Russell Banks - The Sweet Hereafter

“Hey, Dolores,” Billy said, and he flopped a heavy arm over my shoulder. “You just got to have a good time, Dolores, that’s all. Whenever you can, you just go out there an’ you have yourself a good goddamn time. The hell with the rest, that’s what I say. The hell with ’em.”

He extended his bottle toward me. For a second, I was tempted, but I shook my head no, and he took a slug himself. “What about Abbott?” he asked in a low voice and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “He up for it?”

“No. Abbott doesn’t drink.”

Billy apologized, although I don’t know why, and passed the bottle to Stacey Gale. She took a long pull that she tried to make look like a sip, and Billy smiled approvingly and put his hand on her bare knee.

I didn’t know what to think of how Billy had changed since the accident. He scared me; but mostly he made me sad. He had been a noble man; and now he was ruined. The accident had ruined a lot of lives. Or, to be exact, it had busted apart the structures on which those lives had depended — depended, I guess, to a greater degree than we had originally believed. A town needs its children for a lot more than it thinks.

I reflected on the Walkers, Wendell and Risa, and how they were separated now, getting divorced, with their motel up for sale. A week before, I’d run into poor fat Wendell sitting on a stool rewinding rental videos at the Video Den in Ausable Forks, which is where I’d been going for movies these days, and he told me Risa was selling chili dogs at the Stewart’s in Keene. It was a short conversation; I think we were both uncomfortable to see each other there.

And the Lamstons, gone up to Plattsburgh and living on welfare in an old rooming house by the lake. Kyle Lamston had been committed for a spell to the mental hospital to dry out, and afterwards, as I later learned, he’d gone straight back to drinking, but with a vengeance this time, and had done himself some permanent brain damage and would never work again.

There had been trouble up on the Flats all spring and summer, bad enough to get into the papers, with Bilodeaus and Atwaters dealing in small quantities of drugs, cocaine and marijuana that they were sneaking across from Canada. Three or four Bilodeaus and as many Atwaters, the young ones, who a year ago had been parents, heads of households, you might say, were now locked up in prison over to Ray Brook.

All over town there were empty houses and trailers for sale that last winter had been homes with families in them. A town needs its children, just as much and in the same ways as a family does. It comes undone without them, turns a community into a windblown scattering of isolated individuals. Take the Ottos. With Bear gone, it was hard to imagine the two of them together. Significant pain isolates you anyhow, but under certain circumstances, it may be all you’ve got, and after great loss, you must use whatever’s left, even if it isolates you from everyone else. The Ottos were lucky, though — in addition to their pain, they had that new baby. Otherwise, I’m sure, their lives, too, would have come undone.

I wondered if my own children, Reginald and William, had accomplished that for me and Abbott, if their presence in our lives had held us peacefully together all those years. When Abbott and I were young, we were so obsessed with each other, so enthralled by what we thought were our striking similarities, that if I hadn’t twice gotten accidentally pregnant, we might have lost touch with everything and everyone else and maybe never would have grown up ourselves. Our obsession with each other was like the isolation that comes with great pain; it was like extreme sadness. Without our children, we might never have discovered our differences, which is what has made our abiding love for each other possible. We would have been like a pair of infatuated teenagers, drowning in each other’s view of ourselves, so self-absorbed that we’d never have been able to help each other over the years the way we have.

I looked across to Billy Ansel and realized that what frightened and saddened me most about him was that he no longer loved anybody. All the man had was himself. And you can’t love only yourself.

About that time I noticed a buzz going on down front, over at the grandstand gate directly opposite to the one we had come in. People were knotted up there, a whole bunch of folks who all looked to be from Sam Dent, making a fuss over something or someone by the gate, and the rest of the crowd was looking that way now, hooking and craning their heads to see what was going on down there.

Then, in the center of the group by the gate, I saw the tall figure of Sam Burnell, and behind him his wife, Mary, and three of their children, the younger ones, Jennie, Skip, and Rudy. A second later, several of the people in the crowd stepped back, and I saw that Sam was pushing a wheelchair, and seated in it was his daughter Nichole. It was an amazing sight. Everyone was smiling, and the folks nearest to Nichole were reaching out as if to touch her. A few people had started to clap their hands, and more and more of them were picking it up, as Sam and his family, with Nichole in the lead, made their way from the gate straight to the bottom of the stairs at the far side of the grandstand. Nichole had a lovely sweet smile on her face — she’s a beautiful girl anyhow, a fourteen-year-old blessed with movie star looks, practically — and she waved one hand back and forth slowly, like a saint in a religious procession or something, while the people applauded and backed out of the way of her wheelchair.

Billy nudged me with an elbow and in a low voice said, “What we got here, Dolores, is the local hero,” and he chuckled in a knowing way that I couldn’t interpret.

I turned and said to Abbott, “Billy says Nichole is the town hero.”

“No … surprise … there.”

Several men, three or four of them, gathered around her wheelchair and lifted it, like it was a throne, and with her father, Sam, and the rest of her family falling in behind, they carried Nichole up the stairs in a stately way, while the applause grew, a steady respectful clapping, with even strangers, people who must have been tourists, who couldn’t possibly have known who she was or what had happened to her and to our town, joining in the applause.

“What’s the big deal with the kid?” Stacey Gale asked. Even she had her hands out, ready to clap.

It was a hard question to answer. Part of it, I knew, was that Nichole Burnell had survived the accident and had suffered terrible loss, loss made visible by the wheelchair, and now for the first time, after many months away from us, she was at last returning to us, returning in a kind of triumph. Part of it was that she was a beautiful young girl purified by her injury. I remembered how I used to regard some of the Vietnam vets who worked for Billy Ansel. And part of it, I also knew, was me, Dolores Driscoll, the fact of my presence here tonight and the way people felt compelled to treat me. If they could not forgive me, they could at least celebrate Nichole, and then maybe they would not feel so bad that I, too, was one of them.

If she’d been capable of understanding it, that’s how I would have answered Stacey Gale’s question. But then Billy Ansel said to her, “That kid has saved this town from a hundred lawsuits. She’s kept us all out of court, when it looked like half the damned town wanted nothing else but to go to court.”

Abbott swung his head around and peered inquisitively at Billy, who saw him and suddenly looked embarrassed.

“You heard about that, didn’t you?” Billy said.

“No,” Abbott said firmly.

“I figured you knew all about that legal crap.”

Abbott and I both shook our heads.