Funeral homes in three counties had my phone number, and I never once asked them to stop calling.
I’m Eli’s mother. I want to say that up front, because the way this got told later made it sound like a boy who appeared out of nowhere, and there was a woman driving a Corolla behind him more often than anybody wrote down.
Here’s the arrangement, and it was never anything grander than this.
Under federal law a veteran is entitled to military funeral honors, and that includes Taps. But there are only about five hundred buglers on active duty in the entire United States military, and roughly eighteen hundred veterans die every day. You can do that arithmetic on a napkin. So in 1999 Congress authorized a recording — a CD at first, then a small electronic device that fits inside the bell of a ceremonial bugle. A member of the honor guard raises it to his lips, puffs his cheeks, and presses a button.
The Department of Defense is clear that a live bugler comes first and that an active search is supposed to be made. And it is made. It’s just that most of the time there’s nobody to find.
So the funeral directors started calling us.
Wilbeck’s in town first, then Aldritt Brothers, then the two in the next county over, then Pomeroy-Vance across the state line. The question was always the same and always a little apologetic: Is he available Thursday?
Eli would put on his school band uniform — black pants, white shirt, the maroon jacket with Fenwick Consolidated on the pocket — and he’d bike out. He was thirteen when it started. He was fifteen at number sixty-one.
He biked in the rain. He biked in August heat, which if you’ve never worn a band jacket in August in this state, I’d ask you not to comment. He biked out to Rest Haven on a January morning when it was nine degrees, and the reason I know it was nine degrees is that I stood behind a maintenance shed with my keys in my hand and watched the temperature on my dashboard from a hundred yards away.
He’d never go with me. That was the rule he made, not me. He said a mother’s car parked at a stranger’s funeral looks like a mother’s car parked at a stranger’s funeral.
He never introduced himself.
That’s the part people don’t believe. He’d find a spot forty or fifty yards off — near a treeline, behind the last row of stones, wherever it was respectful and out of the way — and he’d wait through the whole service with the horn down at his side. When the flag came off the casket and the folding started, he’d bring it up.
Twenty-four notes. He played them slowly and he did not decorate them, which the good ones don’t.
Then he’d salute the casket, lower the horn, walk back to his bike, and go home and finish his homework.
Sixty-one times. Nobody ever got his name.
Twice, families sent thank-you cards to the funeral home addressed to “the young bugler.” Wilbeck’s has them in a drawer. He never wrote back, and when I pushed him on it once he said, “Mom, then it’s about me.”
At number sixty-one there was a retired colonel in the second row.
That was out at Mount Cavalry, a September morning, for a Korea veteran named Duffy who had four people at his graveside and one of them was a hospice nurse. The colonel was there because the local post asks him to stand at services for men who don’t have anybody, and he does it, and he’d been doing it for years.
He heard the horn come in from behind him and he turned around in his chair.
Afterward he did something he would later apologize for about nine separate times. He got up before the family had left the grass, and he walked out across the section — past the stones, in his good suit, at eighty-one years old — because he had already decided that the bugler was going to get on that bike and disappear before anybody could get to him.
He was right. Eli had the horn in the case and one foot on the pedal.
The colonel asked his name.
Eli told him. Then the colonel asked how old he was, and Eli told him that too, and the colonel put his hand out and took hold of the top of a headstone and stood there.
He said, “Son, why?”
And my son said, “My grandpa got a recording.”
He said, “A speaker on a stand. He deserved a person. They all do.”
The colonel asked him one more question, standing there holding onto a stranger’s headstone in a cemetery in September, and it was the only one Eli ever told me about word for word.
He asked what Eli’s grandfather’s name was.
Eli said it.
And Colonel Renner did not say anything for a long time, and then he asked if he could have my phone number.
I got a letter from that man eleven days later. Two pages, typed, copied to the state honor guard, and it changed my son’s life.
But he wrote me a second letter that same week that he did not copy to anybody, and that one was handwritten, and it is four sentences long, and I have never shown it to Eli.
PART 2
Mrs. Halloway — I need to tell you something before you hear it from a file. In 2021 I served as the state coordinating officer for funeral honors requests in this district. Your father’s request came across my desk. The recording was authorized under my signature.
That’s the whole letter. There’s no apology in it. I’ve read it maybe two hundred times looking for one and it isn’t there, and I’ve come to understand that its absence is the most respectful thing about it.
My father was Master Sergeant Owen Bryce Tackett. Thirty-one years, two of them in a place he never once described to me. He died in March of 2021 and we buried him on a Tuesday with eleven people there because of the restrictions that spring.
There was no bugler. There was a small speaker on a folding stand, about the size of a bread box, set up near the head of the casket, and a man in an honor guard uniform pressed a button on it. The wind was up. It came out thin and it wobbled, and the last note flattened out and then just stopped.
I remember thinking: that’s it. That’s the last thing this country is going to say to him.
And Eli was eleven years old, standing next to me in a coat he’d outgrown.
I did not know until four years later that his trumpet was in the trunk of my car that morning. He’d had a lesson the day before and never brought it inside.
I found the notebook in his backpack the week after Colonel Renner’s letter came, and I want to be honest that I went looking for it. He’d been strange for days and I’m his mother and I opened his bag.
It’s a five-subject spiral, the cheap kind. Every entry is four lines. Date. Cemetery. Name, when he could get it from the program. Branch.
I counted sixty-one, which I expected.
But the list doesn’t start at one.
It starts at zero.
0. March 16, 2021. Rest Haven. Tackett, Owen B. Army.
And underneath that entry, in eleven-year-old handwriting that got smaller toward the end of the line, four words:
I had it. Trunk.
He was eleven years old and he stood in the wind next to his mother and listened to a machine play twenty-four notes badly for a man he loved, and he had a trumpet in the trunk of the car forty feet away, and he did not ask.
Because he was eleven, and there were adults in uniforms, and children that age believe the adults have a system.
He has been paying that back one funeral at a time since he was thirteen.
I sat on the floor of his bedroom and cried in a way I have only done twice in my life, and then I turned to the last written page.
Number sixty-one, Duffy, Mount Cavalry, September.
And under it, not filled in, just a number and a date, circled twice in blue pen:
62.
The date was five months out. February.
You don’t know a funeral is coming five months in advance. That isn’t how any of this works. Funeral directors call you on a Tuesday for a Thursday.
I asked him about it at dinner, straight out, because I’d already admitted to the backpack.
He put his fork down and he said, “That one’s Colonel Renner’s.”
I said, “Eli, he’s alive.”
And my son said, “Yeah. He asked me in October.”
PART 3
Here’s what I learned that fall, and what my son had known for four months before I did.
Ferrous Renner had a cancer that had been quiet for two years and had stopped being quiet in August. He’d been given a window that his oncologist described in the careful way they do, and he had decided, in the way that men like that decide things, that he was going to spend it on paperwork.
The letter to the state honor guard was the first item.
It worked faster than anybody expected. There was an audition in Columbus in November — Eli played twenty-four notes in a carpeted room for four men, and one of them, a warrant officer, put his hand over his eyes. They took him. Youngest member in state history at fifteen years and seven months, with a written parental waiver and a rule that he could not miss school and a hard cap on how far he could travel.
The local paper ran it. Then a station in the city ran it. Then it got out past us entirely, the way things do now.
And that is exactly when the trouble started, and it did not come from where you’d think.
It came from a post commander two counties over named Dell Kaczmarek.
His post handles somewhere north of two hundred burials a year with a volunteer detail of men in their seventies, and they use a ceremonial bugle. That’s the electronic one, with the insert in the bell. And here’s the thing nobody says out loud: posts that use them generally don’t tell the families. You put the horn to your lips and you puff your cheeks, and afterward people come up and thank you for playing, and you say you’re welcome.
That isn’t fraud. I want to be careful here, because I was very angry for a while and I’ve had to work at being fair. Those men are unpaid, they’re old, they’re standing in the rain for strangers, and the alternative to the fake horn is nothing at all.
But a fifteen-year-old on a bicycle who plays it live, for free, in three counties, and gets his picture in the paper — that boy is an accusation whether he means to be or not.
Kaczmarek filed a complaint in December. Three of them, actually, in three directions, and he was clever about it.
He wrote to the state honor guard questioning whether a minor could be a member in good standing. He wrote to the school district asking whether a student was being excused from instructional time for unsupervised off-campus activity. And he called the county — not the police, the county — and used the phrase “unsupervised minor at unsecured sites without a background-checked adult,” which is a sentence engineered to make an agency open a file.
An agency opened a file.
A woman came to my house in January and sat at my kitchen table with a clipboard and was, I will say this forever, decent about it. She’d read the paper. She was not enjoying herself. But she had to ask me why a child was at sixty-one funerals and whether he was compensated and whether I had ever been present, and I had to say that I had been present at maybe forty of them, behind a shed, in a car, because he asked me not to be visible.
I heard how that sounded coming out of my own mouth.
She asked if I’d ever considered that he might be processing his grandfather’s death in an unhealthy way.
I said I had considered it approximately every day for two years.
The school piece resolved in a week — Eli has a 3.9 and had missed six half-days in three years, all documented, all made up. The county closed its file in February with no finding.
The honor guard was the one that nearly killed it.
Because on that one, Kaczmarek wasn’t wrong on the technicality. There was no provision in the standing operating procedure for a member under eighteen. The waiver they’d written for Eli was improvised by four men in a carpeted room who wanted a kid to play, and when someone put it in writing to the adjutant general’s office, it went up for review, and everything Eli was scheduled for went on hold pending that review.
Nine funerals came off his calendar in eleven days.
And on the eighth of those days, Colonel Renner went into the hospital in Marion and didn’t come back out.
Eli was at the kitchen table doing chemistry when my phone went off at ten past four in the morning.
PART 4
He’d left instructions. Of course he had.
There were two pages in a folder at the funeral home in Marion, prepared in October, and item four on the first page read: Taps to be sounded by Eli Halloway. He knows.
And the state honor guard could not send him.
That’s what I had to explain to my son on the fourth of February in a hospital parking lot with the heat running. Not that they wouldn’t. That they couldn’t — the review was open, he was suspended from detail assignments, and every man on that unit who wanted to hand him the horn was under the same order.
The service was set for the eleventh. The review board wasn’t scheduled to meet until March.
Eli said, “Then I’ll go as me.”
And I said the thing I have gone back and forth on ever since, which was: “Baby, you can’t.”
Because Kaczmarek had one more card and I’d been staring at it for a week. If Eli showed up out of uniform and played at a service with an official state detail present, while suspended, he wasn’t a volunteer anymore. He was a suspended member interfering with a military funeral honors ceremony. It goes from a boy with a horn to a written incident, and a written incident at fifteen closes the door for good.
He looked at me across the console and he said, “Colonel Renner asked me.”
I said, “I know.”
He said, “He asked me in a parking lot in October and he was embarrassed to ask, Mom. He said ‘I have no right to ask you this.'”
And that’s when I finally understood what the second letter meant. The one with no apology in it.
That man had spent four years knowing he’d signed a form. Not a wrong form — a lawful, ordinary, correct form, one of hundreds, in a year when everything was short and nothing worked. There was no bugler available in that district on the sixteenth of March, 2021, and he authorized a recording, because that is what the regulation says to do, and if he hadn’t there’d have been nothing at all.
He did his job exactly right and a boy stood in the wind and heard the last note flatten out.
And then, four years later, he walked across a cemetery and found out who the boy was.
He didn’t ask Eli to play at his funeral to be honored. He asked because he wanted to hand the thing back. He wanted the one funeral he could control to be the proof that the system could produce a person.
I called everyone I could think of that week. The warrant officer, who was sick about it and could do nothing. Rosalind at Wilbeck’s, who called the funeral home in Marion. A state representative’s office, which was kind and useless.
On the ninth, two days out, the adjutant general’s office sent a one-paragraph email confirming that the review remained pending and no exception could be granted on an expedited basis.
On the tenth, I told my son that he could go to the service, and stand with me, and not play, and that I would be there beside him for all of it.
He nodded. He didn’t fight me. That was worse.
He went upstairs and I heard him practicing anyway, with the mute in, for an hour and a half.
The eleventh was clear and about twenty degrees. Two hundred people at a cemetery outside Marion — that man knew everybody. A full state detail, seven riflemen, the flag.
And at ten minutes to eleven, while I was helping my son with his tie in the parking lot, a car door shut behind us and I turned around.
It was Dell Kaczmarek.
PART 5
He had a garment bag over his arm and he looked like he hadn’t slept, and he came up to my son and said, “Are you the Halloway boy.”
Eli said yes, sir.
And Kaczmarek said, “I withdrew all three of them on Thursday.”
He’d gone to see Renner in the hospital in January. They’d known each other forty years. And Renner — who could barely talk by then, who had a folder of funeral instructions on the tray table — had told him what the recording sounded like at a graveside in March of 2021 with the wind up.
Kaczmarek told us he’d been standing behind a fake bugle for nine years and had never once let himself think about what it sounded like from the fourth row.
He said, “I filed those because a kid on a bike made two hundred old men look like liars.” He said, “That’s the truest thing I’ve said in a while.”
The withdrawal didn’t lift the suspension. Reviews don’t work that way; the paperwork was already moving under its own power and would take until March. He knew that. It’s why he’d driven ninety minutes with a garment bag.
Because there was one thing he could still do, and he’d worked it out with the funeral director on Friday.
Eli could not play as a member of the state honor guard.
He could play as a civilian bugler engaged by the family, standing apart from the detail, which is not only permitted but is the first option the Department of Defense asks for before any recording is ever authorized. Every single one of those sixty-one funerals had been exactly that. Nobody in that building had thought to say it out loud because we’d all gotten it into our heads that the uniform was the permission.
The garment bag was Renner’s dress blues. His widow had sent them along for the burial detail’s use, and inside the bag, in a hard case, was a bugle.
Silver. His, from 1966, when he was nineteen years old and did this same job at Fort Benning for two years before he ever did anything else.
There’s a card taped inside the lid. I’ve got it in a frame now.
For the young man from Mount Cavalry. — F.R.
Eli played from the treeline, forty yards out, the way he always did. Two hundred people turned around.
He got through all twenty-four notes and I did not, and I want to tell you what I have never been able to explain properly to anybody who wasn’t standing on that grass.
There’s an old tradition called Echo Taps where a second bugler answers the first from a distance. Nobody planned it. Nobody could have. When Eli finished, there was a horn from the far side of the section — the warrant officer from the carpeted room in Columbus, who was off duty, out of uniform, standing behind a maple tree by himself with a trumpet, because he’d driven up on his own time on the chance that the boy would somehow get to play.
Two hundred people in twenty-degree air listening to a fifteen-year-old and a grown man throw twenty-four notes back and forth across a cemetery for a man who spent his last four months trying to fix one signature.
The review closed in March. They wrote the provision. There’s language now for members under eighteen with a guardian waiver and a travel cap, and three other kids in this state have come in under it since, and one of them is a fourteen-year-old girl in Ashtabula County who is better than my son and he will tell you so himself.
Eli is seventeen now. He’s at two hundred and nine.
He keeps the notebook. It’s a different one — the spiral filled up — but he copied the first page over by hand, including entry zero, including the four words.
He plays the silver bugle for the ones that matter and his school horn for the rest, because he says you don’t take a 1966 instrument out in the rain.
And there’s a boy in this town who could have a ride anywhere he wants. The post would send a car. The funeral homes have offered. I have offered approximately nine hundred times.
He still takes the bike.
I asked him once why, when he was sixteen and had a license in his wallet and every reason not to.
He said, “Because I want to be a little bit tired when I get there.”
He said, “It’s the last thing anybody’s ever going to hear for them. It shouldn’t be easy for me.”
