The Name On The Rescue Plaque

The two letters get a name

The name on the plaque was Russell Hale.

R. Hale. R.H.

I sat there and I read it four or five times to be sure my old eyes were not making it up. Russell Hale.

“Grandma?” Caleb said. “You okay?”

I got up and I went to the little table by the front door, the one I have moved house to house, and I opened the drawer and I took out the bone-handled knife, and I carried it back and I set it down on the kitchen table in front of my grandson and I turned it so the stamped end faced him.

“Read that,” I said.

He leaned down. “R.H.,” he said. Then he looked up at me, and I watched it land on him, because he knew the story. Every one of my grandchildren knows the story.

“Grandma,” he said. “Is this. Is this the knife?”

“That is the knife that man left on my dashboard in 1994,” I said. “And I believe the name on your plaque is the man.”

I will tell you, my hands were shaking the way they shook on that bank thirty years ago.

“There’s three other names on it too,” Caleb said quietly, looking from the knife to his phone and back. “But the initials. Grandma, none of the other ones match. It’s the only R.H. on the whole plaque.”

He read me the others. A Thomas somebody, a Delbert somebody, a Raymond that for one second made my heart jump until Caleb said the last name started with a K. Only Russell Hale gave me back my two letters.

“I need you to be careful with me,” I told him. “I have had this knife in a drawer for thirty years, and in that whole time I never once had a name to put on it. I have been wrong before. I have driven pies out to the wrong men. Do not let me believe this just because I want to.”

“Okay,” he said. He is a good boy. He did not tell me what I wanted to hear. He said, “Then let’s find out for real.”

Caleb went right to work, because that is the kind of boy he is. He had the historical society’s records on his laptop within the week. He found Russell Hale in the volunteer rosters, written in by hand in a ledger from the old rural fire association. He found him in the newspaper archive the society had been scanning, column after column of small-town weeklies going yellow in a back room.

And he found why Russell Hale was on a memorial plaque and not in the phone book.

Russell Hale had died. He had been dead since the spring of 1997, three years after he pulled my boys out of Cedar Creek.

I had spent thirty years looking for a man who was already gone for most of them.