Russell Banks - The Sweet Hereafter

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 sense. 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.