Sam’s Table
Part One: The Quiet One
My daughter, Lily, has always been a quiet kid. Even as a baby, she hardly cried. She’d lie in her crib and watch the ceiling fan turn with an expression of total concentration, like she was working out a math problem, and when I came to pick her up, she’d reach for me with both arms without making a sound.
Her father used to say she was an old soul. “She’s been here before,” Sam would say, holding her up over his head in the kitchen while she studied his face. “She’s just checking to see if we’re doing it right this time.”
Sam died four years ago, when Lily was eleven. After that, my quiet kid got even quieter.
My name is Megan Porter. I’m forty-one years old, and I live in a small white house with green shutters on a gravel road outside Mountain Grove, Missouri, in the hills of the Ozarks. I drive a school bus for the Mountain Grove school district in the mornings and afternoons, and in between I clean rooms at the Super 8 out by the highway. It isn’t glamorous, but it keeps the lights on. Most months.
Sam was a lineman for the electric cooperative. He climbed poles in ice storms and tornadoes and hundred-degree heat to put the power back on for people he’d never meet. He had big, scarred hands and a laugh you could hear from the barn, and he sang Merle Haggard songs off-key while he washed the dishes.
He used to say one thing to Lily over and over, every time she asked him why he went out in storms to fix other people’s lights.
“Being a good person means helping when nobody’s watching, Lil,” he’d say. “Anybody can be good when they’re getting a medal for it.”
Part Two: The Flood
It happened in April, four years ago, during the worst flooding the Ozarks had seen in a generation.
It rained for six days straight. The creeks came over the low-water crossings, the rivers came up over the roads, and the whole county turned brown and roaring. Sam had been working nearly around the clock, restoring power to substations, sleeping three hours a night in his truck.
On the sixth night, driving home on Highway 95 near the Gasconade River bridge, he saw headlights in the water.
A car had driven into a flooded low spot where the road dipped near Beaver Creek. The water was moving fast, four feet deep and rising, and the car was already drifting sideways off the pavement toward the creek channel. There was a man inside. Sam could see him through the windshield in the glare of the truck’s headlights, beating on the glass.
Sam called 911 from his truck. The dispatcher told him a swift-water rescue team was twenty-five minutes out. The car didn’t have twenty-five minutes.
So Sam got out of his truck. He tied a tow rope around his waist and the other end to the front bumper of his co-op truck, and he walked into the water.
I know all this from the sheriff’s report, and from the two people in a pickup truck who stopped on the far side of the flood and watched it happen. They said Sam reached the car in about a minute, fighting the current the whole way. They said he broke the driver’s window with his elbow. They said he got the man out through the window and turned around with him and started back along the rope.
They said that halfway back, the rope snapped.
The swift-water team found the car the next morning, a mile downstream, wrapped around a sycamore tree. They found Sam three days later, two miles farther down, in a logjam at the bend of Beaver Creek.
The sheriff came to my door at six o’clock on a Tuesday morning. His name was Dale Huff, and he’d known Sam since high school. He stood on my porch with his hat in his hands, rain dripping off his slicker.
“Megan,” he said. “I’m so sorry. Sam’s gone.”
I remember holding on to the doorframe. I remember Lily coming down the stairs in her pajamas behind me.
“And the man in the car?” I asked. I don’t know why that was my first question. Maybe because I knew Sam would ask it.
Dale shook his head. “We lost him too,” he said. “They’re both gone.”
Part Three: Four Years
The weekly paper ran the story that Thursday. Local Lineman, Motorist Lost in Beaver Creek Flood. There were two photographs side by side on the front page: Sam in his co-op hard hat, grinning, and a man from out of state, identified from his driver’s license, whose name I’ve never been able to forget. Elliot Graves, fifty-four, of Memphis, Tennessee.
I read that article once. Then I folded it up and put it in the back of my Bible, and I didn’t read anything else about that flood ever again. Not the follow-up stories, not the corrections, not the letters to the editor. I couldn’t. I had an eleven-year-old daughter and a funeral to plan and a mortgage I couldn’t pay on one income.
The first year was the worst. Sam’s life insurance through the co-op paid off the truck and the funeral and about four months of mortgage. After that, it was just my bus route and the Super 8.
I learned how to stretch a pound of hamburger across three dinners. I learned which grocery store marked down its bread on Tuesdays. I learned to stand in the checkout line with a running total in my head and quietly put things back when the number got too high: the name-brand cereal, the strawberries, the ice cream Lily liked. I’d tell the cashier I’d changed my mind.
And I learned to skip dinner. Not every night, just when the money ran thin at the end of the month. I’d make Lily a plate and say I’d eaten at work. I’d say I wasn’t hungry, I’d had a big lunch. I’d sit across the table from her with a cup of coffee and watch her eat.
I thought I was hiding it from her. I was so sure.
There was one more loss after Sam died, one I don’t talk about much.
Sam’s mother, Rose Porter, lived alone in a little yellow house on the other side of Mountain Grove. She’d been a widow for twenty years, and Sam was her only child. At the funeral, standing beside his casket at the Methodist church, she said something to me I’ve never been able to forget.
“He went into that water because he never could say no to anybody,” she said. “You should have made him stay home, Megan. You should have made him rest.”
I didn’t answer her. I couldn’t. We hadn’t spoken since. Not at Christmas, not on Lily’s birthdays. I sent cards with school pictures in them for the first two years, and they were never answered. After that, I stopped sending them. 