My Cousin Stopped The Rehearsal To Call Me A Liar

I put a blue paper arrow on the table, pointing toward my right ear. Then I set down the van keys.

I was a forty-five-year-old Korean American man with close-cut black hair, a gray streak above my left brow, and a square face that looked stern when I was trying to hear. I worked as a funeral transport coordinator in Peoria. My day ran on release forms, cot locks, and getting somebody's father to the right door.

The arrow saved me from asking people to repeat themselves. I had heard nothing through my left ear for eighteen years.

"We can move your chair," said Ruth Bell, the memorial committee chair.

"Just speak on this side."

We were at a park shelter above the Illinois River, rehearsing a private veterans' group's May ceremony. Wind pushed damp leaves against the folding tables. A grain barge moved below us without seeming to move at all.

Then my cousin Nolan picked up my arrow.

"Stage directions already?" he said.

Nolan was a forty-seven-year-old white American man with a broad red face, bright teeth, and sandy hair brushed back in a stiff wave. He had married my cousin June. He had served in an Army supply office. He had never served on my recovery team. He called himself a veterans' speaker on the cards he left at diners.

He liked to stand while other people sat.

"It's for my hearing," I said.

"Sure."

Ruth tapped her rehearsal sheet. "Minho, you're introducing the Names We Carried register. Two minutes about your recovery team."

The register was new. It held separate entries for people lost in service and people brought out alive. Families could add a note. It wasn't a federal record or a monument cut in stone. It was a local promise to get names right.

I had asked them to include Sami Qadir, an Iraqi interpreter.

Nolan set my arrow down backward.

"We need to settle that before we print anything."

The six volunteers looked up.

"Minho moved bodies," he said. "That's honorable work. But this whole battlefield rescue, the hearing loss, the living interpreter? He wasn't where he says he was."

Ruth's pen stopped.

"Are you saying his dates are wrong?"

"I'm saying he made it up."

The wind lifted one corner of my script. I held it flat with two fingers.

"My recovery orders were released for public use in February," I said.

Nolan gave a little laugh.

"Movement details were classified. We both know you can't show those."

He had used that line at June's kitchen table for years. Usually I had let it pass. I didn't discuss routes over dinner, and I didn't turn every meal into a hearing.

But the Army had reviewed the pages I requested. Some details stayed covered. The parts that named me, Sami, and the receiving hospital did not.

Copies sat in a blue folder under my passenger seat. The review letter was clipped on top. I had brought them to check the spelling, not to fight my cousin.

"I can show what was cleared," I said.

"You have some travel voucher. That isn't proof."

Cal, the treasurer, pushed back his chair. "We paid a $600 print deposit. Can this wait until after rehearsal?"

"No," Nolan said. "Our donors deserve the truth."

That got him what he wanted. Ruth put a line through my speaking slot.

"Pending review," she said quickly. "That means pending review, Minho."

Still, everybody watched her pen.

I had spent years checking wrist tags against release slips. A clean line on a sheet could send a person to the wrong county. I knew how small a mistake could look from across a table.

"Please put his claim in the minutes," I said.

Nolan frowned. "What?"

"That I invented the recovery and the cause of my hearing loss. Use those words."

"We're family."

"Then you can stand behind what you said."

Ruth wrote it down. I asked for a copy of the draft register and the next review date. She gave me both.

Nolan caught me beside my van.

"Don't embarrass yourself with old papers. I've done thirty rooms this year. People know me."

"Then one quiet review shouldn't hurt."

His eyes dropped to the folder on my seat. For the first time that morning, he stopped smiling.

At work, I had a transfer waiting in Pekin. A family had paid $385 for the trip, and the driver needed the signed release before he left. I couldn't spend their afternoon on my cousin.

I turned my blue arrow around and tucked it into the folder.

Before starting the van, I checked the register.

Entry fourteen carried my recovery date and my team number. The status box said DIED DURING RECOVERY.

Under the name, where Sami Qadir should have been, someone had typed Elias Ward.

Beside it was Nolan's approval mark.