Russell Banks - The Sweet Hereafter

This was the beginning of what I have come to think of as the permanent end of my childhood and adolescence. The Vietnamization of my domestic life. Which is why I am telling you this. What had been an exception was now possibly the rule. That headlong terrified drive back down the hill and across the smoking cane fields to Westgate in Montego Bay, Jamaica — there began the secret hardening of my heart, a process that today, as I guess is obvious, is nearly complete.

Jessica was not in the parking lot. A scattering of skinny shirtless boys in bare feet kicked a bundled rag in loopy overhead arcs. I drew the car up in front of the grocery store, leapt out, and made for the door; then remembered Mason and came running back. But Lydia already had him out of the car and was hurrying along behind, holding his hand. He was oddly calm and watched the older boys enviously, as if he did not understand what was happening to our family, although of course he did.

There was a single strange thought leading me into the store: I will make this one last try to save her, and then I will give it up. I must have known that if my child was indeed to be lost to me, then I would need all my strength just to survive that fact, so I had decided ahead of time not to waste any of my strength trying to save what was already lost.

You are probably astonished that I gave her up so easily. And although you could say that it was only a minor event in my life, a scare is all, that broke me, you’d be wrong; I think I was broken long before that afternoon in Jamaica, possibly in Vietnam but more likely not. Maybe in the womb, or even earlier. If not broken, I was weakened. Which is not all bad, you understand. The way we deal with death depends on how it’s imagined for us beforehand, by our parents and the people who surround them, and what happens to us early on. And if we believed properly in death — the way we actually do believe in taxes, for instance — and did not insist on thinking that we had it beat, we might never even have had a Vietnam war. Or any war. Instead, we believe the lie, that death, unlike taxes, can be postponed indefinitely, and we spend our lives defending that belief. Some people are very good at it, and they become our nation’s heroes. Some, like me, for obscure reasons, see the lie early for what it is, fake it for a while and grow bitter, and then go beyond bitterness to … to what? To this, I suppose. Cowardice. Adulthood.

We entered the store frantic, wild-eyed, looking ridiculous, I’m sure, and the three women at the registers saw us and smiled knowingly and pointed, together in a single gesture, as in a chorus line, to the counter at the end, where Jessica was seated cross-legged like a little blond yogi, sucking on an orange coco-pop and studying the pages of a Jamaican romance comic book. She hadn’t seen us, or if she had, she had decided to ignore us.

Lydia got to her first and swept her up in her arms. Mason and I hung back a bit — emotions in dignified check. When Lydia put her down, Jessica marched quickly past me and out the door, haughty, empowered by neglect, with Mason falling in line behind her, and the two of them got into the back seat of the car and began together to study the drawings of the black men and women in love. A tall, broad-shouldered cashier asked me for two dollars for the comic book and the coco-pops Jessica had consumed, and I paid her, and Lydia and I left the store.

We never returned to that store; we couldn’t face the cashiers, I think. Also, we stopped smoking marijuana. It was one of those episodes that clarify things, that shape and control your future behavior. We never went back to Jamaica, of course: a year later, Lydia was dead. Four years later, the twins were dead. And now, here am I.

I could say that I saw it all coming, like most people in town do, but unlike them, I’d almost be lying. It’s just that after Jamaica, while I expected death, I did not anticipate it.

That’s how Risa thinks, however, and she believes it, poor woman — she actually believes that she saw it all coming. Before the accident, for several years, mainly due to her collapsed marriage and numerous financial problems, she was merely a woman depressed and troubled; but that’s what she thinks of now as prescience. Which is like writing history backward, if you ask me, fixing the past to fit the present. Hindsight made over into foresight.

“Oh, I knew it, Billy,” she told me after the accident, when finally we could speak of it to each other. “I knew for the longest time, I knew that something terrible was coming down. When I heard the sirens and the alarm from the firehouse, nobody had to tell me that something terrible had happened, that something unimaginably awful had been visited on me and Wendell, and on you, too, and on the entire town. I knew it instantly, because I had known for months that it was coming. That was why all those months, all the time we were meeting each other, in fact, I was so unhappy and turbulent in my emotions.”

Risa actually said that to me. And when she did, it turned me off, but there was a time when that particular cast to her mind, the superstitious part of it, you might say, made her appear wonderfully attractive to me. After the accident, however, it made her seem stupid and weak, and it embarrassed me to find myself talking so intimately with her.

She had always been essentially the same person, of course, just as I had been, but the Bide-a-Wile Motel, which she and Wendell bought from the bank at auction and which anyone who’d ever tracked the economy of this town could have predicted would be nothing but a sinkhole for their little bit of money (that’s the sort of thing you can predict), was probably the start of her decline, the ending of her dream, the end of her youth. Some people, when their dreams collapse, turn superstitious in order to explain it, and Risa is one of them. The motel, in addition to the insurmountable financial difficulties it created for them, made Wendell, who’d always worked behind the counter of someone else’s business, never his own, look lazy and a little dumb and pessimistic to her, which of course he was anyhow and had been from the day they married. But she hadn’t seen it before, and now she believed that his character was getting in front of her realizing a very important dream. That got her angry at him in a profound way, which drove him further into himself, and although they both loved their boy Sean dearly, they soon began to love each other less. That’s when he started going to bed early and alone, and Risa started meeting me in Room 11.

By that time, which was about three years before the accident, their marriage was essentially dead, except for their love of Sean, of course. I suppose I want to believe that; anyone who’s an interloper in a marriage wants to think the marriage was dead before he pulled up and parked; but in this case I’m sure it’s the truth.

It started innocently enough — that is, without my knowing anything had been started. I’ve known Risa and Wendell most of my life; we more or less grew up together here in Sam Dent, although Risa is a few years younger than Wendell and I. When I was in Vietnam, Wendell, who was bagging groceries at Valley Grocery in Keene Valley, started dating Risa, who was then barely out of the eighth grade. They stuck together, though, and the year she graduated high school, he got a job as a Tru-Value cashier in Marlowe, and they got married. I always liked Wendell, even though he was indeed, as Risa eventually discovered, lazy and pretty dumb and pessimistic. That’s a hard combination for a wife to like, and frankly I never would have hired him to work for me, even if he had been one of the Vietnam vets who for a long time were the only people I hired at the garage. But Wendell made it relatively simple, by being good-looking and passive, for a man to call him a friend. (Some folks might regard him as low-key or easygoing, but I have to say passive.)