The Name On The Rescue Plaque

Thirty years of asking

I want you to know I tried. From the very first week, I tried.

I called the sheriff’s office and gave them the two letters and the little I had of the truck. A deputy was kind about it and took it down and I never heard back, because two letters and a maybe-green truck is not anything to go on, and there had been no crime, only a good deed nobody had reported.

I put a notice in the county paper. “To the man who pulled my two sons from Cedar Creek on the Dawson Road crossing. Please let me thank you.” I ran it three weeks running. I got two phone calls, both from kind old men who were not him and knew it and just wanted to tell me they were glad the boys were all right.

I asked at church. I asked at the feed store and the implement dealer and the two gas stations in town. I described the coat and the cap and the truck to anyone who would stand still. Everybody wanted him to be somebody they knew. Nobody could make him be.

One old farmer at the co-op counter thought it might be a fellow named Cletus from over by the river, and I drove clear out there one Sunday with a pie on the seat, and Cletus was a round short man who had never pulled anybody out of anything and was embarrassed for both of us. I gave him the pie anyway.

Another time a woman at church was sure it was her late brother-in-law, and she cried telling me so, and I let her believe it for a good month before the dates made it impossible, because it seemed to give her something and it cost me nothing.

That is what thirty years of asking is really like. It is not one big search. It is a hundred small wrong answers, each one held out to you by somebody kind, and each one you have to set back down.

I kept a little spiral notebook of it for a while. Names people suggested, trucks people half remembered, the dates I ran the notice in the paper. I still have the notebook. The last entry in it is from about 2001, and then I just stopped writing, not because I quit but because there was nothing new to write.

For a while I thought he must not be from here. A man passing through. That would explain the leaving, the not knowing him. But a man passing through does not stop on a flooding country road he has no reason to be on, and does not know water the way that man knew water, and does not have a worn bone knife with his own initials punched into it.

He was a local man. I was sure of it. He just did not want to be found.

My husband used to say maybe I should let it be. He said it gently. He said the man clearly did not want thanks, and that chasing him might be taking something from him he had chosen to keep.

I understood that. But I could not let it be. It was not about me getting to feel better. It was that there was a man walking around this county, or lying in a cemetery in it, who had done the single bravest thing I ever saw, and the world did not know his name, and I did. I knew two letters of it. And it seemed to me that two letters was a debt, not a closed book.