The Last House on South Water St.

It's not every day you're called to save a life. Sure, we've all moved a turtle out of the road, let a fly out a window, pulled a dog or cat off death row at the shelter. But unless you're a first responder of some flavor, saving a person is highly unusual — and no, rescuing a friend from a bore at a party doesn't count.

Sometimes, though, life calls on you to do exactly that: to save someone who is looking death in the face, when only you can break that glance.

Such was the position Mary Jane Bushey found herself in one summer afternoon, August 1929, at 1115 South Water Street in Ogdensburg. The last house on the street — a quiet, half-forgotten part of town. Small, functional, more about function than form. Behind it the Oswegatchie, a tributary of the St. Lawrence, flows steadily on, indifferent to who stands at its edge. It's not a wide river here, maybe 350 feet across, but in the right conditions it pulls with real force.

It was around five o'clock, a Thursday, and Mary Jane was upstairs — making a bed, putting laundry away — when she glanced out and saw a man down at the riverbank, fifty feet or so behind the house, stooping to wash his hands and face.

She watched him pitch forward. Maybe the wet grass, maybe the soft bank giving way — either way, he was in the water, and he wasn't coming back up. At least not the right end of him. He'd gone in headfirst and stuck in the muddy silt, legs flailing above the surface, kicking to right himself.

The man was in trouble.

She hurried down the stairs and out the back porch, and in her rush she slipped on the steep incline and rolled down toward the water's edge. She got up, waded in, and reached Louis Seigal, 63, of Rochester, head-down in the mud. She freed him — but in the struggle, on the slick footing, the current caught them both and began pulling them downstream toward a deeper channel. As they drifted some fifteen feet, she caught an exposed tree root with one hand and Seigal's collar with the other, and held fast until he'd recovered enough strength to help himself. Together they worked their way back to shore.

Only then did a crowd begin to gather. One imagines they lay there a while, catching breath, steadying nerves. A thousand feet downstream, the river drops over the dam into faster water. Had they drifted much farther, this would be a different kind of story.

She'd need bed rest afterward — the shock of the cold water, the exertion. It was not the first time she'd pulled someone out. Four years earlier, in nearly the same spot, two boys had gone in, and in she'd gone after them.

A fine story, if we left it at that.

But the story has more.

Mary Jane Bushey was ninety years old.

That's before the Civil War was even a rumor — barely thirty years after George Washington was in the ground. Ninety years old, and she stepped into cold, moving water to save a man thirty years her junior, then hung from a tree root by one arm until he could stand.

And ninety might be the low estimate. The papers that carried the rescue in 1929 called her ninety. Ten years later, the obituaries had aged her to a hundred and eight. Her own children figured a hundred and four. And Mary Jane herself insisted she'd been born on October 24, 1803 — which would have made her a hundred and twenty-six the day she went into the river. That's impossible, of course. It's also exactly the kind of thing she'd say. Nobody could pin her down. Nobody ever really could — not on her age, not even on where she came from. Ottawa, said one account. Quebec, said another. Born in Canada, around 1830, is about as close as anyone got.

And not just an old woman. A woman who'd borne fourteen children, with grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and great-great-grandchildren scattered across the region — by one count, more than a hundred and thirty of them.

She came into the world the daughter of Peter and Mary Denny Sayers, in a Canada that wasn't yet a country, long before electricity lit a single Ogdensburg street. Winters meant wood stoves and wool blankets; you raised most of your own food and doctored your own people. A girl's hands were expected to be useful before they were expected to be soft. As a child she rode logs downriver when the timber was being driven to the mills, and at least once, when men were short, she worked the drive herself.

At sixteen she crossed into Ogdensburg and married Henry Miller, and the St. Lawrence corridor became the quiet spine of her life — commerce, danger, livelihood, memory. She would marry twice more: a man named Leo Compo, and finally Henry Bushey, whose name she was still carrying the day she saved Louis Seigal, and who — remarkably, given everything — would outlive her. She buried the first two. She outlived nearly everyone else. Not quite everyone, though. That was the joke the years kept setting up and never quite letting her finish.

Widowed young the first time, raising children in a town still rough at the edges, she did the only thing there was to do. She worked. More than twenty years in the George Hall household; years more for the Curtises and other families whose names once shaped this town. She watched most of them go. For years she was also a midwife, called into cramped bedrooms at all hours, paid sometimes in cash, sometimes in gratitude, sometimes by the state when a family couldn't. Long before she pulled a grown man from the Oswegatchie, she'd been pulling infants into the world.

She remembered the day word came that Lincoln had been shot, and the hush that fell over the town. She lived through wars each promised to be the last. "After every war they say the same thing," she once remarked. "There'll never be another." Whole families she'd worked for faded into memory. "They are all gone," she said once, lifting her hands. "And here I am, still alive."

Water never frightened her. It was just part of life — cold, unpredictable, always moving. A fair enough description of life itself.

The rescue, she assumed, would stay among the neighbors. It did not. It went out on the wires and ran in papers clear across the country — even TIME carried it: a grandmother of twenty, somewhere past ninety, dragging a grown man out of a river. "I didn't think anybody but the neighbors would find out about it," she laughed when a reporter came to call. She thought the whole business was a great joke, and admitted, later, to getting a kick out of it. Asked how she'd done it, she gave the only account that seemed to interest her: "I'm not as strong as I used to be."

Work was her hobby, she liked to say. When she wasn't working she was doing handwork — she made her own pillows and prized them, and would show them to anyone who asked.

By August 1929, Mary Jane had buried two husbands, delivered babies by candlelight, worked in the houses of the well-to-do, and watched the nineteenth century hand off to the twentieth. The river behind the house was not new to her. Hardship was not new. Doing what had to be done was not new.

So when she saw a man upside down in the mud, she did what she'd always done when something needed doing.

She stepped forward.

Mary Jane Bushey was my great-great grandmother. And here is the part that still catches me: the whole story never left the street. She pulled Louis Seigal from the water at 1115 South Water. My grandmother, Helen Miller Ashley, lived down the block at 923. My mother, Margaret, and I lived at 814 for a time.

Three houses, half a mile of riverbank, four generations — all strung along the same stretch of moving water she was never once afraid of. The Oswegatchie is still back there, indifferent to who stands at its edge. But we stood there. Some of us are standing there still.