The Sweet Hereafter

by Russell Banks

And then there were those folks who wanted to believe that the accident was not really an accident, that it was somehow caused, and that, therefore, someone was to blame. Was it Dolores’s fault? A lot of people thought so. Or was it the fault of the State of New York for not replacing the guardrail out there on the Marlowe road? Was it the fault of the town highway department for having dug a sandpit and let it fill with water? What about the seat belts that had tied so many of the children into their seats while the rear half of the bus filled with icy water? Was it the governor’s fault, then, for having generated legislation that required seat belts? Who caused this accident anyhow? Who can we blame?

  Naturally, the lawyers fed off this need and cultivated it among people who should have known better. They swam north like sharks from Albany and New York City, advertising their skills and intentions in the local papers, and a few even showed up at the funerals, slipping their cards into the pockets of mourners as they departed from the graveyard, and before long that segment of the story had begun—the lawsuits and all the anger and nastiness and greed that people at their worst are capable of.

  At first, however, people behaved well, which is to say, they behaved as you would expect: they decently gathered around one another and tried to provide comfort and aid. That’s when you could be glad that you lived in a small town, relieved that you had family and friends, whether they could help you or not. The attempt was dignified and praiseworthy.

  Most of my own family, at first, did exactly that, and I was appropriately grateful. We are not an unusual family—that is, we are not much of one. My mother, because of Alzheimer’s, had been in a nursing home in Potsdam for over two years then, and she no longer even remembered the bare fact of my existence, let alone my children’s; but my three sisters, who are married and have children of their own, called me as soon as they heard about the accident on the evening news. They and I are not personally close, we are in no sense confidants, but they are conscientious women and live in the area, you could say—the nearest, Sally, in Saratoga Springs, with her husband, who is an accountant for the racetrack commission, the other two in western New York, Rochester and Buffalo, where their husbands work, one as a machinist, the other as some kind of technician for Eastman Kodak. My brother, Darryl, the youngest, is out of the loop altogether. Years ago, he followed our father to Alaska but only got as far as Washington State and didn’t quite disappear; once every eighteen months or so, he gets drunk and calls me late at night. I never heard from Darryl when the twins were killed, although I am sure he learned about it right away from my sisters, and when a year or so later he did call me, drunk as usual, very late at night, neither of us mentioned it, me for my reasons, and he no doubt for his. I was probably as drunk that night as he was. Of course, I never called him, either, to tell him what had happened; that would have been impossible for me, almost unthinkable—in fact, it took me until this very instant to think of it.

  But it didn’t matter, because, regardless, I was unable to take the comfort offered me. Something metallic in me refused to yield, and when one by one my sisters phoned and offered to come up to Sam Dent, an old compulsion took over; the same thing happened when various local people—Reverend Dreiser, Dorothy Coburn, even the men from the garage—called or came by to see how I was or to ask if there was anything they could do for me. It’s something I have done since childhood, practically. When a person tries to comfort me, I respond by reassuring him or her—it’s usually a her—and in that way I shut her down, smothering all her good intentions by denying my need.

  I can’t help it, and I’m not sorry for it; I’m even a little proud. People think I’m cold and unfeeling, but that’s a price I’ve always been willing to pay. The truth is that I’m beyond help; most people are; and it only angers me to see my sisters or my friends here in town wasting their time. To forestall or cover my anger, I jump in front of them, and suddenly I myself have turned into the person come to provide comfort, reassurance, help, whatever it is they originally desired to provide me with. I take their occasion and make it my own. I never know this at the time, of course; only afterwards, when I’m alone again, sitting in my living room with a glass of whiskey in my hand, brooding over my solitude, trying to generate a little feeling, even if it’s only self-pity.

  When my youngest sister, Sally, called on the night of the accident, she was the first in the family to reach me, but it was maybe the fifteenth telephone call I’d received since hiking through the snow all the way home from the site. I had walked in whited out like a snowman, shucked my soaked clothes and put on a bathrobe, sat down at the kitchen table, opened a bottle of Scotch, and started to drink. I knew what it looked like and was glad no one could see me, although I was not ashamed. I knew why I was drinking, and it wasn’t to numb the pain. Gary Dillinger, the school principal, called, and Wyatt Pitney, and Eden Schraft; and I reassured them all that there was nothing they could do for me. I’m okay, I’ll be fine. They believed me: not that I was fine; they believed that there was nothing they could do for me. I was like a wounded animal gone to ground: better leave him to heal alone, or you might get bit trying to help. A couple of reporters called, and I simply hung up on them.

  Jimbo Gagne called from the garage, and as usual, it was like we were both in Vietnam again—I was playing the lieutenant and he the corporal. We were all logistics. What did I want him to do with my truck? Leave it at the garage; I’d drive my car in tomorrow. Where should he put the wrecked bus? Out of sight behind the garage, and keep people away from it, because there was sure to be an investigation. Was there anything I needed? No, but if people came into the garage and asked, tell them I might be taking a few days off from work, so there’ll probably be a delay for a couple of jobs.

  “Are you okay, Billy?” He finally came right out and asked it. “How’re you doing up there on the hill? You got somebody at the house with you?”

  “Are you okay, Jimbo?” I returned. “It must have been rough on you out there.”

  “Yeah, sure,” he said. “I’m all right, I guess. It was rough …,” he began, but then realized where that would lead and swerved away. “But, yeah, Billy, I’m okay.”

  By eight that night, when my sister Sally called, I was thoroughly drunk and was responding automatically, as if my mouth were a telephone answering machine: You have reached the home of Billy Ansel, he has suffered an irretrievable loss, has discovered that he is inconsolable, and thus, to save you trouble and him embarrassment, has removed himself from normal human contact. He will probably not return, but if you wish to leave a message anyhow, do so at the sound of the ice cubes tinkling in his glass, and if someday he does return, he will try to respond to your message.

  But don’t count on it.

  Before you lose your children, you can talk about it—as a possibility, I mean. You can imagine it, like I did that time in Jamaica, years ago, and then later you can remember the moment when you first imagined it, and you can describe that moment coherently to people and with ease. But when the thing that you only imagined actually happens, you quickly discover that you can barely speak of it. Your story is jumbled and mumbled, out of sync and unfocused. At least that’s how it has been for me.

  People who have lost their children—and I’m talking here about the people of Sam Dent and am including myself—twist themselves into all kinds of weird shapes in order to deny what has happened. Not just because of the pain of losing a person they have loved—we lose parents and mates and friends, and no matter how painful, it’s not the same—but because what has happened is so wickedly unnatural, so profoundly against the necessary order of things, that we cannot accept it. It’s almost beyond belief or comprehension that the children should die before the adults. It flies in the face of biology, it contradicts history, it denies cause and effect, it violates basic physics, even. It’s the final contrary. A town that loses its children loses its meaning.

  Desperately, we struggled to arrange the event in our minds so that it made se
nse. Each of us in his own way went to the bottom and top of his understanding in search of a believable explanation, trying to escape this huge black nothingness that threatened to swallow our world whole. I guess the Christians in town, and there are a lot of them, got there first, at least the adults did, and I’m glad for them, but I myself could not rest there, and I believe that secretly most of them could not, either. To me, the religious explanation was just another sly denial of the facts. Not as sly, maybe, as insisting that the accident was actually not an accident, that someone—Dolores, the town, the state, someone—had caused it; but a denial nevertheless. Biology doesn’t matter, the Christians argued, because this body we live in is not ultimately real; history doesn’t matter, they said, because God’s time is different and superior to man’s anyhow; and forget cause and effect, forget what you’ve been told about the physical world, because there is heaven and there is hell and there is this green earth in between, and you are always alive in one of the three places.

  I was raised, like most folks in Sam Dent, with a Christian perspective, and I remember it well: they made no bones about it. Billy, they said, there is no such thing as death. Just everlasting life. Isn’t that great? That was the bottom line, whether you were Protestant like me and Lydia or Catholic like half the other folks in town. But when I was nineteen and went to Vietnam, I was still young enough to learn something new, and the new thing was all this dying that I saw going on around me. Consequently, when I came home from Vietnam, I couldn’t take the Christian line seriously enough even to bother arguing with it. To please Lydia and the kids, I went to church a couple of times a year, but the rest of the time I stayed home and read the Sunday paper. Then Lydia died, and the Christian perspective came to seem downright cruel to me, because I had learned that death touched everyone. Even me. I stopped going to church altogether.

  I still believed in life, however—that it goes on, in spite of death. I had my children, after all. And Risa. But four years later, when my son and daughter and so many other children of this town were killed in the accident, I could no longer believe even in life. Which meant that I had come to be the reverse, the opposite, of a Christian. For me, now, the only reality was death.

  I went to the funeral service, of course; there was no way to avoid it without hurting and bewildering innocent people. And not to go, to stay holed up in my house like I had been doing, would have drawn too much attention to me, the last thing that I wanted. But the night before the funeral, late, I ventured out of my house for the first time and drove down the hill to town. I had been drinking pretty steadily for four days, but at that particular hour was sober—or at least sober enough to drive. It was a clear, starry night. A nearly full moon was circled by a ring of pale blue haze. There were no other vehicles on the road, and no lights on in the town. Sam Dent was a ghost town surrounded by fields of glistening snow under moonlight, with the hulking shades of the mountains blocking out half the sky.

  I pulled in at the garage and drove around to the back, where the bus had been hauled by the wrecker and dropped, and for a few moments I sat in my truck with the motor running and looked at the thing—a huge dead fish, one of those leviathans drawn up from the deepest bottom of the sea, the ice-encrusted carcass of a creature from another age. Most of the windows had been smashed by the force of the accident and by the divers, the headlights and grille were gone, the sides and roof were bent and dented, and the tires were flattened and torn. It was dead, permanently stilled, silent, harmless.

  I don’t know why I was there, staring with strange loathing and awe at this wrecked yellow vehicle, as if it were a beast that had killed our children and then in turn been slain by the villagers and dragged here to a place where we could all come, one by one, and verify that it was safely dead. But I did want to see it, to touch it with my hands, maybe, in a primitive way to be sure finally that we had indeed killed it.

  I got out of my truck, leaving the motor running and the headlights on, and walked slowly toward the bus. It was very cold; my shoes squeaked against the hard-packed snow on the ground, and my breath glided out in front of me in pale thin strips. There were several other vehicles parked in the darkness in the back lot—customers’ cars scheduled to be repaired but crowded out of the garage and a couple of wrecks stashed there for parts or being rebuilt for the demolition derby. The orange plastic tape that the state police had wrapped around the bus to warn people away from it looked like tangled lines from the harpoons we had stuck it with.

  For a moment I stood at the side of the bus, looking up at the windows; and then I heard the children inside. Their voices were faint, but I could hear them clearly. They were alive and happy, going to school, and Dolores was moving through the gears, driving the bus up hill and down, cheerfully doing her duty; and I longed to join them, felt a deep aching desire to be with them, the first clear emotion I had felt since the accident; I wanted simply to pull the door open and walk inside and smell the wet wool and rubber boots and the lunches carried in paper sacks and tin boxes, hear their songs and gossip and teasing; I wanted to be with them in death, with my own children, yes, but with all of them, for they seemed at that moment so much more believable than I myself was, so much more alive.

  But it was not the voices of the children that I heard, of course; it was the hiss of the wind in the pines at the edge of the lot, where the forest begins, the cold wind that blows down along the valley from the north. And it was not the sound of Dolores driving up hill and down; it was the engine of my own vehicle idling a few yards behind me, illuminating me and the bus with its headlights. For a long moment I stood there, listening to the wind and the low thrum of the truck, and slowly returned to reality.

  And then, as I stepped away and turned back toward my truck, I heard the unmistakable thump of a car door open and close, and the crackle of leather footsteps on the hard dry snow of the lot. A tall man emerged from the darkness next to the truck and entered the circle of light between us. He wore a tan wool topcoat and was hatless, a middle-aged man with a bulbous tangle of curly gray hair that made his head appear much too large for his tall thin angular body. His hands were jammed deep in his coat pockets, and he hunched over slightly against the chilling wind that blew from behind him. Now, in the shadows at the far end of the lot, I saw the car he had been sitting in, a light-colored Mercedes sedan, silver or gray. The headlights were off, but the engine was running; doubtless I had not heard it over the sound of my own vehicle and the wind, the engine of the bus and the voices of the children.

  The man came up to within a few feet of me and made a strange little smile, almost wistful. “You work for Ansel?” he said.

  “I am Ansel.”

  “Yes, I thought so.” He had bright blue wide-open eyes that were impossible to read and sharp small features. He was clean-shaven, and his skin was pink and taut. It was a likable face, but the face of a smooth talker, self-confident and intelligent, and pleased, even eager, to let you look directly at him. “I’m sorry about your children, Mr. Ansel,” he said, lowering his voice.

  “You are, eh?”

  “Yes.”

  For a few seconds neither of us spoke; we just looked straight into each other’s eyes. He was good at it, he didn’t get nervous or scared or even glance away; he held his ground and waited for me to break the silence or the stare, whichever I preferred.

  “I take you to be a lawyer,” I said, holding on to the stare.

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

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

  He hesitated a second. Then in a soft voice he said, “I understand.”

  “No. No, you don’t understand.”

  “I can help you.” He went on looking right into my eyes, as if he knew something I didn’t.

  “No, you can’t help me. Not unless you can raise the dead.” I was sorry at once for having said it, a cliché, a boy’s smart remark, not a man’s sad one. I had revealed to him, and to myself, a desire
that I did not want to permit myself and that I was instantly ashamed of.

  Pushing past him, I made quickly for my truck, but when I pulled the door open and started to get in, he came up beside me and held out a business card. “Here,” he said. “You may change your mind.”

  I took the card and lifted it up and read it in the moonlight: Mitchell Stephens, Esq., of a four-named firm, one of them Stephens, in New York City. Then I passed it back to him. “Mr. Stephens,” I said to him, “if right now I was to beat you with my hands and feet so bad that you pissed blood and couldn’t walk right for a month, would you sue me? Because that is what I’m about to do, you understand.”

  “No, Mr. Ansel,” he said in a weary voice. “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?”

  I looked over at the bus. The children waved back at me, bright knots of apparition. The lawyer was right; I was no danger to him. I was a ghost.

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

  “You may change your mind. I can help you,” he said again.

  “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,” he said. “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.”

  “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,” he added, and he drew a small black automatic camera from his coat pocket.