The Stranger Who Followed Us Home

Mark came home at seven that morning white as a sheet, because the plant had heard the roads were deadly and he had been trying to call the dead phone all night.

When I told him what had happened he sat down at the kitchen table and put his face in his hands, and my Mark is not a man who does that.

He kept saying, who was he, Dana, I have to shake that man’s hand. And I had no answer. All I had was an old plaid thermos drying in the dish rack.

So we set out to find him, and I will tell you, I thought it would take a week.

In a county this size, an old man in an old Ford who drives Route 9 in ice storms with coffee for strangers, that is a man somebody knows. That is a man with a reputation. Or so I believed.

But there was no thread to pull. There was no record of that night anywhere but in me. No tow ticket, no call logged, no report filed. He had telephoned no one. He had done the whole thing with his own two hands and driven off into the storm, and the only proof it had happened at all was that dented plaid thermos drying in my dish rack.

And I had so little to go on. I had been half frozen and out of my mind that night, a baby inside my coat and a boy under my arm, and I never once thought to look at his license plate or catch more of his face than white hair and a plain, kind look under a seed-corn cap.

I was not even sure he was one of ours. I had it in my head he might have been passing through, somebody’s cousin from two counties over, there one night and gone by the time the sun came up.

But I tried anyway. I asked everyone who would stand still.

I asked at the diner. The Wagon Wheel has a table of old farmers every morning, six or eight of them, coffee and lies, they have solved the world’s problems at that table for fifty years.

I described the man and the truck and the thermos, and they all nodded like they knew exactly who I meant, and then every one of them named a different person.

One said it sounded like old Vern Kloster. I drove out to Vern’s and it was not him, though Vern was tickled to be asked and gave me a jar of honey.

One said it had to be the older Pfeiffer boy, who was seventy if he was a day. It was not him either. I drove a lot of gravel those first months.

I asked at church. I asked the pastor to put a line in the bulletin, a thank you to the man who helped a mother on Route 9 in the December storm, please come forward.

Nobody came forward. That was the strange thing. A man who does a kindness like that, you would think he would at least want his family to know he was looked for.