Russell Banks: The Sweet Hereafter

Oh, like most people, we go to church — First Methodist — but irregularly and mostly for social reasons, so as not to stand out too much in the community. But we’re not religious persons, Abbott and I. Although, since the accident, there have been numerous times when I have wished that I was. Religion being the main way the unexplainable gets explained. God’s will and all.

The first house you come to up there on the ridge is Billy Ansel’s old cut-stone colonial. I always liked stopping at Billy’s. For one thing, he used me as an alarm clock, not leaving for work himself until I arrived to pick up his children, Jessica and Mason, nine-year-old identical twins. I liked it when the parents were aware of my arrival, and he was always looking out the kitchen window when I pulled up, waiting for his kids to climb into the bus. Then as I pulled away I’d see the house lights go out, and a mile or two down the road, I’d look into my side mirror, and there he’d be, coming along behind in his pickup, on his way into town to open up his Sunoco station.

Normally he followed me the whole distance over the ridge to the Marlowe road, then south all the way into town, keeping a slow and distant sort of company with the bus, never bothering to pass on the straightaways, until finally, just before I got to the school, he turned off at the garage. Once I asked him why he didn’t pass me by, so he wouldn’t have to stop and wait every time I pulled over to make a pickup. He just laughed. “Well,” he said, “then I’d get to work before eight, wouldn’t I, and I’d have to stand around the garage waiting for the help to show up. There’s no point to that,” he said.

Truth is, I don’t think he wanted to move through that big empty house alone, once his kids were gone to school, and I believe it particularly pleased and comforted him, as he drove into town, to catch glimpses of his son and daughter in the school bus, waving back at him. Their mother, Lydia, a fairy princess of a woman, died of cancer some four years ago, and Billy took over raising the children by himself — although believe me, there are plenty of young women who would have been happy to help him out, as he is one fine-looking man. Smart and charming. And a successful businessman too. Even I found him sexy, and normally I don’t give a younger man a second look.

But it was more than sexy; there was always something noble about Billy Ansel. In high school, he was the boy other boys imitated and followed, quarterback and captain of the football team, president of his senior class, et cetera. After graduation, like a lot of boys from Sam Dent back then, he went into the service. The Marines. In Vietnam, he was field commissioned as a lieutenant, and when he came back to Sam Dent in the mid-seventies, he married his high school sweetheart, Lydia Storrow, and borrowed a lot of money from the bank and bought Creppitt’s old Sunoco station, where he had worked summers, and turned it into a regular automotive repair shop, with three bays and all kinds of electronic troubleshooting equipment. Lydia, who had gone to Plattsburgh State and knew accounting, kept the books, and Billy ran the garage. The stone house up on Staples Mill they bought a few years later, when the twins were born, and then renovated top to bottom, which it sorely needed. They were an ideal couple. An ideal family.

Billy Ansel, though, was always a man with a mission. Nothing discouraged him or made him bitter. When he came back to Sam Dent, right away he joined the VFW post in Placid, and soon he became an officer and went to work making the boys who had served in Vietnam respectable there, at a time when, most places, people still thought of them as drug addicts and murderers. He got them out marching proudly with the other vets every Fourth of July and Veterans Day. In fact, until recently, to work for him at the garage, you yourself had to be a Vietnam vet. He hired young men from all over the region, surly boys with long hair and hurt looks on their faces. At different times he even had a couple of black men working for him — very unusual in Sam Dent. His men were loyal to him and treated him like he was their lieutenant and they were still back in Vietnam. It was strange and in a way thrilling to watch a lost boy get rehabilitated like that. After a year or two, the fellow would have learned a trade, more or less, and he’d brighten up, and soon he’d be gone, replaced a week later by another sad-faced angry young man.

All the way across the back ridge on Staples Mill Road, Billy followed the bus. Whenever I slowed to pick up a waiting child, I’d look into the side mirror, and there he’d be, grinning through his beard at the kids in the back seat, who liked to turn and make V-for-victory signs at him. Especially Bear Otto, who regarded Billy Ansel as a hero, and of course the twins, who, because of Bear’s protection, were allowed by the older boys to sit in the back seat of the bus. Bear dreamed of going into the Marines himself someday and working afterwards in Billy’s garage. “Can’t go to no Vietnam no more,” he once told me. “But there’s always someplace where they need the U.S. Marines, right?” I nodded and hoped he was wrong. I have a son in the military, after all. But I understood Bear Otto’s desire to become a noble man, a man like Billy Ansel, and I respected that, naturally. I just wished the boy had more ways of imagining the thing than by becoming a good soldier. But that’s boys, I guess.

Out there on the far side of Irish Hill, just before Staples Mill Road ties onto the old Marlowe road and makes a beeline for Sam Dent, three miles away, there’s a stretch of tableland called Wilmot Flats. Supposedly, in ancient times it was the bottom of a glacial river or lake, but now it’s mostly poor sandy soil and scrub brush and jack pine, with no open views of the mountains or valleys, at least not from the road. The town dump takes up half the Flats, with the other half parceled into odd lots with trailers on them and a couple of hand-built houses that are little more than shanties, tarpaper-covered clusters of tiny rooms heated by kerosene and wood. The folks who live in them are mostly named Atwater, with a few Bilodeaus thrown in. Every winter there’s a bad fire up on the Flats, and at town meeting for a spell everyone talks about instituting regulations to govern the ways houses are heated, as if the state legislature hadn’t already tried to regulate them from down in Albany. But nothing ever comes of it — there’s too many of us who heat with kerosene or wood to change things. They’re dangerous, of course, but what isn’t?

Anyhow, I was making my stops up along the Flats, picking up the last of my load — nine kids up there, except when there’s a virus going around — boys and girls of various ages who are the poorest children in town, generally. Their parents are young, little more than teenaged kids themselves, and half of them are cousins or actual siblings. There’s intermarriage up there and all sorts of mingling that it’s better not to know about, and between that and alcohol and ignorance, the children have little chance of doing more with their lives than imitating their parents’ lives. With them, says Abbott, you have to sympathize. Regardless of what you think of their parents and the rest of the adults up there. It’s like all those poor children are born banished and spend their lives trying to get back to where they belong. And only a few of them manage it. The occasional plucky one, who happens also to be lucky and gifted with intelligence, good looks, and charm, he might get back, before he dies, to his native town. But the rest stay banished, permanently exiled, if not up there on Wilmot Flats, then someplace just like it.

That’s when I saw the dog. The actual dog, I mean — not the one I thought I saw on the Marlowe road a few minutes later. It’s probably irrelevant, but I offer it as a possible explanation for my seeing what I thought was a dog later, since both were the same dull red color. The dog on Wilmot Flats was a garbage hound, one of those wandering strays you see hanging around the dump. They are often sick and vicious and are known to chase deer, so the boys in town shoot them whenever they come across one in the woods. Over the years I’ve come up on four or five of their rotting corpses in the woods behind our house, and it always gives me a painful chill and then a protracted sad feeling. I don’t like the dogs one bit, but I hate to see them dead.