The Citizenship of Small Things

At the old Patterson School on Weaver Road in China Grove, North Carolina — out where the ears of corn stand against the horizon like company men clocking in for first shift — 89-year-old Bobby Mault marks the price of freedom. With the help of his high school classmate and co-founder, the late Frank Albright, Mault – who saw three brothers serve in World War II when he was just a boy – transformed the schoolhouse into a shrine to hometown heroes. The place is packed wall-to-wall with the forever-young faces of the local set, all looking uneasy in dress uniforms. Visitors are as likely as not to know the people in the photographs by their first names. They came up together, went to school together, worked the same farmland, and ate at the same dinner table.