The Sweet Hereafter

by Russell Banks

We had one more conversation before we got home, which I think was responsible somehow for my deciding to go to the fair, although it’s not really connected. As we pulled into the yard, I said to Daddy, “Nothing will happen to Dolores, will it?”

  He shut off the engine, and we sat there for a moment in silence, listening to the dashboard clock tick. Finally, he said, “No. Nobody wants to sue Dolores. She’s one of us.”

  “Will the police do anything to her now?”

  “It’s too late for that. Dolores can’t drive the school bus anymore, anyhow; the school board saw to that right off. I doubt she even wants to. Everyone knows she’s suffered plenty.”

  “But everyone will blame her now, won’t they?”

  “Most will, yes. Those that don’t know the truth will blame Dolores. People have got to have somebody to blame, Nichole.”

  “But we know the truth,” I said. “Don’t we?”

  “Yes,” he said, and for the first time since before the accident, he looked me straight in the face. “We know the truth, Nichole. You and I.” His large blue eyes had filled with sorrowful tears, and his whole face seemed to beg for forgiveness.

  I made a small thin smile for him, but he couldn’t smile back. Suddenly, I saw that he would never be able to smile again. Never. And then I realized that I had finally gotten exactly what I had wanted.

  “Well,” I said, “it’s over now.”

  He turned away from me and got out of the car, and when he came around to my side with the wheelchair and opened my door, I said to him, “Daddy, I think I do want to go to the fair.”

  He concentrated on unfolding the chair and said nothing.

  “Let’s go Sunday afternoon and see everything,” I said. “The last day is always the best. Everyone in town goes then, and we can sit in the grandstand, and everyone will see us together. We can look at the livestock too, and the rides, the midway, the games, everything. All of us together, the whole family.”

  He nodded somberly and lifted me out of the car and set me into my wheelchair. Then he pushed me up the ramp and into the house.

  Dolores Driscoll

  Every August since we were married, and before that, separately, since childhood, Abbott and I have attended the Sam Dent County Fair, which by rights should be held over in Marlowe, since that’s the county seat. Instead, it’s held here in Sam Dent, where there is a fine old fairgrounds out along the East Branch of the Ausable River. Abbott loves the fair, especially the demolition derby; weeks in advance, he gets himself worked up to a fever pitch, practically, almost like a child.

  Except for the pleasure I get from his excitement, I myself can take the fair or leave it, it’s just one of the stops that a person makes in the course of a year, but I do confess to enjoying the livestock exhibitions. I like to wander through the dairy barns more than any of the other exhibits, probably because of my childhood experiences, what with my father having been a dairy farmer. The dim warm stalls and the smell of wood chips and hay and fresh cow manure, the slow and gentle movements of cattle and their large moist eyes—those things cut straight through all my troubles to my heart and bring me practically to tears as I pass along the long low barns and stop here and there to admire and maybe even speak to an especially fine Jersey or a pretty black and white Holstein, which is the type of cow my father raised.

  It’s not the same for Abbott. He’s more at ease in the flash and bustle and noise of the midway and, as I said, the demolition derby, which he prefers to watch from high in the grandstand. “You … need … perspective … to … experience … it,” he explains. That’s a problem, of course, with his being confined to a wheelchair in recent years. Normally, what happens is that a couple of men from town spot us before we even get to the grandstand and meet us at the bottom of the steps and, one on each side, latch on and carry Abbott in his wheelchair to the top level, where he can set his brake and watch the whole thing to his heart’s delight, to the very end. Afterwards, usually the same fellows from town show up and carry him back down to the ground, where I take over and wheel him to the parking lot.

  This year, though, things were different. I probably should have expected it, but it caught me by surprise. Although I don’t think it surprised Abbott one bit—there’s very little surprises that man. But without having said anything to him, without our actually discussing it, I figured that enough time had passed for people to have gone through their first tangled reactions to the accident and come out on the other side, just as I more or less had myself; I had pretty well stayed out of sight and, I hoped, mind, all these lonesome months, which was only proper; by now, I thought, people would have put their dark conflicted feelings about me behind them and would once again be free to act toward me and Abbott like the dear friends and neighbors they had always been. Sam Dent was our permanent lifelong community. We belonged to this town, we always had, and they to us; nothing could change that, I thought. It was like a true family. Certainly, terrible things happen in every family, death and disease, divorce and blood feuds, just as they had in my own; but those things always have an end to them and they pass away, and the family endures, just as ours had. The same must hold for a town, I thought. But I’m a sanguine person, as Abbott says. Too sanguine, I guess.

  It was early Sunday evening when we got there, the last day of the fair, and I had to park the van at the farthest end of the parking lot, a long bumpy haul from the grandstand. There had been a thunderstorm earlier, one of those late August storms that move quickly and heavily through the mountains like a freight train from Canada, and we had waited at home for it to pass over into Vermont, which it did around six o’clock, leaving the sky cloudless and tinted a stony shade of blue and the air moist and scrubbed and cool. For the first time that summer, you could smell fall coming on.

  Because of the storm, though, we were late and didn’t have time to visit the livestock barns, which grieved me some, or linger along the midway like Abbott enjoys. They start the demolition derby right at sundown, for it is definitely more exciting to sit up high in the old wooden stands and watch the cars down below smash against each other under spotlights than to do it in broad daylight, when the whole event might seem a foolish thing for a normal person to view. At least I would find it somewhat embarrassing in daylight, although I doubt that would matter much to Abbott. He’s not as self-conscious as most people, due to his stroke, no doubt, and what he’s learned from it.

  From the parking lot, we made our way through the gate and along the far side of the field in front of the grandstand, which wasn’t easy, as the lane was rutted and wet, the grass trampled by the crowds of the last week. We were cheerful, though, Abbott and I; it was our first time out in public together since last winter. After the accident, I had attended the funerals, but alone, without even Abbott to accompany me; it was a way of bearing witness, I guess you could call it. I kept to myself, spoke to no one, and left immediately after the services. It was just something I had to do, something crucial between me and the children. I don’t think people, the adults, quite wanted me there among them, which was understandable, but I had to do it—for the children, who, if they could have spoken for themselves, would surely have asked me to attend their funerals and say a prayer for each of their dear departed souls. And I did. They would have thought me cowardly if I had stayed home instead.

  That done, though, I kept myself away from all town functions, church affairs, meetings, bake sales, and so forth, and more or less oriented myself west and south, faced our life toward Lake Placid, where I had to take Abbott twice a week for his physical therapy anyhow. Naturally, I no longer drove the school bus; two weeks after the accident, the school board mailed me a certified letter saying my services were no longer required, but I had already made that decision for myself, thank you. And since Eden Schraft never called me, the way she usually did, about carrying mail in the summer months, I gave that up too; a bit more reluctantly, however, than I gave up the bus, for I had no terrible associations with that
particular job. Now, whenever I saw one of those big yellow International school buses on the road, I simply had to look away or else concentrate on a single detail, like the sum of the numbers on the number plate or the poker hand the numbers made, until the thing was gone from view.

  I did all our grocery shopping at the Grand Union in Lake Placid, and even started reading the Lake Placid newspaper, which is how I got my job driving for the hotels. We needed money—since Abbott’s stroke, I have been the sole breadwinner in the family. I started with the Manor House, who’d advertised for a part-time driver with a van to carry guests in from the Saranac airport. They did not connect my name to the well-known accident in Sam Dent, and naturally I did not give the school board as a reference. Then on my own initiative I added a few more hotels and got me one of those belt beepers and a CB, until soon I was on call twenty-four hours a day and in Lake Placid five and six full days a week, lugging folks back and forth from the airport, cruising in and out of the downtown shopping area with a load of Canadian souvenir hunters and off to view the local sights—Whiteface, the Olympic ski jumps, the John Brown house, and Kate Smith’s grave. Lake Placid can be an interesting town when you see it from a tourist’s perspective.

  Sometimes, out of the goodness of his heart, because he’s easily bored and would have preferred staying home with his radio and books and magazines, Abbott came along, and that cheered me somewhat. I was very lonely in those days, still in a kind of shock from the accident, I think, and Abbott was the only person I could communicate with. But soon winter passed over, and spring appeared and rolled on a few weeks later, and then it was summer, and now in late summer I had begun to feel more like my old self—although I knew, of course, that I would never be the same person again. You can’t raise the dead. I knew that.

  Anyhow, it seemed like an appropriate time and way for me to reenter the life of my town—coming out here to the fairgrounds with my husband and joining the crowd and not making anything large of it, just saying howdy to those folks who seemed willing to speak with me, and enjoying ourselves for a few hours, like normal people, and then going home. Tired but happy, as they say.

  Was I nervous or scared? Yes, of course I was. My son Reginald had warned me off it. “Ma, forget it, forget that damned town. C’mon up here, you and Dad, sell the house, for God’s sake, and move up here to Plattsburgh with me. I can build you an apartment upstairs or renovate the basement or something, and I’ll look after you both.” As if we were a helpless pair of elderlies. I think he had his own motives, now that he and Tracy were separated and he was living alone in their house. Reginald has always been something of a mama’s boy and secretly ashamed of it; and while he’d never move back to Sam Dent just to be near me and his father, he was not above trying to talk us into moving near him.

  The large oval field in front of the grandstand is ringed by a dirt track that’s generally used for racing trotters. Tonight, though, the racetrack, along with the field itself, was entirely covered by old banged-up cars hand-painted in garish colors, slapped-on shades of pink and aqua and yellow, with slogans, mottoes, girls’ names, and huge numbers on the doors, hoods, and roofs. Parked around the cars in no evident pattern or order I saw flatbed trailers and tow trucks, pickups, and even some fancy new Z cars here and there, with what looked like a couple hundred people lounging around the vehicles, all drinking beer and having a fine time together. They were mostly young men and women and teenaged boys and girls, all of whom love cars and machinery. The boys and men, and many of the females too, moved and mingled among the tow trucks and pickups and Z cars and the old painted-up clunkers familiarly, as if the vehicles were beloved and admired animals that they had raised themselves. It was a whole pack of muscular good-looking youths in excellent health showing off to one another, with the boys’ sleeves rolled practically over their shoulders so as to expose their tanned arm muscles and new tattoos and the girls in tight shorts or jeans and halters, their hair all moussed and swirled and curled in the newest styles from the TV singers and soaps. They had tape decks set out, blasting rock ’n’ roll and country and western songs from the hoods of their vehicles, and coolers of iced beer all around, and here and there a couple was dancing together.

  It was almost dark now. Huge spotlights in front of the grandstand had been turned on to illuminate a short section of rain-soaked track that had been blocked off between the stands and the raised open stage facing it. From the field, the pale glow of the spotlights and the flashing lights from the midway and the rides—strips and circles of red, yellow, purple, and green—passed like firelight from a huge bonfire across the faces of the young people hanging out in the field. I cut between a pair of beat-up sedans right onto the field among them and pushed Abbott’s wheelchair over the grass between pickups and flatbeds and knots of kids clutching beer cans. In the distance, I heard the announcer start to call out the order of the upcoming heats.

  Abbott swung his head around and said to me, “Can’t … be … late.” I started to hurry, but while I wheeled him through the vast conglomeration of cars, trailers, and trucks toward the stands, I kept peering around in search of my old station wagon, Boomer, which I had good reason to hope would be entered in the derby tonight, resurrected and driven by Jimbo Gagne. It would have been difficult to recognize it—they take out all the window glass and lights, and you can barely tell what brand or model car it was originally, except by the shape of its fenders and grille and so on. Forget telling who owned the car originally.

  All the way across the field to the stands, I kept an eye out, but I never caught sight of anything that resembled Boomer more than superficially. Boomer was, of course, the name my boys and I had given to that old Dodge wagon, which had served back in the 1970s as my very first bus and which, after 168,000 miles, had finally thrown a rod and generally collapsed. I’d pushed it out behind the barn and stashed it on blocks, in case Abbott or I or one of the boys ever needed parts from it, which need never arose, as my boys were by then obsessed with off-road vehicles and four-by-fours and I was driving first the GMC and then the International. And then Abbott had his stroke. The old Dodge got more or less forgotten over the years that it sat back there, and in time meadow grass and tall weeds and berry bushes grew around it. Until one day in June of this year, when Jimbo Gagne came out to the house unannounced and asked to buy it. He said he liked its power-to-weight ratio, it had plenty of both, and he would like to get it running again and enter it in the demolition derby at the fair.

  I said, “What the heck, Jimbo, just take it. Haul it out of here and keep it,” I said, and on the spot wrote him a bill of sale for one dollar. He was the first person from town who had come out to the house in a normal way and on his own since the accident, and I was so grateful to him for that, I’d probably have given him my almost new Voyager van for a dollar, if he’d asked me for it. Jimbo is one of Billy Ansel’s Vietnam vets, the one who’s been working at the garage the longest, nine or ten years now, and though he still lives over in Ausable Forks in a trailer with his wife and a dozen sled dogs that he houses in oil drums spread around the yard, he’s practically a local person now, because of his association with Billy Ansel’s garage. People talk against the way he uses oil drums for doghouses, but I can’t see how they’re any worse for dogs than house trailers are for people. Jimbo is a lanky brown-eyed man with stringy black hair who wears one of those long Fu Manchu mustaches and a gold earring and looks downright evil. But he’s actually a very shy and sensitive man, a respectful soft-spoken gentleman, underneath that pirate’s costume, and when he came with Billy’s wrecker to haul old Boomer away, he treated me with courtesy and kindness. He knew that I would take one look at that tow truck and remember the last time I’d seen it, when it had slowly drawn the bus out of the water-filled sandpit that snowy morning last January, and so he telephoned before coming out and in a joking way said he was calling ahead in case I didn’t want to be there when he took old Boomer away.

  “I know
how sentimental you are about that junker, Dolores. It’s like I am about some of my dogs. But I ain’t going to put your car down. In fact, I’m going to give the old boy a second life. Maybe you should think of it that way,” he suggested.

  I did, but I also made sure not to be home when he arrived with the big blue wrecker. In fact, that night Abbott and I drove into Placid for supper at the Ponderosa restaurant, where they serve good beefsteaks cheap and have a long salad bar that Abbott particularly likes to partake of, because he can reach everything from his wheelchair. He always returns for seconds and even goes after salad for me. “Sit … now … and … I’ll … serve,” he says. “Everyone … must … serve … sometimes,” he says.

  I’m not inclined to notice, but now and then poor Abbott must feel a wave of guilt because of the way I’ve taken care of him in these last years of our life together, and the few occasions when he can perform some little physical task for me are no doubt of greater importance to him than they are to me. I try to keep alert to such opportunities and to make myself available to them, but they rarely come along, due to his condition. To me, it never matters, because it’s his mind that takes care of me, not his body. In the old days, before his stroke, he took wonderful care of me with his body, which I will say was always a creamy white and tender delight to me, providing me with all the necessary and loving services a woman could imagine, and consequently I did not pay sufficient attention to his mind, which from the beginning was superior to mine, more logical and just. Now Abbott and I live together like the perfect brother and sister, and I do not think I would have been intelligent enough to do that back before he had his stroke.

  When we reached the edge of the field, we had to cross the track behind one of the fire engines to get to the right-hand corner of the grandstand, and I saw a few folks there that I recognized, volunteer firemen from Sam Dent, and I know they saw and recognized me—I’m pretty easy to recognize, even in twilight dark: I’m big and have red hair, and here I am pushing this small man in a wheelchair. Not wanting to put myself in a needy position, though, I merely nodded a short hello, which I was glad of right after, as not a one of those boys acknowledged me and Abbott when we passed by the fire engine and crossed the track.