I told Dana Kowalczyk to come closer, because my eyes are not what they were. She walked through the gate in her good wool coat and stopped in the light of the police car, and I saw her father in her face. Walt Kowalczyk was an ironworker. He was thirty four on the night of August 9, 1987, when he slipped on the Cherry Street Bridge steel in the dark and fell sixty feet toward the river. “Mr. Wozniak, I have waited thirty eight years to ask what really happened,” she said. Behind me, Doug lowered the steel box and looked at his shoes.
I told her. I had not said it aloud since Helen and I locked that box in the crane cab. That night, Walt had been working late on a rush job, with no safety net, because the city inspector wanted the span closed by morning and the foreman cut corners. I was in the cab of the Manitowoc, lifting a girder. I saw him lose his footing. I swung the boom under him as fast as the old machine would go, and the hook caught his harness, and he hung there over the black water, alive, shouting my name.
I lowered him onto the barge. He had a broken leg and three cracked ribs, but he lived. The city, afraid of a lawsuit, asked me to say he had fallen on his own time, on his own account. The cashier check for two million, four hundred thousand dollars was meant to be hush money, payable to Helen and me. I did not cash it. Helen and I talked all night and decided the money would poison us. We locked it in the cab with the letter that told the truth, and we promised never to speak of it, because Walt himself asked us to.
A toy crane on a Thanksgiving plate, a steel box two hundred feet up, and an old operator who finally told what he saw that night.
Dana had gone very pale. “Mr. Wozniak, my father passed in 2009, of a heart attack,” she said. “He never told us anything about that night. But he kept a photograph of a crane above his workbench. He said a man in a crane saved his life once, and that he never learned the man name.” Her voice broke. “He said, if I ever met him, I should say thank you.” I could not talk. I took off my cap and held it against my chest. The police officer standing at the gate took off his, too.
Doug stood in the middle of the yard like a man who had been struck by lightning. He had climbed two hundred feet in the dark to steal a cashier check he thought was worth millions. Now he understood that it was worth nothing, that the letter said something very different from what he had read at the top, and that he had insulted a man who had saved a life. “Pop, I did not read it all,” he whispered. “I stopped at the part about the bridge.” I said that was the way of a man in a hurry. He wept without a sound.
The cashier check was too old to cash, of course. But Dana had a better idea. She told me that her father had been paid a small settlement in 1988, enough for a down payment on a house, and that the family had always wondered who had done him the courtesy of making it right. I told her it had been Helen. Helen had written the city a letter, anonymously, and refused to stop until they paid. “Your wife was a remarkable woman,” Dana said, and I said yes, and the three of us stood there in the yard under the great black crane.
I did not sign Doug co signing papers. The lake house deposit, made with my name forged on the line, was returned by the bank within the week, and I gave Kristy a long, quiet talk on my porch. She said she had been afraid of money all her life, that Doug told her it would be fine, and that she had believed him because she wanted to. I said Helen had believed me for forty years, and I was not always right. We cried. We ordered a pizza. It was the best Thanksgiving leftover of my life.
The following spring, the city of Toledo invited me to the dedication of a new plaque on the Cherry Street Bridge. It read, In Honor of the Ironworkers and Crane Operators Who Built This Span. Dana stood beside me in a blue dress, and a hundred and twenty ironworkers in hard hats applauded as I walked to the microphone. I said only a few words. I said I was proud to have worked in a trade where men caught each other. Then I handed the plaque a small paper envelope, and Dana opened it. It was the old cashier check.
I climbed up the Manitowoc for the last time on a clear June morning, with Dana grandson on the ladder behind me, a boy of twelve in a hard hat too big for his head. At two hundred feet I settled into the operator seat, the leather worn smooth by my own back. I showed him the levers, the pedals, the dial, and the long gray boom stretching over the Maumee like an arm held out in greeting. “Is it scary?” he asked. I said it was only a matter of knowing what you are holding, and who is below.
In the fall I gave the crane to the Ironworkers Local, on the condition that it stay in the yard where the river light touches the boom at sunset. They set a bronze plate in the cab, under the seat where the steel box once rode. It says, Helen and Gus Wozniak, 1987. I drive past it on Sundays, with the kielbasa sandwich Kristy makes me, and I roll down the window. “You can still lift,” I tell the old machine. And every once in a while, in the wind, the great cable sings back.
