The Sweet Hereafter

by Russell Banks

  We came up on the gate, where I paid, and passed through to the bottom of the grandstand. The thing was nearly filled already, with lots of folks standing around at ground level by the rail. I knew many of them, naturally—most of the town of Sam Dent comes out for the demolition derby—and saw them glance at us and then look quickly back toward the track and stage in front or nudge the person next to them, who would then take his turn casting a quick expressionless glance at us. No one said a word to me and Abbott or even acknowledged our presence. I knew it was not Abbott they were snubbing; it was me. But he was with me, so they ignored him too. That made me mad.

  Several times I started to say hello, to force the issue, but before I could open my mouth, the person had turned his back to me.

  I studied the stairs for a second; they looked steep and long. Down here in front, I might be able to see some of the action over and around the crowd of people at the rail; but not Abbott. “Hold on tight, honey,” I said to him. “I believe I can get you up there a ways.”

  He has the good use of his left hand and arm, although his right is gone, of course; consequently, when he grabbed the left armrest tightly, he had to flop his whole body against that side of the chair for leverage, which put the chair all out of balance. Still, it was the only way to do it. I backed him around and drew the chair up backward to the first step, thinking I’d try to lug him up one step at a time, thinking also that maybe someone kind would see me struggling and would come to my aid. It’d probably have to be a stranger. A tourist, even. I grunted and yanked, and the chair came along with a thump, and we were up one step. Then another. Then a third, until soon we had made the first landing.

  Out of breath, with my back and legs hot and wobbly from the effort, I had to stop for a breather, when, all of a sudden, of all the people I did not want to see, there was Billy Ansel standing right next to me, with a woman I didn’t know bouncing up the stairs behind him.

  He grinned widely, which was not exactly a characteristic expression, and said, “H’lo there, Dolores! Come out to see the demolition derby, eh? Attagirl, Dolores!” he said in a loud voice, and for a second I thought he was making cruel fun of me. His grin made his teeth show through his beard, like he was clenching them. He was dressed up, in his usual way, khakis and white shirt and loafers, but I saw he was carrying a small paper bag with a bottle in it, and then I realized he was drunk.

  I took a look at the woman with him. She was maybe thirty-five trying to look twenty—barefoot, in tight cutoff shorts and a tee shirt with the words “Shit Happens” printed across the front. Taller than Billy and skinny as a stick, she was dark-haired and had a small head made to look even smaller by one of those pixie haircuts that used to be so popular with teenagers. Her thin lips she had painted over and around with bright red lipstick, trying to make her lips look full; it only worked from a distance, though. Not the sort of woman you’d expect to see in Billy Ansel’s company. She was drunk too.

  “Goddamn, Dolores, you look like you an’ ol’ Abbott here could use a hand,” Billy said, and he passed his brown bag to his friend. “Oh, sorry, this here’s Stacey,” he said. “Stacey Gale Morrison, from Ausable Forks. Stacey Gale, like you t’meet Dolores an’ Abbott Driscoll, old friends from Sam Dent. Salt of the earth, both of ‘em,” he declared.

  “Pleased to meetcha,” Stacey Gale said. She didn’t put her hand out to shake, and neither did I.

  “Where you headed, Dolores? All the way to the top? Lemme give a hand here.”

  “No, that’s okay,” I said. “I can manage.”

  “The hell you can. Here, you get on one side, an’ I’ll grab hold the other, an’ we’ll scoot ol’ Abbott right to the top, just like that. What’s a neighbor for, right? We got to lend each other a helping hand, right, Abbott? Neighbors got to help each other out. Am I right?”

  Abbott swung his head around and looked straight into Billy’s bearded face, probably seeing grim things there that no one else could. “You … help … Dolores … help … me …,” Abbott said to him. “Give … thanks … then … all … around,” he added.

  “How’s that, Abbott? I didn’t quite getcha. What’d he say, Dolores?” Billy asked. “No offense, Abbott.”

  I told him, although I doubt he really got it.

  “Damned straight. Let’s go, Dolores,” he said, and he grabbed onto one side of the chair, and I grabbed the other, and we lifted Abbott and his wheelchair together and crab-walked our way sideways up the stairs. Stacey Gale came along a few stairs behind us, looking slightly put out by the whole thing.

  At the top, we put the wheelchair down, and I set the brake and parked it there on the landing. The folks who were seated along the last row silently moved in a bit on the long bench and made room for Stacey Gale and then Billy Ansel and, finally, me. I noticed a few familiar faces down along the row—a couple of the Hamiltons and Prescotts, some Atwaters from up to Wilmot Flats, a bunch more from town—but everybody kept themselves face-forward, like they hadn’t noticed our arrival.

  I sat down on the end seat, with Abbott on my left and Billy Ansel on my right, and dropped my head and put my face in my hands. Oh, this was hard on me. Much harder than I’d imagined. My heart was pounding lickety-split, and my ears were hot. I was truly sorry that we had come.

  “Hey, Dolores,” Billy said, and he flopped a heavy arm over my shoulder. “You just got to have a good time, Dolores, that’s all. Whenever you can, you just go out there an’ you have yourself a good goddamn time. The hell with the rest, that’s what I say. The hell with ’em.”

  He extended his bottle toward me. For a second, I was tempted, but I shook my head no, and he took a slug himself. “What about Abbott?” he asked in a low voice and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “He up for it?”

  “No. Abbott doesn’t drink.”

  Billy apologized, although I don’t know why, and passed the bottle to Stacey Gale. She took a long pull that she tried to make look like a sip, and Billy smiled approvingly and put his hand on her bare knee.

  I didn’t know what to think of how Billy had changed since the accident. He scared me; but mostly he made me sad. He had been a noble man; and now he was ruined. The accident had ruined a lot of lives. Or, to be exact, it had busted apart the structures on which those lives had depended—depended, I guess, to a greater degree than we had originally believed. A town needs its children for a lot more than it thinks.

  I reflected on the Walkers, Wendell and Risa, and how they were separated now, getting divorced, with their motel up for sale. A week before, I’d run into poor fat Wendell sitting on a stool rewinding rental videos at the Video Den in Ausable Forks, which is where I’d been going for movies these days, and he told me Risa was selling chili dogs at the Stewart’s in Keene. It was a short conversation; I think we were both uncomfortable to see each other there.

  And the Lamstons, gone up to Plattsburgh and living on welfare in an old rooming house by the lake. Kyle Lamston had been committed for a spell to the mental hospital to dry out, and afterwards, as I later learned, he’d gone straight back to drinking, but with a vengeance this time, and had done himself some permanent brain damage and would never work again.

  There had been trouble up on the Flats all spring and summer, bad enough to get into the papers, with Bilodeaus and Atwaters dealing in small quantities of drugs, cocaine and marijuana that they were sneaking across from Canada. Three or four Bilodeaus and as many Atwaters, the young ones, who a year ago had been parents, heads of households, you might say, were now locked up in prison over to Ray Brook.

  All over town there were empty houses and trailers for sale that last winter had been homes with families in them. A town needs its children, just as much and in the same ways as a family does. It comes undone without them, turns a community into a windblown scattering of isolated individuals. Take the Ottos. With Bear gone, it was hard to imagine the two of them together. Significant pain isolates you anyhow, but under certain circumstances,
it may be all you’ve got, and after great loss, you must use whatever’s left, even if it isolates you from everyone else. The Ottos were lucky, though—in addition to their pain, they had that new baby. Otherwise, I’m sure, their lives, too, would have come undone.

  I wondered if my own children, Reginald and William, had accomplished that for me and Abbott, if their presence in our lives had held us peacefully together all those years. When Abbott and I were young, we were so obsessed with each other, so enthralled by what we thought were our striking similarities, that if I hadn’t twice gotten accidentally pregnant, we might have lost touch with everything and everyone else and maybe never would have grown up ourselves. Our obsession with each other was like the isolation that comes with great pain; it was like extreme sadness. Without our children, we might never have discovered our differences, which is what has made our abiding love for each other possible. We would have been like a pair of infatuated teenagers, drowning in each other’s view of ourselves, so self-absorbed that we’d never have been able to help each other over the years the way we have.

  I looked across to Billy Ansel and realized that what frightened and saddened me most about him was that he no longer loved anybody. All the man had was himself. And you can’t love only yourself.

  About that time I noticed a buzz going on down front, over at the grandstand gate directly opposite to the one we had come in. People were knotted up there, a whole bunch of folks who all looked to be from Sam Dent, making a fuss over something or someone by the gate, and the rest of the crowd was looking that way now, hooking and craning their heads to see what was going on down there.

  Then, in the center of the group by the gate, I saw the tall figure of Sam Burnell, and behind him his wife, Mary, and three of their children, the younger ones, Jennie, Skip, and Rudy. A second later, several of the people in the crowd stepped back, and I saw that Sam was pushing a wheelchair, and seated in it was his daughter Nichole. It was an amazing sight. Everyone was smiling, and the folks nearest to Nichole were reaching out as if to touch her. A few people had started to clap their hands, and more and more of them were picking it up, as Sam and his family, with Nichole in the lead, made their way from the gate straight to the bottom of the stairs at the far side of the grandstand. Nichole had a lovely sweet smile on her face—she’s a beautiful girl anyhow, a fourteen-year-old blessed with movie star looks, practically—and she waved one hand back and forth slowly, like a saint in a religious procession or something, while the people applauded and backed out of the way of her wheelchair.

  Billy nudged me with an elbow and in a low voice said, “What we got here, Dolores, is the local hero,” and he chuckled in a knowing way that I couldn’t interpret.

  I turned and said to Abbott, “Billy says Nichole is the town hero.”

  “No … surprise … there.”

  Several men, three or four of them, gathered around her wheelchair and lifted it, like it was a throne, and with her father, Sam, and the rest of her family falling in behind, they carried Nichole up the stairs in a stately way, while the applause grew, a steady respectful clapping, with even strangers, people who must have been tourists, who couldn’t possibly have known who she was or what had happened to her and to our town, joining in the applause.

  “What’s the big deal with the kid?” Stacey Gale asked. Even she had her hands out, ready to clap.

  It was a hard question to answer. Part of it, I knew, was that Nichole Burnell had survived the accident and had suffered terrible loss, loss made visible by the wheelchair, and now for the first time, after many months away from us, she was at last returning to us, returning in a kind of triumph. Part of it was that she was a beautiful young girl purified by her injury. I remembered how I used to regard some of the Vietnam vets who worked for Billy Ansel. And part of it, I also knew, was me, Dolores Driscoll, the fact of my presence here tonight and the way people felt compelled to treat me. If they could not forgive me, they could at least celebrate Nichole, and then maybe they would not feel so bad that I, too, was one of them.

  If she’d been capable of understanding it, that’s how I would have answered Stacey Gale’s question. But then Billy Ansel said to her, “That kid has saved this town from a hundred lawsuits. She’s kept us all out of court, when it looked like half the damned town wanted nothing else but to go to court.”

  Abbott swung his head around and peered inquisitively at Billy, who saw him and suddenly looked embarrassed.

  “You heard about that, didn’t you?” Billy said.

  “No,” Abbott said firmly.

  “I figured you knew all about that legal crap.”

  Abbott and I both shook our heads.

  “Oh. Well, I guess it’s not really all that important,” he said, and he took a quick swig from his bottle and kept looking at it while he talked. “I mean, it’s not old news, actually. But any kind of news travels fast in this town, so I thought you knew. But I guess you folks’ve been out of touch.”

  “Pretty much,” I said, still waiting.

  “Yeah. Well, what it is, Nichole Burnell was s’posed to help this big-time New York lawyer sue the town and the state for negligence. She was like a witness.” He paused for a second. “I thought you knew all about this.”

  We shook our heads again.

  “Yeah, well, when she refused to help him, when she wouldn’t tell the judge or whoever what they expected, this lawyer, a guy that Sam and Mary and the Ottos and who knows how many other people in town had hired, he had to drop the case. And then everyone else who was going to sue, they’ve been dropping out too. The Ottos went first. I don’t think they were ever that serious and were probably happy for the excuse. It just got too … it got too complicated, I guess. People just said the hell with it, the Burnells are off the case, the Ottos are gone, it’s a big mess, so the hell with it, let’s just get on with our lives. You know.”

  I told him that a lawyer had come out to the house and had tried to get us to sue too, but I didn’t remember the man’s name. “Tall guy. Drove a big Mercedes-Benz sedan. Abbott sent him packing, though. Probably the same lawyer as you’re speaking of,” I said.

  “Yeah. Probably was.”

  The men who had carried Nichole up the stairs to the top of the grandstand had set her down in the aisle there, in the same manner that Billy and I had situated Abbott over here, and the Burnell family had found seats for themselves at the farther end of the same topmost bench. The derby was about to start, and people had turned their attention back to the track now, where a batch of old cars were lining up in single file, making a big racket as they positioned themselves to enter the derby area for the first heat.

  Abbott said, “What … did … Nichole … witness?”

  “How’s that?”

  “Abbott asked what did Nichole witness.”

  “Oh.” Billy was watching the cars now. Out in the shadowy track beyond the fire trucks, the half-wrecked cars shuddered and rocked on their wheels, their engines hammering like kettledrums. That’s part of the fun of it—the huge uncontrolled noise of it. All sixteen drivers in the heat sit out there and race their motors as loudly as they can, and clouds of exhaust and sparks fly out, and everyone cheers wildly with excitement. The announcer, a short balding fellow in a green satin jacket, stood on the stage facing the grandstand, and you could barely hear him, despite the excellent loudspeaker system, as he singled out individual drivers to comment on and make fun of, since most of the drivers are local and there are inside jokes that everyone knows.

  Then down on the track one of the green-jacketed referees waved a small yellow flag, and one after the other, four of the gaudy battered old junkers came roaring into the derby area, which is more like an arena, a large rectangular muddy pit, than the finish-line section of a racetrack. The four crossed in front of us, spinning wheels and cutting reckless half circles, lurching forward and then suddenly stopping, until all four of them were lined up at the right, side by side and facing away from the direct
ion they’d come. At a signal, a second line of four cars sped into the arena, digging up the dirt with their tires as they abruptly stopped, turned around, and backed up to the first set, rear bumpers, or what was left of them, against rear bumpers. A third row of cars charged out and slapped on their brakes, and as soon as their front grilles faced the grilles of the second bunch, the last set roared in, swiftly spun and whipped around, reversing direction, and backed their rear bumpers up against the rear bumpers of the previous four. And then they were ready—four rows with four cars in each row, all squared off like sixteen gladiators, armored and breathing fire and exhaling smoke, snarling and growling into each other’s faces. The helmeted drivers were young men and boys, most of them grinning fiercely and punching the air with fists or waving out the windshield opening at the cheering crowd. It was a thrilling spectacle, even to me.

  I glanced off to my left, to see how Abbott was enjoying his favorite aspect of the fair, but to my surprise, he was ignoring the cars altogether. Instead, he looked intently past me and straight at Billy Ansel, and I realized that he was waiting for an answer to his question. What did Nichole witness?

  I didn’t know whether to say anything or not, which is unusual for me, as I’m rarely undecided. I hate that state, so I made a decision not to say a word. Leave it to the men to settle, was my decision. I was aware that somehow I was at the center of this, my honor, perhaps, but I was not sure how. I just trusted my husband to know.

  Billy was hunched over, pretending to be engrossed in the scene down below, but I could tell that he knew Abbott was watching him. The girl, Stacey Gale, was off on her own planet.