Victor Peterson from Minnesota

I walked right by him. Never saw him. But Nancy saw him sitting in the lobby. Dressed in a long sleeve khaki shirt and pants, he looked like an old safari hunter with white hair and wind blown sideburns. He had been invisible, like so many others like him today.

"Did you see the World War II vet?" she asked.

“Where?”

“Back there, sitting by himself.”

I wheeled around to return to the lobby. There he was with a red lanyard hanging around his neck, suspenders draped down his short torso and his World War II hat. Would anybody but a WWII vet wear such a hat?

He watched the hotel guests check out and arrange for the valet to retrieve their cars, or ask the concierge for advice - the best places to go, to see and to experience New Orleans, to cram as much as possible into the morning, before the temperatures scorched 100, before they wilted into the sewer drains beneath the broken slate sidewalks in the French Quarters.

I offered my hand. “Thank you for your service.” He shook with a firm grip, similar to my father’s. (My theory is those with good handshakes are due for a long life.) And like Dad, he humbly thanked me and declined to accept that what he had done years ago was anything special. He “just got on with life.”

But life almost didn’t happen for young Victor Peterson. He had left home when he was fifteen. He took to the trains. Flat broke he never asked for a handout, but knocked on doors and asked for odd jobs. This way of life took him to Alaska where he helped build the Alaskan Highway. But when the war broke out, he came home and he went to his draft board.

“They asked me if I was married. I told them yes. They asked me if I got married to get out of being drafted. I said no. So the stamped my papers.” He became a cook onboard the ship to England. When he got there they asked what he did. He said he was a cook. They said they didn’t need cooks, so they put a rifle in his hands. Two weeks later he was a sergeant and headed to Czechoslovakia.

As a squad leader, Victor saw himself as a mother hen, responsible for younger soldiers, boys who had never been away from home, away from mom. He was 22. So he never let his charges go into the woods first. He was point and that was how he got shot in the head. He pointed to his head. Was that to emphasize the place he got shot or to show me where in the head he took the bullet? I don’t know. His finger landed on his forehead above his right eye. There was no visible scar.

Was he a real New Orleans’ saint? He was shot in the head. As if he knew what I had been thinking he explained, “I yelled at the Germans that they couldn’t shoot me. Those SOBs. I was cocky. Then I took one. My platoon couldn’t get to me. They thought I was dead. I lay on the ground. Then I sat up. My men couldn’t believe it. The docs said just this much further…” Victor had head aches for three years after that.

It wasn’t Victor’s time. He came home and raised seven children with his wife who passed away a few years ago. His eyes filled when he spoke of her. I fought back my own. Now he visits his wife’s grave on the 8th day of each month. “I got ten more years until I’m 100. Then my wife and I will go for a walk together." I believe this will be true.

Victor was in New Orleans to attend the annual 90th Tough Hombre Division. The division has gathered ever since World War I. While we talked, a couple came up and thanked him for playing the piano last night. He entertained the group with a collection of hymns. “I can play for hours. Non stop. Until I played Lili Marlene. Then my wife would yell, ‘don’t play that.’ She’d accuse me of thinking about the war. I guess I was.” He laughed.

Somehow time moved rapidly forward. He shared a story about a trip he took to Texas. He was lying in bed eating peanut brittle when his stomach acted up. Diarrhea. He had it for 4 months and lost forty pounds.

"Okay, Victor, I got to get back up to my room." I thanked him again for being a hero.

“No, I’m not.”

“What you did back then, made me who I am today. That makes you a hero.”

Graveside

“How much further you got to go?” It was meant to be a joke. Something told me he wasn't going to say, "to China." He looked at me, his black eyes on the same level as mine. With a shrug he dismissed my question. The crowbar thumped into the earth with the hollow sound of a summer melon. He stood knee deep in the neatly shaped rectangle.

For the past hour I listened to his rhythmical thuds followed by a short series of metal biting into dirt. Now the shovel speared the grass. His wet t-shirt clung to his torso like a burial cloth. The interruption gave him the opportunity to wipe his forehead with the back of his hand. He readjusted his ball cap. “If I was working over in Franklin, I’d be done by now. This is nothing but fill. I even find bits of old cans and glass.” He stepped out of his hole. A harvest fly’s complaint scattered the still air.

The ground behind the church pitched the headstones in short waves and trailed off down a slope. There he had dumped wheel barrels of dirt and returned with small rocks.

“I guess you have to dig that by hand.” It was a statement as much as a question. He wasn’t a grave digger, but instead a headstone placer. Something about the hole fascinated me. I figured there must be a special machine to dig these holes. A bobcat maybe? Like steak I never think about the process beyond the butcher saran wrapping the Styrofoam. Head stones don’t grow at gravesides, but I never saw anyone put one in before.

“You got a business card?”

“Nope. If you need me, contact the church.” He didn’t offer his name.

“My cousin needs a headstone. I pointed to a marker just a few feet behind me.”

“Ramirez?"

“Perez.”

“When did he die?”

“Last October.”

“No offense, but you should wait a year. The ground needs to settle. It’s better to wait, although the guys here do a good job packing.”

He noticed my license plate. “You from Tennessee?”

“No, Hawaii. I was cleaning the moss and lichen from my grandparents’ headstone.”

“You got to be careful. Some stones are limestone and bleach could eat away at it.”

“I used a paint scraper and a brush. A dry cleaning. It’s still stained, but at least you can read the dates.”

“Some get worse than others.”

“The west sides are worse than the east. That seems strange.”

He wandered down a couple rows and agreed with my observation. Then he picked up his crowbar and returned to his hole.