Torn American flag tattoo on shoulder

The flag came in on the back of a handcart this morning, folded wrong, the way people fold a thing they have been sleeping under. Ruth Okonedo unpicked the hem before I could say anything. Forty stars, she said, and I counted them myself by the window: thirty-eight left, two gone to the wet. Stripes, grey where the dye gave out, black where the rain got in and stayed.

I have been mending it since the bell rang for noon. The tear runs from the canton down through the third white band, clean as if something had come through it at speed. I did not try to match the cloth. There is no grey cotton left in the valley and I would have had to lie to make it. Instead I laid the good panels against each other and let the seams show, the way the old wardens taught us, so anyone who looks can see where the damage was and where we stopped it.

Ruth asked whether I could make it look new. I told her no. A new flag belongs to a new country, and this one has been out in the weather for longer than either of us has been alive. What I can do is make it hang straight enough to be read from the road.

When I finished, the light was going and the stars caught it, the faded ones and the sound ones alike. Ruth stood with her hands in her apron and said nothing for a long while. Then she asked me to sew one more star in the corner, from the cloth of her son's coat, the one that never came home from the coast. I said yes. It is pinned to the wall of the shop now, dark on the dark, and you will see it when you come through in spring.