The Flag on the Wire Stem

The flag on a wire stem is printed on one piece of cloth and stands about as tall as a hand. It has no pole and no rope. The wire runs up one edge of the cloth, and below the cloth it continues bare, a short length of wire meant for the ground. The cloth carries the flag of the country: thirteen stripes, a blue field, and stars printed small.

It is made to be handled once a year. In May, in the days before the last Monday of the month, the flags come out of storage folded over their own wires and bundled tight. The bundle is opened at the cemetery, where the ground has softened enough to take a wire without a hole. A hand takes a single flag by the bare end of the stem and pushes it into the sod at the head of a grave. The push is made with the heel of the palm, and the wire goes in until the cloth stands clear of the grass.

Each flag keeps the angle the push gave it. The wire holds whatever bend it receives, so no two stand quite alike: one straight up, its neighbor leaning, another turned a little where the hand turned on the way in. The fold from the bundle leaves a crease in the cloth, and the crease does not fall out in the first days. The blue field sits at the upper corner on the side of the wire, and the stripes run out across the cloth, which is light enough to move in the air and settle when the air settles.

The wire stem is a flagpole reduced to its only necessary part. A pole wants a hole, a sleeve, a collar of concrete, and a grave will not take any of those. The wire is what remains when they are taken away: stiff enough to stand, long enough to lift the cloth off the grass, cheap enough to be printed by the thousand, and soft enough to be straightened by hand when a push has bent it.

The habit of putting something into the ground at a grave in May is older than the flag. It comes from the years after the Civil War, when the dead lay in new ground across the country and the custom of decorating graves in spring spread from town to town. The flag on a wire stem is that habit after it changed materials, a printed cloth where a cutting from a garden used to be, set in by hand and taken out by hand.

After the day has passed, the same hands walk the rows again and pull. The grip goes on the wire just below the cloth, and the flags come out in the order they went in. A bent wire is straightened by hand before it is stored. The flags are folded over their own wires once more, counted, and put away until the next May.