The Name On The Rescue Plaque

What I did with the knife

I never fixed the knife up and I never carried it. It was not mine to use.

I cleaned the silt out of it that first week with an old toothbrush and a little oil, worked the blade till it opened smooth again, and then I set it in the drawer of the little table by our front door, under the church directory and the spare keys, and there it stayed.

Twice a year I would take it out and oil it and work the blade and set it back. Spring and fall, like you do a good tool, even a tool you never use. It felt like a way of keeping a promise I did not have the words for.

My boys grew up knowing the story. I told it to them the way you tell children a thing that is too big for them, in pieces, as they got old enough for each piece.

My oldest does not remember the water at all. He was four. My youngest was two and remembers nothing, of course, though for years he said he remembered being lifted up high, and I never told him whether he truly did or whether he had just heard me say it so many times it became his.

They would take the knife out sometimes when they were boys and hold it and run their thumbs over the two letters. “R.H.,” my oldest would say, like it was the name of someone we were all waiting on. In a way it was.

My husband passed six years ago. The boys are grown and gone, one to Kansas City and one still here in the county with a family of his own. The knife stayed in the drawer through all of it, moving houses twice, always to a drawer by a front door.

I had made my peace, mostly. I had decided that R.H. was a man I would thank in the next life if I did not manage it in this one, and that the boys he saved had turned into good men with children of their own, and that was its own kind of thank-you, lived out, even if he never saw it.

And then last spring my grandson came over after school with a camera and a clipboard and a county history project, and he changed everything.