I picked the wool loose, and what fell into my hand stopped me cold, because it was a laminated card the size of a postcard, and the thing sealed inside it was a piece of newspaper gone the color of weak tea.
The Cadiz Republican, March of 1974. Two columns and a photograph.
The photograph is me at twenty-two with wet hair standing on the bank of Piney Fork with a blanket around my shoulders, and the headline says a mill hand pulled three people out of a car in the creek during the flood.
I have not told that story in fifty-one years. Not to my children. Not at the plant. The only reason my wife knew it happened is that she was in the crowd on the road that day, seventeen years old, watching a boy she had not met yet come up out of the water the third time with a woman under his arm.
She married me four years later and never once brought it up, because the second time she tried I told her to leave it alone, and Ruth was a woman who heard a thing the first time.
What she did instead was go to the library in Cadiz and sit at the microfilm reader — my wife, who was sixty-nine years old and did not like machines — and scroll through 1974 until she found it. The librarian printed it for her. Then she took it to the print shop out on 250 and had it sealed in plastic so it would not fall apart, and then she knitted it into a scarf.
The note was in there with it, printed small on the back of the card so it’d fit under the lamination.
Richard — I have listened to you say for fifty years that you never did anything worth talking about. You are wearing the proof around your neck now, so you can quit saying it. The woman in the back seat was Ethel Rowsey. She lived to be ninety-one. She had eleven grandchildren. You did that. — Ruth
Ethel Rowsey. I never knew her name. I have thought about that car for half a century and I never once knew any of their names, and my wife went and found out and carried it around and waited for the right time to hand it to me.
She handed it to me at our anniversary and I asked for a deer rifle.
I said you didn’t have to bother, meaning she shouldn’t have, and I stuffed a plain gray scarf in the hall drawer, and she caught my face, and she said nothing at all in her own defense.
A month later there was a stroke in the night and a quiet house in the morning.
I called the Rowseys in April. Ethel’s granddaughter runs a daycare in Steubenville and she cried on the phone and then she put her mother on, who was in that car, who was nine years old in 1974, and who is fifty-nine now and remembered the blanket.
They came to the house in May. There were eleven of them and they brought a ham, which I did not need, and which I ate for two weeks.
I wear that scarf from October to April. It has a dropped stitch about every four inches and it is worth more than everything else in my house put together.