Mason looked like somebody had hit him in the chest.
“I didn’t know,” he said. “Sir, I didn’t— she didn’t say anything. I asked her and she just said she knew it was for veterans, and she moved. I thought she meant—”
“She meant she knew it was for veterans,” Gus said. “She didn’t mean she wasn’t one.”
Mason turned and looked down the sidewalk at my mother.
My mother was sitting very still in her lawn chair with her hands folded. She was looking at Gus. She wasn’t looking at anyone else.
I looked down at her.
“Mom,” I said. “Is that true?”
She didn’t answer me. She was still looking at Gus.
“Peg,” Gus called down the street. “Get up here.”
My mother shook her head. A little. Barely.
“Peg Lindahl. I’m ninety-four years old and I’m standing on a hay wagon in the middle of Main Street. I am not going to sit down until you get up here. And Larry’s not going to be able to hold my belt much longer.”
“I’m fine where I am, Gus,” my mother said.
She didn’t raise her voice. But it was so quiet on that street by then, everyone heard her.
“No, you’re not,” Gus said. “You haven’t been fine where you are since 1968. Neither have I.”
My mother closed her eyes.
Then she opened them. She put her hands on the arms of the lawn chair. And she stood up.
The crowd moved out of her way. Nobody told them to. They just did. They stepped back off the sidewalk into the street and onto the curb and made a path straight from the bank to the hay wagon.
My mother walked down it.
She didn’t hurry. She walked the way she walks into church. Head up. Hands at her sides. Her red cardigan buttoned. The little pin catching the sun.
She stopped at the side of the hay wagon. She looked up at Gus.
“You should sit down before you fall,” she said.
“I’ll sit down when you’re up here.”
“Gus.”
“Peg.” He leaned down toward her. His voice dropped. Not everybody could hear this part. But I was close by then, and I heard it. “You held my boy’s hand. You were the last one. You wrote to Ellen. You told her he wasn’t alone.”
My mother put her hand on the side of the hay wagon. She held onto it.
“I did,” she said.
“I’ve carried that letter in my wallet for fifty-eight years.”
My mother looked up at him.
“I know you have, Gus,” she said. “Ellen told me. At the church. In 1985.”
“Then you know I’m not going to sit down.”
She stood there a long moment.
Then she held up her hand.
Larry Fossum let go of Gus’s belt and reached down and took my mother’s hand, and two of the Korea guys reached down and took her other arm, and between the three of them they lifted my eighty-one-year-old mother up onto the hay wagon.
Gus finally sat down.
He pointed at the empty folding chair beside him. The one closest to the front.
My mother sat in it.
Sophia Rivers is an experienced News Content Editor with a sharp eye for detail and a passion for delivering accurate and engaging news stories. At TheArchivists, she specializes in curating, editing, and presenting news content that informs and resonates with a global audience.
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