty road to the little graveyard in the middle of that field. My oldest sister had told me that if I stared at the long black car I would die. I believed her, half expecting to drop dead that very day with all those people dressed in black all around. But I couldn’t stop staring.

There were seven men, though, that didn’t wear mourner’s black. They wore uniforms and carried long guns. Three times they raised their guns with such crisply hypnotic movements and shot high over the old man’s house. Three times, seven shots that left a thunder banging in my chest. Three times, seven shots were hurled across the unknown. Faceless, purposed, quickly growing cold. Even today, I marvel at those soldiers, keeping such emotionless faces in the midst of such sorrow. And like a small child scared of a long black car, I marvel at those twenty-one bullets, detached and duty-bound.

© 2000 Linda Leigh Hargrove,
excerpt from ‘Graveyards of My Childhood’
[a work in progress]

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