The panel went up in November. Veterans Day.
It’s a smaller piece of black granite, set just to the right of the big memorial. It says, at the top, in gold letters:
THE WOMEN OF HARMON COUNTY WHO SERVED.
There are nineteen names on it. Mason found sixteen more in the county records over the summer. Women who’d been WACs and WAVES in World War Two. A Navy nurse in Korea. A woman who’d flown cargo planes in Iraq. A medic in Afghanistan who’s thirty-four now and teaches second grade in Harmon and never told her students.
My mother’s name is third from the top.
Margaret J. Lindahl. Army Nurse Corps. Vietnam. 1967-1969.
They had a ceremony. Gus Halvorsen insisted on being there, even though it was thirty degrees and windy and he’d been in the hospital in October with pneumonia. His grandson pushed him up in a wheelchair with a blanket over his knees.
When they pulled the cloth off the panel, Gus reached into his coat. He took out his wallet. He opened it with shaking hands and took out a piece of paper, folded so many times it had gone soft as fabric. Yellow. Splitting at the creases.
He held it out to my mother.
“I want you to have this now,” he said.
My mother looked at it.
She knew what it was. She’d written it.
“Gus, no. That’s yours. That’s Ellen’s.”
“Ellen’s gone. And I’m going. Doctor says spring, maybe.” He pushed it toward her. “I read it every night for fifty-eight years. I know every word. I don’t need it anymore. And I don’t want my grandkids finding it in a drawer after and throwing it out because they don’t know what it is.”
My mother took it.
She didn’t open it. She held it against her chest.
“I’ll keep it,” she said. “I’ll put it in the notebook. With his name.”
Gus nodded. He was crying again. He’d cried more in the past six months than in the forty years before, my mother said later. It was good for him.
“Peg,” he said. “Thank you. I should’ve said it in eighty-five. I should’ve said it in sixty-eight. I was a coward.”
“You weren’t a coward, Gus. You were a father.”
“Same thing, sometimes.”
She bent down and kissed the top of his head, right on his garrison cap.
Gus Halvorsen died in April.
My mother sat with him at the end. His grandson called her. She drove to the nursing home at two in the morning and sat beside his bed and held his hand.
She told me later that he was awake for a while near the end. Not long. He knew she was there.
He asked her if Danny had been brave.
She said yes.
He asked her if Ellen would be waiting.
She said yes.
He asked her to stay.
So she did.
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