The Sweet Hereafter

Dolores Driscoll

A dog — it was a dog I saw for certain. Or thought I saw. It was snowing pretty hard by then, and you can see things in the snow that aren’t there, or aren’t exactly there, but you also can’t see some of the things that are there, so that by God when you do see something, you react anyhow, erring on the distaff side, if you get my drift. That’s my training as a driver, but it’s also my temperament as a mother of two grown sons and wife to an invalid, and that way when I’m wrong at least I’m wrong on the side of the angels.

It was like the ghost of a dog I saw, a reddish-brown blur, much smaller than a deer — which is what you’d expect to see out there that early — although the same gingerbread color as a deer it was, moving fast behind the cloud of snow falling between us, then slow, and then stopped altogether in the middle of the road, like it was trying to make up its mind whether to go on or go back.

I couldn’t see it clearly, so can’t say what it was for sure, but I saw the blur clearly, that’s what I mean to say, and that’s what I reacted to. These things have to happen faster than you can think about them, because if they don’t, you’re going to be locked in place just like that dog or deer or whatever the hell it was, and you’ll get smacked head-on the same as that dog would have if I hadn’t hit the brake and pulled the wheel without thinking.

But there’s no point now to lingering over the dog, whether it was a dog or a tiny deer, or even an optical illusion, which, to be absolutely truthful, now seems likeliest. All that matters is that I saw something I didn’t expect out there and didn’t particularly identify at the time, there being no time for that — so let’s just say it was like a dog, one of those small red spaniels, smaller than a setter, the size of a kid in a rust-colored snowsuit, and I did what anyone with half a brain would have done: I tried to avoid hitting it.

It was in first light and, as I said, blowing snow by then, but when I started my route that morning, when I left the house, it was still dark, of course, and no snow falling. You could sniff the air, though, and smell it coming, but despite that, I had thought at first that it was too cold to snow. Which is what I said to Abbott, who is my husband and doesn’t get out of the house very much because of his being in a wheelchair, so I have this habit of reporting the weather to him, more or less, every morning when I first step out of the kitchen onto the back porch.

“I smell snow,” I said, and leaned down and checked the thermometer by the door. It’s posted low on the frame of the storm door, so Abbott can scoot over and open the inside door and check the temperature anytime he wants. “Seventeen below,” I told him. “Too cold to snow.”

Abbott was at one time an excellent carpenter, but in 1984 he had a stroke, and although he has recovered somewhat, he’s still pretty much housebound and has trouble talking normally and according to some people is incomprehensible, yet I myself understand him perfectly. No doubt it’s because I know that his mind is clear. The way Abbott has handled the consequences of his stroke is sufficient evidence that he is a very courageous man, but he was always a logical person with a lively interest in the world around him, so I make an effort to bring him as much information about the world as I can. It’s the least I can do.

“Never … that … cold,” he said. He’s worked out a way of talking with just the left side of his mouth, but he stammers some and spits a bit and makes a grimace that some people would find embarrassing and so would look away and as a result not fully understand him. I myself find his way of talking very interesting, actually, and even charming. And not just because I’m used to it. To tell the truth, I don’t think I’ll ever get used to it, which is why it’s so interesting and attractive to me. Me, I’m a talker, and consequently like a lot of talkers tend to say things I don’t mean. But Abbott, more than anyone else I know, has to make his words count, almost like a poet, and because he’s passed so close to death he has a clarity about life that most of us can’t even imagine.

“North … Pole’s … under … snow,” he said.

No arguing with that. I grabbed my coffee thermos, pecked him with a kiss and waved him goodbye as usual, shut the door and went out to the barn and got my bus started. I kept an extra battery and jumper cables in the kitchen, just in case, but the old girl was fine that morning and cranked right up. By nature I’m a careful person and not overly optimistic, especially when it comes to machinery and tools; I keep everything in tiptop condition, with plenty of backup. Batteries, tires, oil, antifreeze, the whole bit. I treated that bus like it was my own, maybe even better, for obvious reasons, but also because that’s my temperament. I’m the kind of person who always follows the manual. No shortcuts.

Weather, meaning snow or ice, stopped me numerous times a year — of course, those were days that Gary Dillinger, the principal, called school off anyhow, so it didn’t count — but in twenty-two years I did not miss a single morning or afternoon pickup because of a mechanical breakdown, and although I went through three buses in that time, it was only to have each bus replaced with a larger one, as the town grew. I started back in 1968, as a courtesy and convenience, with my own brand-new Dodge station wagon, carting my two boys, who were then in Sam Dent School, and scooping up with them the six or eight other children who lived on the Bartlett Hill Road side of town. Then the district made my route official, enlarging it somewhat, and gave me a salary and purchased me a GMC that had twenty-four seats. Finally, in 1987, to handle the baby boomers’ babies, I’d guess you’d call them, the district had to get me the International fifty-seater. My old Dodge wagon finally gave out at 168,000 miles, and I drove it behind the barn, drained it, and put it up on blocks, and now for my personal vehicle and for running Abbott over to Lake Placid for his therapy I drive an almost new Plymouth Voyager van. It’s got a lift for his chair, and he can lock the chair into the passenger’s side and sit next to me up front, which gives him a distinct pleasure. The old GMC they use for hauling the high school kids over to Placid.

Luckily, our barn being plenty large enough and standing empty, I was always able to park the bus at home overnight, where I could look after it in a proper way. Not that I didn’t trust Billy Ansel and his Vietnam vets at the Sunoco, where the district’s two other buses were kept and serviced, to take good care of my bus; I did — they are intelligent mechanics and thoughtful men, especially Billy himself, and anything more complicated than a tune-up I happily turned over to them. But when it came to daily maintenance, I was like the pilot of an airplane — no one was going to treat my vehicle as carefully as I did myself.

That morning was typical, as I said, and the bus started up instantly, even though it was minus seventeen out, and I took off from our place halfway up the hill to commence my day. The bus I had given the name Shoe to, which is just something I do, because the kids seemed to like it when they could personalize the thing. I think it made going to school a little more pleasurable for them, especially the younger children, some of whose home lives were not exactly sweetness and light, if you know what I mean.

My old Dodge wagon, which was a masculine-type car, had been nicknamed Boomer by my own kids during a period when the springs were bad. Since the district was not then paying for repairs, I couldn’t afford to get them replaced right away, causing the vehicle to make a booming sound when it bottomed out on the washboard ruts on Bartlett Hill Road, which at that time had not yet been paved. I noted how fast the other children seized on the use of the name, asking me, “How’s ol’ Boomer today?” and suchlike when I picked them up, as if the vehicle was a horse they felt affectionate toward. So later, when my sons were in high school and I got the GMC, I made a little act of introducing it to the children as Rufus, Boomer’s larger, dumber cousin, which is how it seemed to me and to the children as well. The International got named Shoe because when I drove it with a load of thirty, thirty-five kids I felt like the old woman who lived in a shoe who had so many children she didn’t know what to do, and it tickled the kids to hear me tell it, and in no time they were slapping old Shoe on the side as they lined up at their stop to climb aboard, saying things like “Shoe sleep good last night?” “Shoe eat a good breakfast this morning?” That sort of remark. By staying away from the cutesy names, sticking with names that were slightly humorous, I was able to get the older kids, especially the boys, who could be curt, to go along with the game, making the ride more cheerful for everyone that way. It was something we could all participate in together, which was a value I tried to promote among young people.

My first stop that morning was at the top of Bartlett Hill Road, where it branches into Avalanche Road and McNeil. I pulled over and made my turnaround so the bus was facing east and waited for the Lamston kids to come down the hill on McNeil. The three of them, since the day the oldest, Harold, started school, always got to the stop late, no matter how often I threatened to leave them if they weren’t there waiting for me, so eventually I just made it a habit to come a little early and pour myself a cup of coffee and wait. It’s like when they were born their clocks were set permanently five minutes behind everybody else’s, so the only way you could meet them on time was to set your own clock five minutes early.

I didn’t mind. It gave me a chance to enjoy my second cup of coffee in solitude in the bus with the heater running. It was peaceful, way up there on top of Bartlett Hill looking east toward Giant and Noonmark and Wolf Jaw, watching the sky lighten, with the mountains outlined in black against this milky stripe of light widening from the horizon. Made you appreciate living here, instead of some milder place, where I suppose life comes somewhat easier. Down in the valley, you could see the house lights of Sam Dent coming on one by one, and along Routes 9 and 73 the headlights of a few cars flashed like fireflies as people headed out to work.

I’ve spent my whole life in this town, and I can safely say I know everyone in it, even the newcomers, even the summer people. Well, not all the summer people; just the regulars, who own their own houses and arrive early and leave late. Them I know because when school’s out I work part time sorting their mail in the post office and helping Eden Schraft deliver it. That is, I used to, before the accident. Now I work in Lake Placid, driving for the hotels.

That morning, while I waited for the Lamstons, I was thinking about my sons. Reginald and William. We always called them that, never Reggie or Billy; I think it helped them grow up faster. Not that I was in a hurry for them to grow up. I just didn’t want them to become the kind of men who think of themselves as little boys and then tend to act that way when you need them to act like adults. No, thanks. William, who is the younger, is in the army in Virginia and was just back from Panama then, and although he had not been wounded or anything, he was sounding a little strange and distant to me, which is understandable, I suppose. He hadn’t been shipped out to Arabia yet. Reginald was having some marital problems, you might say, in that his wife, Tracy, was bored with her job at the Plattsburgh Marriott, where she worked as a receptionist, and wanted to get pregnant. As he was still in night school at Plattsburgh State and wasn’t making much as a draftsman, he preferred to wait a few years before having a child. I told him why didn’t he tell Tracy to find a job that wasn’t boring. That irritated him. We were talking on the phone; I guess she was out somewhere. “Ma, it’s not that simple,” he said, as if he thought I was simpleminded. Well, I knew it was complicated — I’ve been married twenty-eight years — but what else could I say? Anyhow, I was feeling cut off from my sons, which is unusual and gives me an empty feeling in the stomach when it happens, almost like hunger, and I wanted to do something to change it, but nothing would come to my mind.

Then suddenly there they were, the Lamstons, the two older boys, Harold and Jesse, banging on the door, and the little girl, Sheila, who was barely six, running along behind. I flipped open the door, and they marched in, silent, sober-faced, as always, wearing their hand-me-down snow-suits, lugging lunchboxes and schoolbooks, all three plumping down next to one another halfway back. They had their choice of seats, but they always put themselves behind me precisely in the middle of the bus, between the boys, most of whom preferred to sit way in the back, and the girls, who tended to cluster in the front near me, while whoever was last to get picked up took whatever seats were left, usually those nearest the Lamstons.

I never exactly liked the Lamston kids; they made it hard. But I felt sorry for them, so instead I acted as if I was very fond of them. They were what you call uncommunicative, all three, although they certainly communicated fine with one another, always whispering back and forth in a way that made you think they were criticizing you. I think they felt different from the other kids. Due to their father, Kyle Lamston, a sometime housepainter who was a drinker and was known in town for his propensity to commit acts of public violence. Their mother, Doreen, had the hangdog look of a woman who has to comfort such a man. The Lamstons were field-mouse poor and lived until recently in a trailer on a lot a half mile in on McNeil Road. Poverty and house trailers are not uncommon in Sam Dent, however. No, I’m sure it was the violence that made those children act like they were different from the others. They had secrets.

Little, pinch-faced kids, a solemn trio they were, commiserating with one another in whispers behind my back while I drove and every now and then tried to chat them up. “How’re you this morning? All ready to read ’n’ write ’n’ ‘rithmetic?” That sort of thing. Make myself sick. “Pretty damned cold this morning coming down the hill, I bet.” Nothing. Silence.

“Harold, you planning to play little league this summer?” I asked him. Still nothing, like I was talking to myself or was on the radio.

Most days I just ignored them, left them to themselves, since that’s clearly what they wanted, and whistled my way down the hill to the second stop, treating it in my mind like it was my first stop coming up and not the second and I was still alone in the bus. But that day for some reason I wanted to get a rise out of at least one of the three. Maybe because I felt so cut off from my own children; maybe out of some pure perversity. Who knows now? Fixing motives is like fixing blame — the further away from the act you get, the harder it is to single out one thing as having caused it.

Their father, Kyle Lamston, was a man I’d known since he was a boy in town; his family had come from over the border, Ontario someplace, and settled here in the early 1950s, when there were still a few dairy farms left in the area that kept unskilled people working year round. The only Canadians you see nowadays are tourists. Kyle was a promising youth, athletic, good-looking, smart enough, but he got into alcohol early, when he was still going through the turbulence and anger of a male teenager, and like a lot of unruly boys, he seemed to get stuck there.

Doreen was a Pomeroy from Lake Placid, a sweet little ding-a-ling of a girl, and she fell for Kyle and before she knew it was pregnant and situated in a trailer up on McNeil Road on a woodlot Kyle’s father had once owned, with Kyle coming home later and later every night from the Spread Eagle or the Rendez-Vous, drunk and feeling trapped by life and blaming her, no doubt, for that, and taking it out on her.

Now he was in his thirties and already gone to fat, and after half a dozen DWI convictions, permanently without a driver’s license, making it difficult for him to get off that hill and go to work, of course. What little money Kyle did earn housepainting, he spent most of it on booze at the Spread or the Rendez-Vous. Food stamps, welfare, and local and church charity kept them more or less fed, clothed, and sheltered, but the Lamstons were a family that, after a good start, had come to be characterized by permanent overall failure, and people generally shunned them for it. In return, they withheld themselves. It was their only point of pride, I suppose. Which is why the children behaved so sadly aloof, even to me. And who could begrudge them?

“Harold!” I said. “You hear me ask you a question?” I turned around and cut him a look.

“Leave us alone!” he said, coming right back at me with those cold blue eyes of his. His brother, Jesse, sat by the window, looking out as if he could see into the dark.

Harold was trying to wipe his baby sister’s red face with the end of his scarf. She had been crying in that silent way of a very sad and frightened person, and I suddenly felt terrible and wished I had kept my big mouth shut.

“I’m sorry,” I said in a low voice, and turned back to my driving.

From the Lamstons’ stop at McNeil and Avalanche, the route ran west along the ridge into the dark, with the black heights of Big and Little Hawk on your right and the valley and town of Sam Dent on your left, out to the crest of the hill, where I picked up a kid I actually liked personally a whole lot and was always pleased to see. Bear Otto. He was an energetic, oversized, eleven-year-old Abenaki Indian boy adopted by Hartley and Wanda Otto. For years they had tried and failed to conceive a child of their own, until finally they gave up and somehow found Bear in an orphanage over in Vermont, and I guess because Hartley was quarter Indian himself, a Western-type Indian, Shawnee or Sioux or something, they were able to adopt him right off. Now, three years later — which is how it often happens, as if the arrival of an adopted child somehow loosens up the new parents — Wanda was suddenly pregnant.

Bear was ready and waiting for me, and the second I swung open the door he jumped straight into the bus from the ground, as if he had been planning it, and grinned in triumph and held out the flat of his hand for a high five, like a black kid from the city. I slapped it, and he said, “Yo, Dolores!” and bounced back down the aisle and sat in the middle of the last seat with his legs stretched out, raiding his lunchbox and waiting for the other boys. He had a round burnt-orange baby face with a perpetual peaceful smile on it, as if someone had just told him a terrific joke and he was telling it over again to himself. His hair, which was straight and coal black and long in back, hung in bangs across his broad forehead. Bear was supposed to be only eleven, but because of his size he looked thirteen or fourteen. A stocky boy, but not fat, he was built like one of those sumo wrestlers. Numerous times, in the quick bristly quarrels that boys like to get into, I had seen him play the calm, good-natured peacemaker, and I admired him and imagined that he would turn into a wonderful man. He was one of those rare children who bring out the best in people instead of the worst.

The Ottos were what you might call hippies, if you considered only their hair and clothing, mannerisms, politics, house, et cetera — their general life-style, let us say, which was extreme and somewhat innovative. But in fact they were model citizens. Regular at the town meetings, where they offered sound opinions in a respectful way, and members of the voluntary fire brigade. They even took the CPR training and the emergency first aid courses offered at the school, and they always helped out at the various fund-raising bazaars and carnivals in town, although they were not themselves churchgoers. They both were tall and thin and moved and talked slowly. Vegetarians, they were.

Hartley, who was a furniture-maker for a company up in Keeseville, had a thick, unkempt beard and wore his hair in a long ponytail, which to me was a little pathetic-looking, now that he was turning gray. Wanda, who made pots with sticks and straw stuck into holes in the clay and baskets with tubes of clay in the straw — very original items, which she sold at fairs around the state — wore old-fashioned spectacles and had hair like that woman Morticia, the mother on The Addams Family TV show. Their house was a dome, half buried in the side of Little Hawk. They had built it themselves, a peculiar-looking structure, although people who have been inside tell me it is quite large and comfortable, if dark. Like the inside of an army field tent, I’m told. The Ottos had a special interest in protecting the environment, as you might expect, and were from someplace downstate and I believe were college educated. There were persistent rumors that they grew and smoked marijuana, which, as far as I’m concerned, was their business, since nobody else got hurt by it.

I keep saying “was,” as if they are no longer with us, like the Lamstons, who have moved to Plattsburgh. But in fact the Ottos are still here in Sam Dent, living in their dome, Hartley making his Adirondack porch chairs up in Keeseville and Wanda her straw pots and clay baskets at home. She has delivered her baby safely, thank God, a healthy little boy (whose name I don’t know, since I don’t see them much anymore and don’t keep track of those things as much as I used to). But I’m telling about life in Sam Dent before the accident, and so much has changed since then that it’s difficult for me to describe people or things concerned with the accident, except in terms that put them into the past.

Beyond the Ottos’ and over the crest of Bartlett Hill, the road drops fairly fast, and I made three stops in short order, so I barely got the bus out of first gear before having to hit the brakes and pull over again. These were the Hamilton kids, the Prescotts, and the Walkers, seven in all, little kids, first, second, and third graders, mostly, the children of young couples living in small houses that they built piecemeal themselves on lots cut out of a tract of land that had once belonged to my father and grandfather.

The acreage, along with the old family house and barn, passed to me and Abbott when my dad died back in 1974 (my ma died early, when I was nineteen), and then in ‘84, when Abbott had his stroke, we sold off most of the uphill land that fronted on the road. Sold too cheaply, it turned out, as it was a few years too soon to take advantage of what they call the second-home land boom. But we needed the money right then and there, for Abbott’s hospital bills and so on, since his insurance had run out so fast, and those young couples needed land to build their homes to raise their children in.

I’ve never especially regretted it. I’d rather watch the little tatty Capes and ranches of local folks, people I’ve known since they were children themselves, going up on that land than the high-tech summer houses and A-frame ski lodges with decks and hot tubs and so on built by rich yuppies from New York City who don’t give a damn for this town or the people in it.

I’ve got nothing against outsiders per se, you understand. It’s just that you have to love a town before you can live in it right, and you have to live in it before you can love it right. Otherwise, you’re a parasite of sorts. I know that the tourists, the summer people, bring a load of seasonal cash to town, but as Abbott likes to say, “Short … term … profits … make … long … term … losses.” Which is true about a lot of things.

With the Hamilton, Prescott, and Walker kids safely aboard, I drove slowly past my own house, where I could see from the light in the kitchen window that Abbott was on his second cup of coffee and listening to the radio news — he likes the National Public Radio news from Burlington, which is one of his sources of unusual facts. He listens to the radio the way some people read the newspaper — he looks right at it, his brow furrowed, as if committing what he hears to memory. He hates television. Which is unusual in an invalid, I understand, but may account for the fact that he is rarely depressed by his condition. He always had more of a radio personality than a television personality anyhow. I gave him a blast of the horn, as I always do, and rolled past the house.

By now there was some noise in the bus, the early morning sounds of children practicing at being adults, making themselves known to one another and to themselves in their small voices (some of them not so small) — asking questions, arguing, making exchanges, gossiping, bragging, pleading, courting, threatening, testing — doing everything we ourselves do, the way puppies and kittens at play mimic grown dogs and cats at work. It’s not altogether peaceful or sweet, any more than the noises adults make are peaceful and sweet, but it doesn’t do any serious harm. And because you can listen to children without fear, the way you can watch puppies tumble and bite and kittens sneak up on one another and spring without worrying that they’ll be hurt by it, the talk of children can be very instructive. I guess it’s because they play openly at what we grownups do seriously and in secret.

There was enough light, a predawn grayness, so that I could by this time see the lowered sky, and I knew that it was going to snow. The roads were dry and ice-free — it had stayed cold and hadn’t snowed for over a week — and because the temperature was so low, I figured that the new snow would be dry and hard, so was not concerned that I had not put chains on the tires that morning. I knew I’d be needing them for the afternoon run, though, and groaned silently to myself — putting on chains in the cold is tedious and hard on the hands. You have to remove your gloves to snap the damned things together, at least I do, and the circulation in my fingers — due to cigarettes, Abbott tells me, although I quit fifteen years ago — is not good anymore.

But for now I was not worried. You drive these roads for forty-five years in every season and all kinds of weather, there’s not much can surprise you. Which is one of the reasons I was given this job in 1968 and rehired every year since — the others being my considerable ability as a driver, pure and simple, and my reliability and punctuality. And, of course, my affection for children and ease with them. This is not bragging; it’s simple fact. No two ways about it — I was the most qualified school bus driver in the district.

By the time I reached the bottom of Bartlett Hill Road, where it enters Route 73 by the old mill, I had half my load, over twenty kids, on board. They had walked to their places on Bartlett Hill Road from the smaller roads and lanes that run off it, bright little knots of three and four children gathered by a cluster of mailboxes to wait there for me — like berries waiting to be plucked, I sometimes thought as I made my descent, clearing the hillside of its children. I always enjoyed watching the older children, the seventh and eighth graders, play their music on their Walkmans and portable radios and dance around each other, flirting and jostling for position in their numerous and mysterious pecking orders, impossible for me or any adult to understand, while the younger boys and girls soberly studied and evaluated the older kids’ moves for their own later use. I liked the way the older boys slicked their hair back in precise dips and waves, and the way the girls dolled themselves up with lipstick and eyeliner, as if they weren’t already as beautiful as they would ever be again.

When they climbed onto the bus, they had to shut their radios off. It was one of the three rules I laid down every year the first day of school. Rule one: No tape players or radios playing inside the bus. Headsets, Walkmans, were permissible, of course, but I could not abide half a dozen tiny radio speakers squawking three kinds of rock ‘n’ roll behind me. Not with all the other noises those kids made. Rule number two: No fighting. Anyone fights, he by God walks. And no matter who starts it, both parties walk. Girls the same as boys. They could argue and holler at one another all they wanted, but let one of them strike another, and both of them were on the road in seconds. I usually had to enforce this rule no more than once a year, and after that the kids enforced it themselves. Or if they did hit each other, they did it silently, since the victim knew that he or she would have to walk too. I was well aware that I couldn’t ever stop them altogether from striking each other, but at least I could make them conscious of it, which is a start. Rule number three: No throwing things. Not food, not paper airplanes, not hats or mittens — nothing. That rule was basically so I could drive without sudden undue distraction. For safety’s sake.

I’m a fairly large woman, taller and heavier than even the biggest eighth-grade boy (although Bear Otto was soon going to be bigger than I am), and my voice is sharp, so it was not especially difficult, with only these few rules, to maintain order and establish tranquillity. Also, I made no attempt to teach them manners, no moves to curb or restrain their language — I figured they heard enough of that from their teachers and parents — and I think this kept them loose enough that they did not feel particularly restricted. Besides, I have always liked listening to the way kids talk when they’re not trying to please or deceive an adult. I just perched up there in the driver’s seat and drove, letting them forget all about me, while I listened to their jumble of words, songs, and shouts and cries, and it was almost as if I were not present, or were invisible, or as if I were a child again myself, a child blessed or cursed (I’m not sure which) with foresight, with the ability to see the closing off that adulthood would bring, the pleasures, the shame, the secrets, the fearfulness. The eventual silence; that too.

At Route 73 by the old mill, I banged a left and headed north along the Ausable River, picking up the valley kids. There was always a fair amount of vehicular traffic on 73 at this hour, mostly local people driving to work, which never presented a problem, but sometimes there were downstate skiers up early on their way to a long weekend at Lake Placid and Whiteface. Them I had to watch out for, especially today, this being a Friday — they were generally young urban-type drivers and were not used to coming up suddenly on a school bus stopped at the side of the road to pick up children, and the flashing red lights on the bus didn’t seem to register somehow, as if they thought all they had to do was slow down a little and then pass me by. They thought they were up in the mountains and no people lived here. To let them know, I kept a notebook and pen next to my seat, and whenever one of those turkeys blew past me in his Porsche or BMW, I took his number and later phoned it in to Wyatt Pitney at state police headquarters in Marlowe. Wyatt usually managed to get their attention.

Anyhow, this morning I was stopped across from the Bide-a-Wile Motel, which is owned and operated by Risa and Wendell Walker, and Risa was walking their little boy, Sean, across Route 73, as is customary. Sean had some kind of learning disability — he was close to ten but seemed more like a very nervous, frightened five or six, an unusually runtish boy and delicate, with a sickly pale complexion and huge dark eyes. He was a strange little fellow, but you couldn’t help liking him and feeling protective toward him. Apparently, although he was way behind all the other kids his age in school and was too fragile and nervous to play at sports, he was expert at playing video games and much admired for it by the other children. A wizard, they say, with fabulous eye-hand coordination, and when sitting in front of a video game, he was supposed to be capable of scary concentration. It was probably the only time he felt competent and was not lonely.

It had started to snow, light windblown flecks falling like bits of wood ash. Risa had her down parka over her nightgown and bathrobe and was wearing slippers, and she held Sean by the hand and carefully walked him from the motel office, where they had an apartment in back, to the road, which, although it’s only two lanes, is actually a state highway along there, the main truck route connecting Placid and the Saranac region to the Northway.

There were no cars or trucks in sight as Risa brought her son across to the bus. He was Risa’s and Wendell’s only child and the frail object of all their attention. Wendell was a pleasantly withdrawn sort of man who seemed to have given up on life, but Risa, I knew, still had dreams. In warm weather, she’d be out there roofing the motel or repainting the signs, while Wendell stayed inside and watched baseball on TV. They had a lot of financial problems — the motel had about a dozen units and was old and in shabby condition; they had bought it in a foreclosure sale eight or ten years before, and I don’t think they’d put up the No Vacancy sign once in that time. (Sam Dent is one of those towns that’s on the way to somewhere else, and people get this far, they usually keep going.) Also, I think that the Walkers’ marriage was shaky. Judging from what happened to them after the accident, it was probably just that motel and their love for the boy, Sean, that had bound them.

I flung open the door, and the child, because he was so small, stepped up with difficulty, and when he got to the landing he turned and did an unusual thing. Like a scared baby who wanted his mother to lift him up and hug him, he held his arms out to Risa and said, “I want to stay with you.”

Risa had large dark circles under her eyes, as if she hadn’t slept well, or at all, for that matter, and her hair was tangled and matted, and for a second I wondered if she had a drinking problem. “Go on now,” she said to the boy in a weary voice. “Go on.”

The kids sitting near the door were watching Sean, surprised and puzzled by his behavior, maybe embarrassed by it, since he was doing what so many of them would sometimes like to do but did not dare, certainly not in public like this. One of the eighth-grade girls, Nichole Burnell, who was sitting next to the door and has a wonderful maternal streak, squinched over a few inches and patted the seat next to her and said, “C’mon, Sean, sit next to me.”

With his large eyes fixed on Risa’s face, the boy edged sideways toward Nichole and finally sat, but still he watched his mother, as if he was frightened. Not for himself but for her. “Is he okay?” I asked Risa. Normally he just marched on board and found himself a seat and stared out the window for the whole trip. A very private boy enjoying his thoughts and fancies, thinking maybe about his video games.

“I don’t know. He’s fine, I mean. Not sick or anything. It’s just one of those mornings, I guess. We all have them, Dolores, don’t we?” She made a wistful smile.

“By Jesus, I sure do!” I said, trying to cheer the woman up, although in fact I almost never had those mornings myself, so long as I had the school bus to drive. It’s almost impossible to say how important and pleasurable that job was to me. Though I liked being at home with Abbott and had the post office and mail carrier job to get me through the summers, I could hardly wait till school started again in September and I could get back out there in the early morning light and start up my bus and commence to gather the children of the town and carry them to school. I have what you call a sanguine personality. That’s what Abbott calls it.

“Are you okay, Risa?” I asked.

She looked at me and sighed. Woman to woman. “You want to buy a good used motel?” she said. She looked across the road at the row of empty units. Not a car in the lot, except their Wagoneer. It’s the Holiday Inns and the Marriotts that keep folks like the Walkers from making a living.

“Winter’s been tough, eh?”

“No more than usual, I guess. The usual just gets harder and harder, though.”

“I guess it does,” I said. A big Grand Union sixteen-wheeler had come up behind me and stopped. “But I got enough problems of my own, honey,” I said. “Last thing I need is a motel.” We were talking finances, not husbands — or at least I was. I suspected she was talking husband, however. “I got to get moving,” I said, “before the snow blows.”

“Yes. It will snow some today. Six to eight inches by nightfall.”

I thought about the chains again. Sean was still watching his mother with that strange grief-stricken expression on his small, bony face, and she waved limply at him, like she was dismissing him, and stepped away. Shutting the door with one hand, I released the brake with the other, waited a second for Risa to cross in front of the bus, and pulled slowly out. I heard the air brakes of the sixteen-wheeler hiss as the driver chunked into gear and, checking the side mirror, saw him move into line behind me.

Then suddenly Sean shrieked, “Mommy!” and he was all over me, scrambling across my lap to the window, and I glimpsed Risa off to my left, leaping out of the way of a red Saab that seemed to have bolted out of nowhere. It had come around the bend in front of me and the truck and hadn’t slowed a bit as I drew back onto the road, and the driver must have felt squeezed and had accelerated and had just missed clipping Risa as she crossed to the other side. I hit the brakes, and thank God the driver of the truck behind me did too, managing to pull up an inch or two from my rear.

“Sean! Sit the hell down!” I yelled. “She’s okay! Now sit down,” I said, and he obeyed.

I slid my window open and called to Risa. “You get his number?” All I’d caught was that the car was a tomato-red Saab with a ski rack on top.

She was shaken, standing there white-faced in the motel lot with her arms wrapped around herself. She shook her head no, turned away, and walked slowly back to the office. I drew a couple of deep breaths and checked Sean, who was seated now but still craning and peering wide-eyed after his mother. Nichole had him on her lap, with her arms around his narrow shoulders.

“There’s a lot of damn fool idiots out there, Sean,” I said. “I guess you got a right to worry.” I smiled at him, but he only glared back at me, as if I was to blame.

Again, I put the bus into first gear and started moving cautiously down the road, with the Grand Union truck rumbling along behind. I said, “I’m sorry, Sean. I’m really sorry.” That was all I could think of to say.

There were half a dozen more stops along the valley, and then I turned right onto Staples Mill Road and made my way uphill to the ridge, where you get a terrific view east and south toward Limekiln and Avalanche mountains. It’s mostly state forest up there, not many houses, and the few you see are old, built back before the Adirondack Park was created.

The snow was falling lightly now, hard dry flakes floating on the breeze. There was enough daylight that I could have shut off my headlights, but I didn’t, even though they weren’t helping me see the road any better. In fact, it was the time of day when headlights make no difference, on or off, but they let the bus itself be seen sooner and more clearly by oncoming cars. Not that there was any traffic up on Staples Mill Road, especially this early. But when you drive a school bus you have to think of these things. You have to anticipate the worst.

Obviously, you can’t control everything, but you are obliged to take care of the few things you can. I’m an optimist, basically, who acts like a pessimist. On principle. Just in case.

Abbott says, “Biggest … difference … between … people … is … quality … of … attention.” And since a person’s quality of attention is one of the few things about her that a human can control, then she damn well better do it, say I. Put that together with the Golden Rule in a nutshell, and you’ve got my philosophy of life. Abbott’s too. And you don’t need religion for it.

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.

As I was saying, I had picked up the kids on the Flats and was passing by the open chain-link entrance to the dump, when this raggedy old mutt shot out the gate and ran across the road in front of me, and it scared the bejesus out of me, although I could not for the life of me tell you why, as he was ordinary-looking and there was no danger of my hitting him.

My mind must have been locked onto something contrasted — my sons Reginald and William, probably, since I felt that morning particularly estranged from them, and you tend to embrace with thought what you’re forbidden to embrace in fact. For when that dog entered my field of vision, it somehow astonished and then frightened me. The dog was skinny and torn-looking, a yellow-eyed young male with a long pointed head and large ears laid flat against his skull as he darted across the road, leapt over the snowbank, and disappeared into the darkness of the scrub pine woods there.

Although the snow was blowing in feathery waves by then, the road was still dry and black, easy to see, and I gripped the wheel and drove straight on, as if nothing had happened. For nothing had happened! Yet I wanted intensely to pull the bus over and stop, to sit there for a moment and try to gather my fragmented thoughts and calm my clanging nerves.

I glanced into the side mirror at Billy Ansel’s face smiling through the windshield of his pickup, an innocent and diligent man waving to children at play, and I felt a wave of pity for him come over me, although I did not know what I pitied him for. I turned back from the mirror and stared straight ahead at the road and clamped my hands onto the steering wheel and drove on toward the intersection at the Marlowe road, where I slowed, and when I saw that there was no traffic coming or even going, I turned right and headed down the long slope toward town.

The road was recently rebuilt and is wide and straight, with a passing lane and narrow shoulders and a bed of gravel and guardrails, before it drops off a ways on the right-hand side to Jones Brook, which is mostly boulders up there and not much water. Eventually, as the brook descends it fills, and by the time it joins the Ausable River down in the valley it’s a significant fast-running stream. There’s an old town sandpit down there dug into the ancient lakebed, and a closed-off road in from the Flats, near the dump. On the left-hand side, the land is wooded and rises slowly toward Knob Lock Mountain and Giant in the southeast.

Coming down from the Flats on the Marlowe road toward town, the greatest danger was that I would be going too slow and a lumber truck or some idiot in a car would come barreling along at seventy-five or eighty, which you can easily do up there, once you’ve made the crest from the other side, and would come up on me fast and not be able to slow or pass and would run smack into me, or, more likely, first would hit Billy Ansel’s pickup truck lollygagging along behind and then the bus. As a result, since I didn’t have any more stops to make once I’d gathered the kids from the Flats, I tended to drive that stretch of road at a pretty good clip. Nothing reckless, you understand. Nothing illegal. Fifty, fifty-five is all. Also, if I happened to be running a few minutes late, that was the only time when I could make up for it.

After passing through the gloom and closed-in feeling of Wilmot Flats, when you turn onto the Marlowe road and start the drive toward town, you tend to feel uplifted, released. Or I should say, I always did. The road is straight and there is more sky than land for the first time, and the valley opens up below you and on your right, like Montana or Wyoming — a large snow-covered bowl with a range of distant mountains surrounding it, and beyond the mountains there are still more mountains shouldering toward the sky, as if the surface of the planet were the same everywhere as here. This was always the most pleasurable part of my journey — with the bus in high gear and running smooth, enough pale daylight now, despite the thin gauzy snow falling, to see the entire landscape stretched out before me, and the busload of children peaceful behind me as they contentedly conversed with one another or silently prepared themselves for the next segment of their long day.

And, yes, it was then that I saw the dog, the second dog, the one I maybe only thought I saw. It emerged from the blowing snow on the right side of the road, popped up from the ditch there, or so it seemed, and crossed to the center of the road, where it appeared to stop, as if unsure whether to continue or go back. No, I am almost sure now that it was an optical illusion or a mirage, a sort of afterimage, maybe, of the dog that I had seen on the Flats and that had frightened and moved me so. But at the time I could not tell the difference.

And as I have always done when I’ve had two bad choices and nothing else available to me, I arranged it so that if I erred I’d come out on the side of the angels. Which is to say, I acted as though it was a real dog I saw or a small deer or possibly even a lost child from the Flats, barely a half mile away.

For the rest of my life I will remember that red-brown blur, like a stain of dried blood, standing against the road with a thin screen of blown snow suspended between it and me, the full weight of the vehicle and the thirty-four children in it bearing down on me like a wall of water. And I will remember the formal clarity of my mind, beyond thinking or choosing now, for I had made my choice, as I wrenched the steering wheel to the right and slapped my foot against the brake pedal, and I wasn’t the driver anymore, so I hunched my shoulders and ducked my head, as if the bus were a huge wave about to break over me. There was Bear Otto, and the Lamston kids, and the Walkers, the Hamiltons, and the Prescotts and the teenaged boys and girls from Bartlett Hill, and Risa and Wendell Walker’s sad little boy, Sean, and sweet Nichole Burnell, and all the kids from the valley, and the children from Wilmot Flats, and Billy Ansel’s twins, Jessica and Mason — the children of my town — their wide-eyed faces and fragile bodies swirling and tumbling in a tangled mass as the bus went over and the sky tipped and veered away and the ground lurched brutally forward.