The Sweet Hereafter

by Russell Banks

  I pulled into the garage lot and drove around to the rear, where there were seven or eight different vehicles parked and stowed, including the school bus, which was pretty smashed up, although not as badly as I’d expected. Most of the windows toward the rear were gone, kicked in by the divers, probably, but the vehicle was basically intact, probably even salvageable—a repair job that I did not think Billy Ansel would be taking on.

  I took maybe twenty pictures, from all sides and even a few through the windows, and had just got back into my car and started the motor, when I saw a pickup truck enter the lot. It was Ansel’s. I kept the motor running but the lights off and watched, as he drew up behind the bus and after a few seconds stepped out of his truck. To my surprise, he walked steadily and didn’t look especially drunk. A little crazy, maybe, which was okay; but not drunk. In the glare of his headlights I watched him walk over to the driver’s side of the bus, where he stopped by the window and stood looking up at it for a long time, as if talking to someone inside.

  Finally, he turned away from the bus and moved back toward his own vehicle. I decided to speak to him. I wasn’t scared of him anymore. The timing and locale couldn’t be better. It was invasive but not intrusive.

  I got out of my car and crossed the lot toward him.

  “You work for Ansel?” I asked him, as if I didn’t know who he was.

  “I am Ansel.”

  I moved closer and in a low voice said, “I’m sorry about your children, Mr. Ansel.”

  “You are, eh?” He was already combative.

  “Yes.”

  We stared directly into each other’s eyes. The old staredown.

  He broke first and said, “I take you to be a lawyer,” which let me counterpunch, which is how you control these things.

  “Yes, I am an attorney. My name is—”

  “Mister, I don’t want to know your name.”

  True enough, but he was damn well going to learn it anyhow. “I understand,” I said.

  “No. No, you don’t understand.”

  “I can help you.”

  “No, you can’t help me. Not unless you can raise the dead,” he declared, moving away from me and getting into his truck.

  I quickly handed him a card. “Here. You may change your mind.”

  He read the card and then passed it back, looking me straight in the face, but distracted somehow, as if memorizing the card.

  Fine by me. I stared him back.

  “Mr. Mitchell Stephens, Esquire, would you be likely to sue me if right now I was to beat you with my hands and feet?” he growled. “Beat you so bad that you pissed blood and couldn’t walk for a month? Because that is what I’m about to do, you understand. Whether you sue me or not.”

  Lawyers sue; he’d made the connection. And suing is bad; he’d taken his stand. In what I hoped was a slightly weary but kindly tone, because I did not want to sound in the slightest defensive, the way I knew those other lawyers would react when he started threatening them, I said, “No, Mr. Ansel. No, I wouldn’t sue you. And I don’t think there’s anyone in this county who would even arrest you for it. But you’re not about to beat me up, are you?”

  He paused, reconsidering. “No, I’m not going to beat you up. Just don’t talk to me again. Don’t come around my garage, and don’t come to my house or call me on the telephone.”

  The rest was finish work. “You may change your mind. I can help you,” I said.

  “Leave me alone, Stephens. Leave the people of this town alone. You can’t help any of us. No one can.”

  “You can help each other. Several people have agreed to let me represent them in a negligence suit, and your case as an individual will be stronger if I’m allowed to represent you together as a group.” This was no longer the hook I’d originally planned it to be; now it was merely a way for him to feel morally superior to his neighbors, which, of course, would keep him clean for me later on, when I put him in front of a jury.

  “My ‘case’? I have no case. None of us has a case.”

  “You’re wrong about that. Very wrong. Your friends the Walkers have agreed, and Mr. and Mrs. Otto, and I’m talking with some other folks. It’s important to initiate proceedings right away. Things get covered up fast. People lie. You know that. People lie about these things. We have to begin our own investigation quickly, before the evidence disappears. That’s why I’m out here tonight.” I showed him my camera.

  He looked at it with disgust. “Our children aren’t even buried yet,” he said. “It’s you—you’re the liar. Risa and Wendell Walker, I know them, you’re right, but they wouldn’t hire a goddamned lawyer. And the Ottos, they wouldn’t deal with you, for Christ’s sake. You’re lying to me about them, and probably to them about me. We’re not fools, you know, country bumpkins you can put the big-city hustle on. You’re just trying to use us. You want us to pull each other in,” he announced, getting it nicely wrong.

  Smiling at his minor triumph, he shut the door of his truck, backed the vehicle up and turned, then drove quickly from the lot. The truck fishtailed as it hit the road and turned left, heading toward the west end of town. Where the Bide-a-Wile Motel was located; and Risa Walker. I did not have too much trouble imagining the conversation that would take place between them there. Husband Wendell I was certain, would not be a party to it. Poor sap. I liked Wendell. I did not like Billy Ansel.

  Things moved pretty fast for a while then. A lot of it was strictly procedural, the kind of search-and-destroy that precedes filing a notice of claim, where you’re essentially boxing off the defendants so that you can both narrow the terms and widen the areas of liability. I had some files and a fax machine shipped up from New York by UPS and set up a sort of office for myself in my room at the Bide-a-Wile. The Walkers seemed pleased by the arrangement, especially Risa; from their point of view, they now had a lawyer-in-residence. I wasn’t exactly on retainer, but I did end up advising them, Risa in particular, on a few matters other than their negligence suit, which I was now attempting to aim at the State of New York, for not having installed sufficiently strong guardrails along that especially dangerous stretch of roadway, and at the town of Sam Dent, for not having drained the sandpit. And I was contemplating a suit against the school board, for having permitted Dolores Driscoll to service her school bus herself. I figured, cast as wide a net as possible and catch whatever fish you can in it.

  As a defendant, the driver was out of bounds, of course, but I was now considering making even her a plaintiff, since, if she was not herself responsible for the accident, she might be shown to have a cause for action for emotional distress. What the hell, it was worth a try. It’d make an interesting precedent. Also, I might be able to run it backward: it would be that much harder for the state, town, and school lawyers to lay the responsibility for the accident on her if she was one of the parties suing them for negligence. In an important way, the whole case rose or fell on the question of Dolores Driscoll’s liability, and it was a question I’d just as soon not get asked at all. At least not without a few roadblocks.

  The funerals started the next day, all over town, going on for several days, for three or four children at a time, and naturally I planned on staying away. Out of decency, but strategy as well. It doesn’t hurt to be the only lawyer in town who doesn’t come off as a buzzard.

  The town was beginning to formalize its response to the tragedy. There had appeared one morning fourteen tiny crosses out at the crash site, which turned out to be the work of schoolchildren, at the instigation of the school board. So much for separation of church and state. A memorial service for the victims, announced in the local weekly newspaper, was scheduled to be held the following week in the school auditorium, where the state representative from the district, the school principal, and half a dozen area clergymen would intone. Money was being collected, ostensibly for the families of the victims (although the exact purpose of the money was a little vague—funeral expenses for some, medical expenses for others, I supposed), in
glass jars at all the local businesses, even at the Noonmark Diner over in Keene Valley. TV viewers from around the country were sending contributions—money, clothing, canned food, stuffed animals, crucifixes, and potted plants—all of which was being logged in and held at the school for eventual distribution. Even then I could see problems down the road with that, but it was none of my affair, so I just listened and nodded as Risa filled me in on the details. She was evidently quite touched by the generosity of strangers, and I saw no reason to disabuse her of it. Some people, when terrible things happen to them, take strength from believing that other people are better than in fact they are. Not me. I go in the opposite direction.

  Actually, I knew that Risa’s increasing confidentiality with me, her evident need to talk to me as frequently as possible, was her way of leading up to a conversation about how to divorce Wendell. I doubt she knew that herself then, but it was surely on the agenda. The death of her son had eliminated the one reason she was married to the boy’s father.

  I still hadn’t taken the measure of Dolores Driscoll, however, so when Risa told me that the woman was showing up at all the funerals, sitting way in the back and then disappearing at the end of the service, only to reappear down the road at the next one, I decided to break my rule and take in a funeral myself, then head back to the city for a few days. I had several other cases that I’d left hanging and needed attention.

  That morning at the motel, however, the phone in my room rang, and it was Zoe, out of the blue, after three months of silence, and it caught me completely by surprise, or I doubt I’d have handled it as badly as I did.

  “Daddy, it’s me!” she’d said. Her voice was full of the usual phony enthusiasm, but it was dead, dead as the kids in their caskets.

  “Zoe! Jesus!” I’d been shaving, and I snapped off my electric razor and sat down on the bed. It was like getting a call from a ghost. Every time I think my period of mourning is over, she calls to remind me that I haven’t really started yet.

  “Hi! How’re you doing? Where are you? Where’s five one eight? I got this number off your phone machine.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m … I’m surprised to hear from you. I’m on a case, upstate, in the Adirondacks.”

  She said that was very interesting, and for a minute I gabbled on about the case, the motel, the town of Sam Dent, like we have these conversations, any conversation, all the time. Finally, I was able to stop myself, and I said, “Zoe, why are you calling me?”

  “Why am I calling you? You’re my father, for Christ’s sake! I’m not supposed to call you?”

  “Oh, Jesus, Zoe. Please, for once, let’s talk straight.”

  “Fine. That would be terrific. I called Mom, and all she wanted to know was had I grown my hair back yet and what color was it, so I hung up. What do you want to know?”

  “Well, to be perfectly honest, right now I want to know if you’re high.”

  “You mean, Daddy, am I stoned? Do I have a needle dangling from my arm? Am I nodding in a phone booth? Did I score this morning, get whacked, Daddy, and call you for money”?

  Trees, snow, mountains, ice. I could hear sirens, street traffic, a radio or TV newscaster in the background. I imagined some boyfriend behind her, sick and dying, smoking a cigarette, waiting for her to raise some money from her rich father. Who was I talking to? The living or the dead? How should I behave?

  “God,” she said. “I don’t fucking believe it.”

  “I’m sorry. I just need to know, if that’s possible. So I can know how to talk to you. So I can know how to act.”

  “Just act naturally, Daddy,” she snapped.

  The operator suddenly came on the line, instructing her to please deposit another two dollars and twenty cents for an additional three minutes.

  “Where are you, Zoe? I’ll call back.”

  “Shit!” she said. Then she hollered to someone, “What the fuck’s the number of this phone? It’s not here!”

  “Zoe, just tell me where you are.”

  “It’s this hotel, this … place. Where’s the goddamned number? I can’t find the fucking number.” The operator’s voice cut in again, repeating her instructions.

  “Where are you, Zoe? Give me the name of the hotel; I’ll get the number from Information. What’s the address? You’re in New York?”

  “Shit! It’s this pay phone. Yeah,” she said, and then the line went dead.

  What do you do when this sort of thing happens? I’ll tell you what you do. You sit still and count slowly to ten, or a hundred, or a thousand, however long it takes for your heart to stop pounding, and then you resume doing whatever it was you were doing when the telephone first rang. I had been standing in my socks and underwear at the bathroom sink, shaving. I went back to shaving. I was in the tiny village of Sam Dent, New York, in the middle of generating a terrific negligence suit. I went back to that. I’d planned to return to the city that day anyhow, and Zoe’s phone call hadn’t touched that. She was probably in a ratty, crack-infested single-room-occupancy hotel in back of Times Square, or had just been kicked out of one. And for all I could do about it, she might as well be in L.A. as New York.

  I switched my mind onto the business at hand, which I could do something about. Breakfast at the Noonmark. Attending funerals. Dolores Driscoll. The need to sound her out before I got myself locked into this case.

  There was only one funeral left, the service for the Catholic kids at St. Hubert’s Church, a small white woodframe structure out by the fairgrounds on the East Branch of the Ausable River, on Route 73, a few miles from town. The funeral was for the Bilodeau and Atwater kids, from Wilmot Flats, and there were five small open caskets up front, surrounded by flowers and miscellaneous plant life. There were maybe a hundred people attending, a sadly shabby crowd in their Sunday best, mostly somber young men with big Adam’s apples and weeping overweight young women with rotten complexions, and bunches of kids and babies in hand-me-downs, with red runny noses and slobbering mouths. The kind of crowd the Pope likes.

  I recognized several lawyers, easy to spot in their suits and topcoats, checking out the scene for potential clients, and a couple of journalists with cameras dangling from their necks and notebooks in their hands, waiting for visible signs of grief. Dolores I spotted immediately, thanks to Risa’s description: late middle age, round face, frizzy red hair, a little on the plump side, and wearing a man’s parka and heavy trousers and boots. “You’d think she was a lesbian or something, if you didn’t know about her husband, Abbott, and her sons, who are all quite normal,” Risa had explained. I noted that Risa herself seemed to prefer men’s clothing, but said nothing. What the hell, it was probably just something between women, the way they compete with one another without having to acknowledge it.

  I was standing by the door in a pack of late arrivals, still thinking about Zoe, I admit it, when I first saw Dolores. The tiny church was crowded, but she had half a pew at the back to herself, so I slid in next to her. Immediately four or five people followed and sat on my other side, filling the rest of the pew. It wasn’t too hard to see what the difficulty was—these people liked Dolores, she was one of them, and they felt as profoundly sorry for her as for themselves; but they also could not help blaming her and wanting to cast her out. They would have preferred that she simply disappear from town for a while, go and stay with her son in Plattsburgh or at least hide behind the door of her house with her husband up there on Bartlett Hill. They wanted her to stash her pain and guilt where they didn’t have to look at it.

  But she wasn’t having any of that. Silently, with her head bowed, Dolores was plunking herself down in the exact center of the town’s grief and rage, compelling them by her presence at these funerals to define her. Was she a victim of this tragedy, or was she the cause of it? She had placed herself on the scales of their judgment, but they did not want to judge her. To them, she was both, of course, victim and cause; just as to herself she was both. Like every parent when something terrible happens to his
child, Dolores was innocent, and she was guilty. We knew which, in the eyes of God and our fellowman, we were, despite the fact that most of the time we felt like both; but she did not. Denial was impossible for her, so she wanted us to come forward and do the job for her.

  Toward the end of the service, when the short red-faced priest turned to the cross in the nave for a closing prayer and the pallbearers stepped forward from their front-row seats and took their posts by the caskets, Dolores suddenly stood and squeezed past me and the others in the pew. I followed her, excusing my knees as I worked my way to the aisle. From the foyer, I watched the woman hurry down the path to the road, then move rapidly past the hearses and the long line of parked cars. I broke into a run and caught up with her just as she reached a large dark blue van.

  “Mrs. Driscoll!” I called. “Please!”

  She turned and faced me, scared. “What do you want!”

  “I can tell you, I can tell you whether you’re guilty or not.” I was out of breath; for her size, the woman moved pretty fast.

  “Who are you? Who is it can do that? No one can do that.”

  “Yes, I can. Answer me one simple question, and I’ll tell you if you are to blame.”

  “One question?”

  “Yes. When the bus left the road, Mrs. Driscoll, how fast was it moving?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Approximately.”

  “You said one question.”

  “It’s the same question, Mrs. Driscoll. Approximately how fast?”

  “The police already asked it.”

  “What did you tell them?”

  “You said one question.”

  “Same question.”

  “Fifty, fifty-five at the most, is what I told them.”

  “Then you’re not guilty,” I said. “You’re not to blame. Believe me.”