because what my father buried at that crossing was the best thing he ever did, and he never told a living soul.
In the hollow under that board, lined with plastic and kept dry, was a coffee can, and inside it a folded newspaper clipping, a small photograph, and a bundle of letters tied with a rubber band gone brittle. I sat right down in the grass by the tracks and read it all.
The clipping was forty years old. It told how a delivery driver east of town had seen a car stalled dead on the crossing with the gates broken and a train coming, and how that driver ran flat out and pulled a young mother and her baby clear of the tracks with seconds to spare. It did not give the drivers name. He would not let them print it. But I knew the truck in the grainy photo. It was my fathers.
My father saved two lives at that crossing, forty years ago, and never told his own family. That is the kind of quiet man he was, a man who drove a delivery route around Escanaba for thirty years and never told his business to a soul.
The letters were from the mother. She had found him, years later, figured out who he was, and she wrote him every so often. About the baby growing up. Graduating. Getting married. Having babies of her own. Forty years of a life that only happened because my father ran when running was the only thing that would do.
The last letter, near the top, was recent, and one line of it is why my father drove out to that crossing every single morning of his life.
I stand where you pulled us out sometimes, and I thank God for you. My girl is a grandmother now. All of it is because of one man who ran. I hope you go out there too, and remember that you did the finest thing a person can do.
He went out there every morning, rain or snow, the morning of my wedding, the morning we buried my mother, and we never understood why. He was not haunted by that crossing. He was grateful for it. He went to stand where he had once been given the chance to save two lives, to remember, on the hardest mornings and the best ones, that a person can matter that much in the time it takes to run a hundred yards.
I found the mother. She is old now, and when I told her my father had passed, and that he kept her letters in a can buried at the crossing and read them every morning for forty years, she wept on the phone like she had lost her own kin, which in a way she had.
The county put lights and gates on that crossing years back, finally, so no other car would ever be stranded there. And now there is going to be a small sign too, with my fathers name on it, the name he never let them print. His grandchildren will grow up knowing that the finest thing their grandpa ever did, he did in secret, and drove out to honor every morning of his life.