But the next morning, before the dew burned off, Walt backed the truck up his driveway, carried something out of the garage, and set it on the open tailgate. A wooden display case. Triangle glass, folded flag inside, and a paper mounted behind it.
Then he got out the post-hole digger and started taking the flagpole down.
That is the part nobody expected. Walt Simmons is not a man who fights a rule. Fifty years ago at Fort Campbell they taught him you follow the order and then you go through the process, in that order, and he has never once done it backward.
So he was taking it down. Three days early.
Bev Nagy saw him from her kitchen window and came out in her housecoat. Then the Pruitts. Then Danny Oyelaran from the corner, who is thirty and had no idea what any of it was about, and Walt explained it to him with dirt on his hands.
By eight there were about forty people in that yard. Nobody called anybody. It is a small street.
Bev asked what was in the case. Walt turned it around on the tailgate so people could read the paper behind the flag. It is a certificate from the Architect of the Capitol, the kind that comes with a flag flown over the building in Washington.
Flown over the United States Capitol on 14 March 2011, at the hour of the funeral, for Sgt. Michael W. Simmons. Requested by the men of his platoon and not by his family. Please tell his father that we were the ones who asked.
Walt has flown that flag every day for fifteen years. That is what was on the pole. Half the street set their watch by it and not one of us knew what it was.
Andrea Kessler does real estate closings out on Route 9. She went home, printed something off, and brought it to the October meeting in a folder.
The Freedom to Display the American Flag Act. Federal, signed in 2005, one page long. An association cannot prohibit a member from flying the flag of the United States on his own property. It does not matter what our covenants say, and it has not mattered since before Chad Brennan moved in.
She read it out loud, sat down, and did not add anything to it.
The board voted a permanent variance that night. Seven to nothing. Chad voted for it too, and I will give him that much.
He resigned in November, and Walt is the one who asked the board not to make it public. He said the man had a wife and a kid at that school and there was no sense in it.
We reset the pole the Saturday before Thanksgiving. Four bags of concrete and eleven men. Chad Brennan carried two of those bags up from the truck, and nobody said anything to him about it and nobody said anything about him either.
Walt still folds it every evening, slow and proper. There is a bench by the pole now with Michael’s name on it and the date off that certificate.
A man can spend a year telling you what the rules are. Sometimes it turns out he never read the one that was already written.