Lamar opened the old 1993 call-log book on top of the TV and read the name of the person who phoned the station that week and asked them to never say my name on air again. It was Burt. Ambers father. The man they were putting a memorial up for.
The hero of the flood was never the hero at all, he stood dry on the levee with a camcorder and then called the TV station to erase the real rescuer, so he could tell the story as his own for thirty years.
Lamar had already played the tape. On the screen the water was up to the stop signs on Jones Street, and a woman in a hotel uniform waded out with a little boy on her hip, then went back for an old man in a wheelchair, then again, and again. Hotel housekeeper Corrine Haas has made six trips, the reporters voice said. This aired on our six oclock news, July 1993, its been in our archive ever since. And up on the levee, dry as a bone, stood a big man in a Lions Club cap with a camcorder. It was Burt. Filming. Thats fake, Amber said. Its the original broadcast tape, maam.
Then Lamar said the 1993 call log had a note, somebody phoned that week asking the station never to say my name on air again, and he read it.
I am Corrine Haas, seventy-two. I cleaned rooms at a hotel by the river in Dubuque for thirty-one years, and in July 1993 the Mississippi came over everything. Our son married Amber in 2014, and her father Burt was a big man around town, Lions Club, VFW fish fry, and every year he told how he waded into the flood on Jones Street and carried a family out on his back, and Amber told it louder, my dads a real hero, not like some people who just fold towels, and then she would look right at me. Were you even there, Corrine, or were you vacuuming, she said once, and the whole table laughed.
I did not argue. When the city announced a flood memorial in Burts name, I went to the basement and found the tape my sister labeled in 1993, and I called the station in Cedar Rapids, and a man named Lamar said dont let that tape out of your sight.
A broadcast tape from the night it happened is the truth, and the truth was six trips through floodwater by a hotel housekeeper while Burt filmed from dry ground. That settled who the hero was.
And the call log settled the rest. Burt himself had phoned the station that week and asked them never to say my name on air again, so the story could belong to him, and for thirty years it did, over a plaque that should have had my name on it.
Burt was gone, so he faced no court, but the whole riverwalk watched the tape and heard his own call read aloud. The city took his name off the memorial and put the right one on it, and my son got up from the front row, walked to the back, and sat down next to me.
Try not to cry, Corrine, its not about you, Amber whispered when I came in. It turned out it was about me, and a tape in a dish towel, and a call her father made in 1993. I made six trips through that water. He made one phone call to hide it. The memorial bench on the riverwalk has my name on it now, and I sit on it sometimes and think about the old man in the wheelchair who got out.