…the name was Delores Fontaine, an address down in Arkansas, and I didn’t know it. So my father pulled up a stool, and for the first time in my life, he told me about the winter of 1968.
He was nineteen, driving home on black ice, when his car went through the rail and down the river bank into the cold water. He’d have drowned in it — he was pinned, the door crushed — except a man in a truck stopped, waded into that freezing river, and pried him out. Then the man went back, thinking there was a second boy in the car. There wasn’t. But the current took him, and he never came up. His name was Raymond Fontaine. He was twenty-six, with a baby daughter at home.
“That medal on my mirror was his,” Dad said. “Sheriff found it on the bank and gave it to me. I’ve worn a dead man’s St. Christopher sixty years, because he’s the only reason I ever had a truck to hang it in — or a son to hand it to.”
He’d sent money to the widow for years, quiet, whatever he could spare. But she’d moved, and he lost her, and the guilt just grew. Last month my brother found the daughter — Delores, grown old now, and struggling. So Dad sold the truck he loved more than anything he owned, and mailed her every dollar of it.
My brother, who’d been promised that truck his whole life, drove Dad to the post office himself. “A truck’s just a truck,” he told me later, and this time he meant it the way Dad did.
The truck my father grieved was the smallest thing he gave up that week — because the real gift was the sixty years of life he only ever had because a stranger in a river had traded away his own.