The young nurse stood at the head of the casket of my uncle with the cracked license plate held in both hands, her own name written across the top in faded blue tape. She was perhaps twenty nine, small and steady, with her hair pulled back and her scrubs still creased from the night shift. “My name is Alicia Reyes,” she said. “I am an emergency room nurse at Northwest Texas Hospital. Fourteen years ago this January, I was a fifteen year old girl in the back seat of the Buick of my aunt when a truck jackknifed on Interstate 40 and sent us over the median into a drainage ditch.” The room was so still that I heard the curtain at the window rustle.
“We were upside down in the water,” she said. “My aunt was unconscious. I could not get my seat belt open, and the car was filling. I remember thinking, so this is how it happens.” She swallowed. “Then there was a light, amber and flashing, and a man came down the bank in a pair of work boots, and he cut the belt with a pocket knife, and carried me up the slope in his arms. His name was Earl Dalton. He wrapped me in his coat. He said, You hold on to me, little lady. I have never lost one yet.” She looked down at the plate. “He talked to me for forty minutes until the ambulance came.”
My mother, at the window, had put her hand against her mouth. The nurse turned the plate over to show us the back, where someone had scratched, with a nail or a key, a long row of tiny marks, and beside them a date. “After the wreck, he went back to the ditch and found my license plate in the mud,” said Alicia. “It had broken off in the crash. He kept it. For fourteen years, on the anniversary, he came to the hospital where I trained, and he left a card at the front desk, and he never once said who it was from.” She wiped her eyes with her wrist. “I only found out last month, when he came in himself, as a patient.”
A cracked license plate with a name taped across it was carried to a casket by a young nurse and gave one niece the morning to bring her mother back to her brother.
She pressed her lips together. “He had a heart attack at the wheel of his truck. A woman called the ambulance. They brought him to my ER, and when I saw the name on the chart, I could not breathe. I held his hand. I told him who I was.” Her voice cracked. “He said, Well, I will be. Little lady. You grew up.” “He died four days later in the ICU. I sat with him every night. And in the last hour, he asked me for one thing. He asked me to bring the plate.” She raised it. “He said, put it where it belongs.”
I looked, then, at the window of the funeral home. A line of rotators and wreckers still stretched down Western Street, amber lights turning in the bright air, and the highway patrol cars sat among them like quiet dogs. I had never understood what he did. I had only known that he towed. He towed my car four times. He said, last one, darlin, and he waved off my twenty dollars. But I had not known that at the end of every night, when the roads were empty and the wreckage was cleared, he went home to a garage wall and added another number to a list.
“There is a wall in his garage,” said a deep voice from the second row. A big man in a patrol captain uniform had risen to his feet. “I have seen it. Three hundred and eleven license plates, hung on nails, each one labeled with a name and a date. Every wreck he ever worked where a person lived.” He cleared his throat. “He called them his customers. He had a rule. He would not go to bed until he knew the name of everyone that he pulled out. He called their families himself. He visited the hospital on the first anniversary of each one.” Nobody in the room breathed.
My mother stood. I had never seen her so small. She came away from the window, still clutching the curtain, and walked down the aisle to the casket, and she stopped in front of Alicia and the plate. “I called my brother an embarrassment,” she said. “To his face. For thirty years.” Her mouth trembled. “I called the people he served truck stop people. I said he spent his life scraping drunks out of ditches.” She lifted her eyes to the nurse. “Young woman, I will carry that sentence until the day I die. And I want you to know that I am grateful you were in that ditch to be scraped.”
Alicia set the plate on the casket and put her arms around my mother. They stood that way, the nurse and the sister, with the plate between them, and my mother wept without any sound. The captain began to sing. It was Amazing Grace, in a rich, rough baritone, and one by one the tow truck drivers took up the line, and the nurses, and a long row of ordinary strangers whose lives my uncle had hauled out of the dark.
We buried him on the plains outside Amarillo on a cold, clear afternoon, in the last of the light. The patrol led the procession with their lights on. Behind them, a quarter mile of tow trucks ran in a long chain, and at the cemetery gate they parked in a ring around the grave. When the casket was lowered, all of them, as one, turned on their amber beacons, and the cemetery lit up like a field of low stars. My mother, in her good coat, stood at the edge with the plate in her hands. She had asked to carry it. She would not let it go.
In March, we hung it on the garage wall. Alicia came, with a drill, and my mother held the level, and we put the cracked plate at the very top, above three hundred and eleven others. Below it, my mother wrote, with a marker, on a strip of masking tape: Alicia Reyes. Earl pulled you out. Then she stood there for a long time, quietly, in the cold garage, with the old CB radio on the shelf behind her. When the static hissed, she did not startle. She lifted the mike and pressed the button. “Breaker one nine,” she said, shakily. “This is his sister. Thank you for listening.”