Chapter 9 - The Recovery of the Flag
The winter of twenty-six came to Kentucky with an unusual, crystalline sharpness that turned the red oak ridges of Hardin County into bronze monuments against the white limestone cuts.
It was mid-December.
The recovery ward on the fourth floor of Ireland Army Community Hospital did not smell of commercial lavender or cold chicken soup.
It smelled of clean pine floor wash, floor wax, and the dry, sweet scent of warm cotton sheets that had been laundered in the hospital’s high-pressure steam facility.
The room had three large windows that looked out over the parade field toward the gold depository in the distance. The blinds were wide open. The morning sun poured through the double-pane glass in a wide, clean square that covered the foot of the bed and two feet of the linoleum floor.
Abby sat propped up against three pillows.
She had gained twelve pounds in six weeks. The yellow, turnip-like cast of her skin had vanished, replaced by that healthy, pale gold that came from her father’s side of the family—the skin that freckled across the bridge of the nose whenever she spent two hours in the sun.
Her hair had been cut into a clean, shoulder-length bob that swung free when she turned her head.
Across her lap lay a yellow flannel blanket—the one with the small embroidered ducks I had mailed her seven months ago from the post exchange.
Beside the bed sat an isolette of clear, heated acrylic.
Inside it, lying on her stomach with two tiny white foam monitors taped to her heels, was Clara.
She had been born at twenty-six weeks and four days, weighing two pounds and three ounces. Now, at thirty-two weeks corrected, she weighed four pounds, six ounces. Her lungs were clear; the oxygen prongs had been removed from her nostrils three days ago, leaving only a tiny white feeding tube that disappeared into the corner of her mouth like a piece of silk thread.
Her fingers—small as matchsticks, perfect down to the tiny, translucent nails—were curled around the wooden spindle of a small, carved pine rattle that Earl Dobbs had spent three weeks whittling in the battalion maintenance shop.
The door opened with a soft, rubber-sealed hiss.
I walked in.
I was not wearing my service dress. I had on my everyday operational camouflage uniform—the trousers bloused neatly over the tops of my tan suede boots, the sleeves rolled twice to the forearm, the dark olive undershirt clean and smelling of the starch from the post laundry.
Abby looked up.
She did not flinch. Her hands did not fly to her stomach in that defensive, terrified knot that had made my heart stop in Indianapolis.
She smiled.
It was Rob’s smile—the slow, lopsided lift of the right corner of the mouth that made her left eye crinkle into a narrow crescent of slate-gray.
“You’re late, Colonel,” she said.
Her voice was full. It had that low, resonant bottom that she had used when she called the hurdle marks on the track at Bowling Green.
“The division maintenance meeting ran twenty minutes long,” I said, setting my service cap on the bedside table beside her water pitcher. “General Vance wanted to know why three of our tactical water distributors had dry wheel bearings.”
“Did you tell him?”
“I told him he was looking at the wrong line on the ledger,” I said, pulling the wooden visitor’s chair to the edge of the mattress.
I sat down. I reached out.
Her hand met mine halfway.
Her fingers were warm. The skin across her knuckles was smooth, the small blue veins running beneath the surface with the steady, unhurried rhythm of a healthy young woman whose heart had forgotten how to race in the dark.
“Earl is downstairs,” she said, nodding toward the window.
I looked out.
Sixty feet below, standing beside the staff car on the concrete apron of the hospital entrance, was Earl Dobbs.
He was wearing his civilian windbreaker, his hands deep in his pockets, his head tilted back as he watched a flight of three Black Hawk helicopters transit the southern ridge toward the assault landing strip.
Beside him, parked in the red emergency lane, was a green three-quarter-ton utility truck from the brigade logistical depot, its cargo bed covered with a canvas tarp that had been tied down with fifty-pound parachute cord.
“He brought the rest of the boxes from Indiana,” I said.
Abby’s fingers tightened on mine by half an inch. Not in fear—in that steady, measured pressure that soldiers use when they are checking the drag on an extraction line.
“Did they clear the lease?” she asked.
“The lease was terminated under the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act forty-eight hours ago,” I replied. “The apartment has been emptied. The locks have been returned to the landlord. There isn't a single item belonging to the Keene family within ninety miles of this post.”
“And Travis?”
I looked at the small girl sleeping in the isolette.
Her chest rose and fell—thirty-eight breaths per minute, regular as an astronomical clock.
“Travis entered a guilty plea in federal district court in New Albany yesterday afternoon,” I said. My voice was level, devoid of triumph, carrying only that cold, historical weight that belongs to an official record. “Ten years at the federal correctional institution in Terre Haute. No parole under the federal sentencing guidelines. Glenda received five years for misprision of a felony and conspiracy to commit wire fraud. She reports to the women’s facility in Lexington on January third.”
Abby closed her eyes.
She did not cry. She took a long, deep breath that expanded her ribs until the yellow duck blanket lifted two inches off her lap.
When she opened her eyes again, the slate-gray was clear. The shadows that had lived beneath her lower lids since July had been scrubbed away by six weeks of daylight and clean air.
“Mom,” she said softly.
“Yes, baby.”
“Do you remember the night Dad died?”
My throat clicked. “I remember.”
“I told you that you took too long to get home.”
“I know,” I whispered. The seven words felt like iron on my tongue.
Abby reached out with her other hand. She laid her palm flat against the silver eagle on my right shoulder—the cold metal that had sat three inches from the glass of the Suburban on the drive north.
“You didn't take too long this time, Mom,” she said.
May you like
The silence that followed was not the suffocating, unventilated silence of Apartment 204.
It was the clean, quiet peace that comes over an army post after the retreat gun has fired at seventeen-hundred hours—when the bugle has finished its long, dying fall across the parade ground, when the flag has been folded into its thirteen neat triangles and tucked into the leather box in the guardhouse, and when the sentries on the outer gates turn their faces toward the hills and know that for fifteen miles in every direction, the perimeter is secure.
