Russell Banks - The Sweet Hereafter

The bus had not been hauled out — you could see the front end of the vehicle up on the ice-cluttered far bank of the pit, like some huge dying yellow beast caught struggling to clamber out and frozen in the midst of the attempt, with the rest of the thing underwater. The snow and the cold made everyone down there — the rescue workers, the wet-suited divers from Burlington, the state troopers — move slowly, hunched in on their bodies as if with fear and permanent resentment, like lifetime prisoners in a Siberian gulag.

On the near bank, covered with dark green wool blankets, were the bodies of the last of the children removed from the bus by the divers, the kids who had been seated near the back. They had been laid out in the trampled snow but had not been brought up to the road yet. And among these were the bodies of Risa’s son, Sean, who had been in front but whose body had got jammed under a seat, and the Ottos’ boy, Bear, and my twins, Mason and Jessica.

I had seen them myself, I looked straight down into their peaceful ice-blue faces, and then quickly drew the blankets back over them again, turned and walked away alone, numb and solid as stone, and climbed slowly, on legs that weighed like lead, the steep side of the frozen embankment to the road. Photographs of them alive and smiling would have made me cry and fall down and beat the earth with my fists; their actual dead faces only sealed me off from myself.

I don’t know where I was going, whom I was looking for. Yes, I do know. Lydia. I was looking for Lydia — to tell her that our children were dead, and that I had not been able to save them, and that finally we were all four of us together again.

The last of the ambulances had left for the medical center in Marlowe, where they were taking the survivors before dispatching the most seriously injured children to Lake Placid and Plattsburgh, and the firehouse in Sam Dent, where they had set up a temporary morgue, and there was a break while the workers waited for them to return for the rest. The wrecker from my garage, driven by Jimbo Gagne, was being brought around by the dump road from Wilmot Flats, preceded by a huge town snowplow, for that road had not been used since fall and was under six or eight feet of snow.

Except for Dolores Driscoll, who was uninjured and had remained down by the sandpit, lost and mumbling in a kind of shock but refusing stubbornly to leave the scene, there were no more survivors. Everyone knew that now. Those of us who had not left with the ambulances knew what we were waiting for — the removal of the last of the bodies of our children. Some people sobbed and wailed into the arms of friends and strangers, whoever would hold them; a few had been placed in the back seats of friends’ cars; a few others, like Risa, just stood among friends and relatives and stared silently at the ground, their minds emptied of thought or feeling.

I guess I was one of these, although at first I had tried to keep on working down below alongside the other men, as if my own children had not been on the bus, as if this had happened to someone else and not me. At first, a few people — Jimbo and Bud from the garage, who had raced out at once with the wrecker when they heard on the CB that there’d been an accident (a message that in fact I myself had called in, although I don’t know how I managed that; I don’t even remember it), and Wyatt Pitney, the state trooper, and a couple of guys on the rescue squad — had tried to get me the hell out of there, but like Dolores, I wouldn’t leave.

Later, I learned that people thought I was being courageous. Not so. There were selfish reasons for my behavior. I shoved everyone away and kept more or less to myself, silent, stone-faced, although continuing nonetheless to help the other men, as we received one child after another from the divers and wrapped them in blankets and dispatched them in stretchers up the steep slope to the road and the waiting ambulances, as if by doing that I could somehow prolong this part of the nightmare and postpone waking up to what I knew would be the inescapable and endless reality of it. No one spoke. Somehow, at bottom, I did not want this awful work to end. That’s not courage.

It was still snowing pretty hard; close to half a foot of it had fallen since the bus had gone over. There was no horizon. The sky was ash gray and hung low over the mountains. Within a few hundred yards the spruce trees and pines in the wide valley below the road and the thick birch trees and the road itself quickly dimmed and then simply faded into sheets of falling snow and disappeared entirely from view. There was a long disorderly line of cars, pickups, snowmobiles, and police cruisers parked on the shoulder, while several troopers wearing fluorescent orange jackets stood out in the middle of the road directing traffic, hurrying onlookers — skiers mostly, up for the weekend, delighted by the new snow, slowed suddenly and properly sobered by the sight of our town’s disaster, memorizing as much of it as they could, so as to confirm it to their friends later, when it appeared in the newspapers and on television — past the scene and on to their weekend.

When I reached the top of the embankment, I stepped over the orange plastic ribbon the state troopers had hung along the roadway to keep people from scrambling down to the crash site. One of the troopers, a man I knew vaguely, came toward me, as if to escort me, and when I looked straight through him and waved him off, he backed quickly away, as if I had cursed him. That’s when I saw Risa, standing a few feet in front of Wendell, who looked as though someone had punched him in the chest: all the force had gone out of him, and his face was twisted with the pain of the blow. By comparison, Risa was solid and resolved, already mourning, and slowly she looked up and then saw me when I passed near her. We could no longer pretend to love each other or even pretend to be hiding our love. Our eyes locked for a fraction of a second, and then we both looked away, and I moved on.

After that it was as if no one dared to talk to me or come forward in any way; I walked straight down the line of parents and other townspeople, the onlookers, cops, and reporters, until finally I was alone, plodding along the side of the road, moving uphill, back the way barely two hours earlier the school bus had come and then right behind it I had come in my pickup, idly daydreaming of sleeping with Risa Walker.

The snow continued to fall, and from the perspective of Risa and the others back at the accident site, I must have disappeared into it, just walked straight out of their reality into my own. In a few moments I was utterly alone in the cold snowy world, walking steadily away from everyone else, moving as fast as I could, toward my children and my wife.

For a long time that’s how it was for me; perhaps it still is. The only way I could go on living was to believe that I was not living. I can’t explain it; I can only tell you how it felt. I think it felt that way for a lot of people in town. Death permanently entered our lives with that accident. And while some people simply denied it, as poor Dolores Driscoll seems to have done, or moved to another part of the state and attempted to start their lives over, like the Lamstons, or tried to believe that death had been there all along, like Risa, claiming no difference between then and now, which is a way of denying it too — for me, and perhaps for some of the children who survived the accident, like Nichole Burnell and the Bigelows and Baptistes and the several sad little Bilodeau kids whose older brothers and sisters had been killed, for us there was life, true life, real life, no matter how bad it had seemed, before the accident, and nothing that came after the accident resembled it in any important way. So for us, it was as if we, too, had died when the bus went over the embankment and tumbled down into the frozen water-filled sandpit, and now we were lodged temporarily in a kind of purgatory, waiting to be moved to wherever the other dead ones had gone.