Russell Banks - The Sweet Hereafter

Toward the end of the service, when the short red-faced priest turned to the cross in the nave for a closing prayer and the pallbearers stepped forward from their front-row seats and took their posts by the caskets, Dolores suddenly stood and squeezed past me and the others in the pew. I followed her, excusing my knees as I worked my way to the aisle. From the foyer, I watched the woman hurry down the path to the road, then move rapidly past the hearses and the long line of parked cars. I broke into a run and caught up with her just as she reached a large dark blue van.

“Mrs. Driscoll!” I called. “Please!”

She turned and faced me, scared. “What do you want!”

“I can tell you, I can tell you whether you’re guilty or not.” I was out of breath; for her size, the woman moved pretty fast.

“Who are you? Who is it can do that? No one can do that.”

“Yes, I can. Answer me one simple question, and I’ll tell you if you are to blame.”

“One question?”

“Yes. When the bus left the road, Mrs. Driscoll, how fast was it moving?”

“I don’t know.”

“Approximately.”

“You said one question.”

“It’s the same question, Mrs. Driscoll. Approximately how fast?”

“The police already asked it.”

“What did you tell them?”

“You said one question.”

“Same question.”

“Fifty, fifty-five at the most, is what I told them.”

“Then you’re not guilty,” I said. “You’re not to blame. Believe me.”

“Why? Why should I believe you?”

“Listen to me, you poor woman. You didn’t do anything wrong that morning. It wasn’t your fault. I now know as much as anyone about what happened out there on the highway that morning, and believe me, it’s not you who are at fault.”

“Who, then?”

“Two or maybe three parties who were not there at the time,” I said, and I listed them for her. I told her my name and explained that I was representing the Ottos and the Walkers, people who liked and admired her and who believed, with me, that she was in many ways as much a victim of this tragedy as they were. I said that I would like to represent her too.

“Me? Represent me? No,” she said. “You can’t. I only said I was doing fifty, fifty-five. To the police; to Captain Wyatt Pitney, from the state police. Because that’s how I remembered it. But the truth, mister, is that I might have been doing sixty miles an hour when the bus went over, or sixty-five. Not seventy, I’m sure. But sixty is possible. Sixty-five, even. And I would say that to a judge, if some smart lawyer like you, only working for the other side, took it into his head to ask it that way. And, mister,” she said in a low voice, “let’s face it, if I was over the limit, no matter how you tell it, I’m sure I’m to blame.”

Yep. “But what if Billy Ansel insists that at the time of the alleged accident, you were going fifty-two miles an hour?”

“He knows that? Billy?”

“Yes. He does.”

“Billy said that?”

“If he does not volunteer to say so in court, I will subpoena him and oblige him to testify to that effect — if you’ll let me bring a suit in your name charging negligent infliction of emotional harm. It’s clear to me and many other people that you have suffered significantly from this event. And then, Dolores Driscoll, your name, your very good name, will be cleared once and for all in this town. Everyone will know then that you, too, have suffered enormously, we’ll have established it legally, and then you will not have to bear any of the blame.”

“Well, I’m not to blame!” she said. “I’m not to blame.” Her large round face crinkled suddenly, and she began to weep. I placed both hands on her shoulders and drew her toward me, and in a few seconds she was blubbering against my chest. Peering over her head, I watched the caskets come out of the church, one after the other. The pallbearers — uncles and older brothers and cousins of the kids inside the boxes — shoved the caskets into the hearses, and the somber black-suited guys from the funeral homes slammed the doors shut on them.

It was probably just as well that Dolores had her back to the scene. When the people coming out of the church saw us standing there, they stopped, many of them, and glared at us. And when they moved toward their cars and pickup trucks, they cut a wide swath around us, until finally we were standing there in the parking lot next to the church alone.

“Come out to the house,” she said to me, wiping her red swollen face with her sleeve. “What I want, you can tell my husband, Abbott, what you’ve told me. Abbott’s logical. Like you. But he’s more interested than you in doing what’s right. You’ll see. If he says I should do this, go to court and all, like you say, so my name can be cleared and like that, then I will. But if he’s against it, then I’m against it.”

I hadn’t planned on this, but I said fine, that made perfect sense to me, and agreed to follow her out to her house in my car. Yes, I suppose I had a few minor misgivings about having lied to her — I was a little worried that I wouldn’t be able to get Billy Ansel to confirm that she had been driving under the speed limit. It was a gamble, a calculated risk, but the odds were maybe ten to one that no matter how fast they were going when the bus went over, Ansel, for several reasons, would say to a jury, just as she had told the cops, “Fifty, fifty-five.” You have to gamble like this now and then.

‘Would you say fifty-two miles per hour, Mr. Ansel?”

“Yeah. Fifty-two, I’d say.”

“Would you say fifty-three miles per hour, Mr. Ansel?”

“Yeah. It might have been fifty-three. No more, though.”

“At that time, Mr. Ansel, and under the weather conditions and road conditions that prevailed at that time, the time of the accident, and at that place on the road from Marlowe to the town of Sam Dent — a stretch of road that you, like Mrs. Driscoll, are extremely familiar with, are you not …?”

“Yeah.”

“Would fifty-three miles per hour have been a safe speed to be operating a school bus?”

“Objection!”

“Sustained.”

“I withdraw the question. I have no further questions of the gentleman, Your Honor.”

Piece of cake, on a plate.

Dolores and her husband, Abbott, lived near the top of Bartlett Hill Road in a large foursquare white house with a wide porch in front and a big unpainted barn in back, with nothing but dense woodlands beyond. From the porch you had a great one-hundred-eighty-degree view that included The Range, as they call it, from Mount Marcy to Wolf Jaw. A million-dollar view. For the area, it was an old house, and it had fallen on bad times. In the late 1800s, Dolores’s grandfather had been a successful dairy farmer, she told me as we stood in the driveway before going inside. He’d built it himself from trees cleared off this land, and her father and then she herself had been raised in it. Back then, Dolores said, even in her father’s day, these forested mountains were alpine meadowlands. “It was like Switzerland,” she said, “although I can’t say what Switzerland’s like.” Now, for miles, straight to the horizon, you saw nothing but trees — hardwoods, mostly, and hemlock and pine — and if it weren’t for the occasional old stone wall sinking into the leafy ground, you’d think you were in the forest primeval.

Abbott Driscoll was a shriveled guy in a wheelchair; he’d had a stroke a few years before, and his whole right side had blinked out. He had long thinning white hair, bright blue eyes, and soft pink skin, and he drooled a little and sat canted to one side, like a baby in a high chair.

Although he seemed bright enough, his speech was seriously impaired, and I could make out only about half of what he said. Most of the other half Dolores translated, whether I wanted her to or not. He spoke in these odd cryptic sentences that didn’t really mean a whole lot to me but to Dolores were like Delphic pronouncements. I guess she loved the hell out of the guy and heard what she wanted to hear.