He set his coffee on the folding chair, pushed himself up, waved off the arm my wife offered him, and started toward that stage one slow step at a time, and the only sound in that whole pavilion was his shoes on the concrete.
It took him a while. Nobody helped him. I think we all understood that helping would have been the wrong thing to do. Denny stood up there waiting on a laugh he could work with, and it never came.
Earl reached the steps. Took them one at a time, hand on the rail. Then he put his hand out for the mic, and Denny gave it to him, because two hundred people were watching and there was nothing else he could do.
Earl never said one word about Denny Krause. Not one. He reached into the inside pocket of that pressed jacket and pulled out a piece of paper folded so many times over the years the creases had gone soft as cloth.
“I set up the chairs every year,” he said. “Nobody has ever asked me why I set up so many.”
Then he read the names.
Nineteen of them. First name, last name, and the town each man came from, because Earl said a man deserves to be from somewhere. He read them slow, the way you read something you already know by heart and are in no hurry to finish. Two were from our county. A woman in the fourth row started crying at the eleventh name. Her uncle. She was nine when he shipped out.
When Earl finished he turned the paper over. There was one more line on the back, in younger handwriting, and he read that too. He said he wrote it in a field hospital in 1968, the night they flew him out and left the rest of them behind.
If I get to go home and they do not, then I am the rest of their lives. Act like it.
He folded the paper up. Put it back in his pocket. Then he said the coffee was free because four ladies from the Methodist church get up at five to make it, and everybody ought to thank them on the way out. Then he handed the microphone back to Denny and went down those steps the same way he came up.
Denny did not finish his speech. He stood there a second, said thank you all for coming, and sat down in a folding chair in the back row like anybody else.
He came out to Earl’s place that Thursday. I know because I live across the road. His truck sat there better than an hour. In June the chamber voted to put a stone at the pavilion with those nineteen names cut into it, and Denny paid the whole bill and asked that his own name be left off it. He has not picked up a microphone at a Memorial Day service since.
Earl still shows up at dawn. Still sets up too many chairs. The difference is people know why now, and half the town comes early to help him carry them.
Some men will tell you all day what they have earned. The ones who earned the most usually spend it on somebody else’s name.