The Name On The Rescue Plaque

Who he was and why he never came

Caleb brought me the full story over the next month, a piece at a time, the same way I once gave my sons the story of the creek.

Russell Hale had farmed a place over on the west side of the county, out past the river, and he had been one of a handful of men who, before the county had any real water rescue, kept ropes and life vests in their trucks and went out whenever the creeks came up. The old-timers called them the ones who answered the water. The plaque was for the four of them who had died doing it.

Russell died in April of 1997, pulling a stranded man off the top of a car at the Route 9 crossing in a flood. He got the man to the bank. The water took him on the way back. He was forty-six.

Caleb found a short write-up of Russell’s own death in the paper from April 1997. Three sentences, really, the way those weeklies did it. A local volunteer lost in the Route 9 flood after bringing a stranded motorist to safety. Survived by a wife and a daughter. Services at the Methodist church.

I read those three sentences and I had to sit down. Somewhere in the three years between my creek and his, I had probably passed that man in town. At the co-op. At the pancake feed. I had been asking everyone in the county about him, and he had been right here, walking around with Robbie’s knife gone out of his pocket, and he had let me go on asking, and he had never said a word.

Caleb found his daughter. She still lives in the county, out on part of the old home place past the river. Her name and number were not hard to get once we had his. I called her on a Tuesday evening and I did not know how to start, so I just said I believed her father had saved my two boys at Cedar Creek in the spring of 1994, and there was a long quiet on the line.

Then she said, “He never would tell us about that one.” And I knew, from the way she said that one, that there had been others.

I went to see her on a bright day last June with the knife in my pocketbook, and I sat at her kitchen table, and she is the one who told me the last part, the part I had wondered about for thirty years.

Why her father never came back. Why he walked up that bank and drove away and never once let me say the word.

She was a girl of about ten in 1994, she told me, and she remembered the spring my boys went in the creek, because she remembered the spring her father came home soaked and would not eat his supper and sat out on the porch alone in the dark for a long time. She never knew why until I called her. She had thought it was just the rain getting to him, the way it sometimes did.