The Quiet Rescue Down The Road
What Rosalyn Had Been Doing
Here is what she told me, once she had walked me back out onto that porch and gotten some of the color back into my face with a glass of the church lady’s sweet tea.
The old woman at the table was named Mrs. Tackett. She had lived in that house forty six years, since before the road was even paved, and had buried her husband back in the spring after a heart that had given him trouble for years finally quit for good. Her only son lived up in Ohio, called on Sundays, sent money when he thought of it, and had not managed to get down to Tennessee in the better part of a year. In April, not long after the funeral, Mrs. Tackett had fallen in her own kitchen and lain there the better part of three hours before a mail carrier noticed her porch light still burning at noon and came to check. Nothing broken that a doctor could not fix, but something in her had gone quiet after that fall, the same way a house goes quiet after everybody has left it. She had stopped driving not long after, her eyes not being what they used to be, and stopped going to church, and stopped, near as anybody could tell, doing much of anything at all except sitting in that kitchen waiting on a phone that mostly did not ring.
Rosalyn met her the second morning she was in Clinch Gap, walking the half mile down to the feed store for chicken scratch Dwaine wanted for a project he never finished, and noticed the crooked propane tank and the porch step that looked like it might give way under a strong wind. She knocked, the way she knocks on every door in every town she has ever lived in, because that is simply who my wife is, and found an old woman who had not had a real conversation with another living soul in eleven days.
“I meant to just say hello,” Rosalyn told me. “I meant to be there twenty minutes.”
She was there three hours. She came back the next morning with a casserole. By the end of the first week she had gotten Dwaine and two of the neighbor men to look at that porch step, and gotten Lorene, who still had a nurse’s eye even off the clock, to sit with Mrs. Tackett long enough to gently say out loud what everybody had been tiptoeing around, that this woman needed more than casseroles, she needed people, on a schedule, showing up whether they felt like it or not.