Mrs. Eleanor Haskell, ninety three years old and no larger than a sparrow, laid the letter flat on her dining table and said to her housekeeper, “Get me Brent Talley on the telephone, and then get me Mr. Ostrander.” Then she read the first paragraph aloud to me in a voice like a schoolteacher. The builder of our whole neighborhood, her late husband Walter, had written that every original purchaser and heirs would have “the permanent right to fly the flag of the United States and the flag of any branch of its armed forces upon a pole not exceeding twenty five feet, notwithstanding any rule hereafter adopted by any association.”
“Walter wrote that himself,” she told me, tapping the yellowed page. “His brother came home from Korea in 1953 and a neighbor complained about the flag on his porch. Walter never forgot it. He recorded this at the county in 1987, the very week he sold your house to Frank.” She leaned back in her chair and for a moment I could see the young woman she had been. “And I still hold his seat as the founding declarant, Dolores. Nobody ever told Mr. Talley that. Nobody ever told the board.”
Brent Talley reached her house in less than forty minutes, in a golf shirt and a very tight smile. He began to explain the bylaws. Mrs. Haskell let him talk for exactly one minute. Then she said, “Mr. Talley, Article One of those bylaws provides that the covenants of the declarant prevail over every rule of the association. I wrote Article One. Please sit down.” He sat. Within the hour the lawyer of the association, a nervous man named Mr. Ostrander, had read the recorded page twice and was cleaning his glasses on his tie. “Brent,” he said softly, “I believe we have a problem.”
A right written on a single sheet of paper is worth exactly as much as the courage of the person who holds it up.
The fine for eight thousand four hundred dollars was withdrawn that same afternoon, in writing, with the signature of Brent Talley and a line at the bottom in which he apologized for the inconvenience. I framed it. It hangs in the hallway beside the picture of Frank in his dress blues. But Mrs. Haskell was not finished. She asked Mr. Ostrander to pull every fine the board had levied that year, and when he brought the folder to her table, her eyes went down the list like a hawk down a field.
There were forty one fines in the folder. Thirty four of them had been issued to residents over seventy years of age. A widow on Palo Verde Drive had been fined six hundred dollars for a wind chime. A retired mechanic had been fined for a boat in his own driveway that the bylaws expressly allowed. The president had written them all, and he had kept a share of the late fees in a fund he called a reserve. By Thursday, Mr. Ostrander told us gravely, the Arizona Attorney General would receive copies of everything, and so would the Mesa police.
Brent Talley resigned the following Monday by email, from a phone, at six in the morning. The board held a special meeting in the clubhouse that night, and more than two hundred neighbors came. People stood along the walls. Every fine was voided. The widow with the wind chime received a written apology and a check, and the retired mechanic received a standing ovation. When it was time to vote on a new president, someone in the back shouted, “Mrs. Haskell!” and the whole room echoed it. She declined, but she agreed to serve as advisor for life.
Then the neighbors surprised me. A man named Ray Ortega, a retired pipefitter from the end of the cul de sac, stood up and proposed that the association install a proper flag plaza at the entrance of Saguaro Court, with a new pole, a stone base, and a plaque honoring every veteran in the neighborhood. Fifty four hands went up before he finished. A teenage girl in the second row asked if she could play the bugle at the dedication. “I have been practicing taps since my grandfather died,” she said, and her voice shook.
We held the dedication on Veterans Day, at seven in the morning, because that is when Frank raised the colors. The sun came over the Superstitions as if it had been waiting. Two hundred and fifty people stood on the gravel. Mrs. Haskell, in a wheelchair with a wool blanket over her knees, was pushed to the front by her great grandson. I raised the Marine Corps flag with my own hands, the way I had done for two years. When the girl played taps, there was not a dry eye in that crowd.
Afterward Mrs. Haskell took my hand in her thin, cool fingers. “Your husband was a smart man to keep that letter,” she said. “But you were smarter to read it.” I told her it was only a piece of paper, and she shook her head. “No, dear. Every right we have is only a piece of paper until someone is brave enough to hold it up.” She patted my knuckles twice, and I understood that she was talking about much more than a flagpole.
Frank would have laughed himself silly over the whole business. I can hear him now, in the kitchen, with a cup of black coffee, saying that the biggest battle of his life was fought by his wife and a ninety three year old lady in a quilted jacket. Every morning at seven I still go out in my robe and raise the flag. Now there are neighbors who come out and stand with me, a dozen at a time, with their coffee, their dogs, and their hats over their hearts.