Part 3 — Thirteen Steps West
Gladys finished reading the pencil on the back of the photograph, and her voice broke on the last word.
“Under the flat stone by the old fire ring.”
The woman from the county, Ms. Prater, stood up and asked if she might come along. Craig started to say something about private property. Gladys said, “It is Dads yard, Craig,” and he sat back down.
We walked out into the dusk, the three of us, with a flashlight. At the pole I took thirteen steps due west, one for each fold, with my hand on Gladys arm.
The fire ring was a circle of old bricks I had laid in 1982. A broad flat stone lay in the middle of it, mossy and cold.
Gladys knelt and shoved it aside. Beneath it, under a foot of sandy soil, was a green steel ammunition can wrapped in a plastic feed sack.
She lifted the lid under the flashlight. Folded on top was a deed to the house on Marion Street, recorded in my name and Gladys as joint owners with survivorship. Below it lay four neat bundles of cash.
Forty-one thousand, three hundred dollars, and a note in pencil. “Ray never came home. So I saved what I could for the ones who did.”
I had folded that flag thirteen times a day for fifty years, and never once told anyone that what I was really folding into it was a plan.
Ms. Prater took photographs of the can and wrote her report on the hood of her car. She said the Department of Veterans Affairs would remove Craig as fiduciary at once, and that Gladys could be appointed in his place.
Craig sat on the porch step and wept. He said he had been ashamed since the first scratch-off, and that the shame was the reason he could not stop.
I did not say much. I told him that a man could still be a good son at fifty, and that there was a recovery group at the church on Tuesday nights.
The VA ordered repayment of the seventy-one thousand five hundred twenty dollars through a plan, taken from Craig wages and from the sale of his boat. He moved into Gladys spare room and attended every meeting for ninety days.
Post 284 of the American Legion presented me with a new flag in October, folded and ready.
That night at dusk, Craig stood in the yard in his work boots. He took the flag down from the pole, and I showed him how to fold it. Thirteen times. Slowly.
His hands shook at first, and then they did not.