CLAYBORN, IL — The annual flag-planting at Pleasant Hill Veterans’ Cemetery, an event American Legion Post 412 has conducted on the Saturday before Memorial Day since 1957, concluded just past noon yesterday with sixteen small American flags remaining in the cardboard box and a long, considered silence from the seven men assembled around it.
The box, ordered each March from a wholesaler in Davenport, contained two hundred flags. The veterans’ section at Pleasant Hill contains, by every count anyone has ever taken, one hundred and eighty-four marked graves. The math, performed silently by all parties, was the kind nobody wanted to be the first to say out loud.
“Could be we got an extra packet this year,” said Post Commander Wendell Brubaker, 78, who has overseen the planting for nineteen of the last twenty-three years and who delivered this theory while looking at the ground. “Could be Davenport miscounted. Could be a lot of things. Memorial Day is for remembering, not arithmetic.”
Cemetery sexton Dale Voss, who arrived at 11:40 to lock the maintenance shed, declined to speculate as to whether the surplus might reflect graves that had been added, removed, relocated, or — in one persistent rumor dating to the Carter administration — quietly forgotten under the eastern hedgerow. “I just cut the grass,” Voss said. “You want answers, you talk to whoever did the paperwork in 1962, and good luck with that, because he’s also out here somewhere.”
Mrs. Edna Peterson, who watched the proceedings from her porch on Linden Street with a pair of binoculars and a glass of iced tea, offered the only on-the-record assessment of the afternoon. “They stood around that box for a good eleven minutes,” she said. “I’ve seen funerals move faster. At one point Wendell took his hat off, which I took to mean he had counted again.”
The flag-planting itself, which traditionally takes ninety minutes, was completed in seventy-two — a pace several members of Boy Scout Troop 88 attributed to “wanting to be done.” Scout Caleb Henning, 14, said he had asked his scoutmaster what to do with the remaining flags and had been told, in a tone he described as “weird,” to put them back in the box and not to mention it at the cookout.
A brief recount conducted at 12:18 by Legion treasurer Mert Solberg, using the laminated map he keeps in his glovebox, confirmed both the number of graves and the number of flags, after which Solberg folded the map back up and said, more to the map than to anyone present, that he was going to need a minute.
The sixteen surplus flags are now resting in a Folger’s coffee can on a shelf in the Legion Hall basement, where, per Brubaker, they will remain “until somebody figures something out, or until next May, whichever comes first.” When pressed on which outcome he considered more likely, Brubaker declined to speculate, and offered a reporter a chocolate long john that had, by all visible evidence, also been in the basement.