The Sweet Hereafter

Dolores Driscoll

Every August since we were married, and before that, separately, since childhood, Abbott and I have attended the Sam Dent County Fair, which by rights should be held over in Marlowe, since that’s the county seat. Instead, it’s held here in Sam Dent, where there is a fine old fairgrounds out along the East Branch of the Ausable River. Abbott loves the fair, especially the demolition derby; weeks in advance, he gets himself worked up to a fever pitch, practically, almost like a child.

Except for the pleasure I get from his excitement, I myself can take the fair or leave it, it’s just one of the stops that a person makes in the course of a year, but I do confess to enjoying the livestock exhibitions. I like to wander through the dairy barns more than any of the other exhibits, probably because of my childhood experiences, what with my father having been a dairy farmer. The dim warm stalls and the smell of wood chips and hay and fresh cow manure, the slow and gentle movements of cattle and their large moist eyes — those things cut straight through all my troubles to my heart and bring me practically to tears as I pass along the long low barns and stop here and there to admire and maybe even speak to an especially fine Jersey or a pretty black and white Holstein, which is the type of cow my father raised.

It’s not the same for Abbott. He’s more at ease in the flash and bustle and noise of the midway and, as I said, the demolition derby, which he prefers to watch from high in the grandstand. “You … need … perspective … to … experience … it,” he explains. That’s a problem, of course, with his being confined to a wheelchair in recent years. Normally, what happens is that a couple of men from town spot us before we even get to the grandstand and meet us at the bottom of the steps and, one on each side, latch on and carry Abbott in his wheelchair to the top level, where he can set his brake and watch the whole thing to his heart’s delight, to the very end. Afterwards, usually the same fellows from town show up and carry him back down to the ground, where I take over and wheel him to the parking lot.

This year, though, things were different. I probably should have expected it, but it caught me by surprise. Although I don’t think it surprised Abbott one bit — there’s very little surprises that man. But without having said anything to him, without our actually discussing it, I figured that enough time had passed for people to have gone through their first tangled reactions to the accident and come out on the other side, just as I more or less had myself; I had pretty well stayed out of sight and, I hoped, mind, all these lonesome months, which was only proper; by now, I thought, people would have put their dark conflicted feelings about me behind them and would once again be free to act toward me and Abbott like the dear friends and neighbors they had always been. Sam Dent was our permanent lifelong community. We belonged to this town, we always had, and they to us; nothing could change that, I thought. It was like a true family. Certainly, terrible things happen in every family, death and disease, divorce and blood feuds, just as they had in my own; but those things always have an end to them and they pass away, and the family endures, just as ours had. The same must hold for a town, I thought. But I’m a sanguine person, as Abbott says. Too sanguine, I guess.

It was early Sunday evening when we got there, the last day of the fair, and I had to park the van at the farthest end of the parking lot, a long bumpy haul from the grandstand. There had been a thunderstorm earlier, one of those late August storms that move quickly and heavily through the mountains like a freight train from Canada, and we had waited at home for it to pass over into Vermont, which it did around six o’clock, leaving the sky cloudless and tinted a stony shade of blue and the air moist and scrubbed and cool. For the first time that summer, you could smell fall coming on.

Because of the storm, though, we were late and didn’t have time to visit the livestock barns, which grieved me some, or linger along the midway like Abbott enjoys. They start the demolition derby right at sundown, for it is definitely more exciting to sit up high in the old wooden stands and watch the cars down below smash against each other under spotlights than to do it in broad daylight, when the whole event might seem a foolish thing for a normal person to view. At least I would find it somewhat embarrassing in daylight, although I doubt that would matter much to Abbott. He’s not as self-conscious as most people, due to his stroke, no doubt, and what he’s learned from it.

From the parking lot, we made our way through the gate and along the far side of the field in front of the grandstand, which wasn’t easy, as the lane was rutted and wet, the grass trampled by the crowds of the last week. We were cheerful, though, Abbott and I; it was our first time out in public together since last winter. After the accident, I had attended the funerals, but alone, without even Abbott to accompany me; it was a way of bearing witness, I guess you could call it. I kept to myself, spoke to no one, and left immediately after the services. It was just something I had to do, something crucial between me and the children. I don’t think people, the adults, quite wanted me there among them, which was understandable, but I had to do it — for the children, who, if they could have spoken for themselves, would surely have asked me to attend their funerals and say a prayer for each of their dear departed souls. And I did. They would have thought me cowardly if I had stayed home instead.

That done, though, I kept myself away from all town functions, church affairs, meetings, bake sales, and so forth, and more or less oriented myself west and south, faced our life toward Lake Placid, where I had to take Abbott twice a week for his physical therapy anyhow. Naturally, I no longer drove the school bus; two weeks after the accident, the school board mailed me a certified letter saying my services were no longer required, but I had already made that decision for myself, thank you. And since Eden Schraft never called me, the way she usually did, about carrying mail in the summer months, I gave that up too; a bit more reluctantly, however, than I gave up the bus, for I had no terrible associations with that particular job. Now, whenever I saw one of those big yellow International school buses on the road, I simply had to look away or else concentrate on a single detail, like the sum of the numbers on the number plate or the poker hand the numbers made, until the thing was gone from view.

I did all our grocery shopping at the Grand Union in Lake Placid, and even started reading the Lake Placid newspaper, which is how I got my job driving for the hotels. We needed money — since Abbott’s stroke, I have been the sole breadwinner in the family. I started with the Manor House, who’d advertised for a part-time driver with a van to carry guests in from the Saranac airport. They did not connect my name to the well-known accident in Sam Dent, and naturally I did not give the school board as a reference. Then on my own initiative I added a few more hotels and got me one of those belt beepers and a CB, until soon I was on call twenty-four hours a day and in Lake Placid five and six full days a week, lugging folks back and forth from the airport, cruising in and out of the downtown shopping area with a load of Canadian souvenir hunters and off to view the local sights — Whiteface, the Olympic ski jumps, the John Brown house, and Kate Smith’s grave. Lake Placid can be an interesting town when you see it from a tourist’s perspective.

Sometimes, out of the goodness of his heart, because he’s easily bored and would have preferred staying home with his radio and books and magazines, Abbott came along, and that cheered me somewhat. I was very lonely in those days, still in a kind of shock from the accident, I think, and Abbott was the only person I could communicate with. But soon winter passed over, and spring appeared and rolled on a few weeks later, and then it was summer, and now in late summer I had begun to feel more like my old self — although I knew, of course, that I would never be the same person again. You can’t raise the dead. I knew that.

Anyhow, it seemed like an appropriate time and way for me to reenter the life of my town — coming out here to the fairgrounds with my husband and joining the crowd and not making anything large of it, just saying howdy to those folks who seemed willing to speak with me, and enjoying ourselves for a few hours, like normal people, and then going home. Tired but happy, as they say.

Was I nervous or scared? Yes, of course I was. My son Reginald had warned me off it. “Ma, forget it, forget that damned town. C’mon up here, you and Dad, sell the house, for God’s sake, and move up here to Plattsburgh with me. I can build you an apartment upstairs or renovate the basement or something, and I’ll look after you both.” As if we were a helpless pair of elderlies. I think he had his own motives, now that he and Tracy were separated and he was living alone in their house. Reginald has always been something of a mama’s boy and secretly ashamed of it; and while he’d never move back to Sam Dent just to be near me and his father, he was not above trying to talk us into moving near him.

The large oval field in front of the grandstand is ringed by a dirt track that’s generally used for racing trotters. Tonight, though, the racetrack, along with the field itself, was entirely covered by old banged-up cars hand-painted in garish colors, slapped-on shades of pink and aqua and yellow, with slogans, mottoes, girls’ names, and huge numbers on the doors, hoods, and roofs. Parked around the cars in no evident pattern or order I saw flatbed trailers and tow trucks, pickups, and even some fancy new Z cars here and there, with what looked like a couple hundred people lounging around the vehicles, all drinking beer and having a fine time together. They were mostly young men and women and teenaged boys and girls, all of whom love cars and machinery. The boys and men, and many of the females too, moved and mingled among the tow trucks and pickups and Z cars and the old painted-up clunkers familiarly, as if the vehicles were beloved and admired animals that they had raised themselves. It was a whole pack of muscular good-looking youths in excellent health showing off to one another, with the boys’ sleeves rolled practically over their shoulders so as to expose their tanned arm muscles and new tattoos and the girls in tight shorts or jeans and halters, their hair all moussed and swirled and curled in the newest styles from the TV singers and soaps. They had tape decks set out, blasting rock ’n’ roll and country and western songs from the hoods of their vehicles, and coolers of iced beer all around, and here and there a couple was dancing together.

It was almost dark now. Huge spotlights in front of the grandstand had been turned on to illuminate a short section of rain-soaked track that had been blocked off between the stands and the raised open stage facing it. From the field, the pale glow of the spotlights and the flashing lights from the midway and the rides — strips and circles of red, yellow, purple, and green — passed like firelight from a huge bonfire across the faces of the young people hanging out in the field. I cut between a pair of beat-up sedans right onto the field among them and pushed Abbott’s wheelchair over the grass between pickups and flatbeds and knots of kids clutching beer cans. In the distance, I heard the announcer start to call out the order of the upcoming heats.

Abbott swung his head around and said to me, “Can’t … be … late.” I started to hurry, but while I wheeled him through the vast conglomeration of cars, trailers, and trucks toward the stands, I kept peering around in search of my old station wagon, Boomer, which I had good reason to hope would be entered in the derby tonight, resurrected and driven by Jimbo Gagne. It would have been difficult to recognize it — they take out all the window glass and lights, and you can barely tell what brand or model car it was originally, except by the shape of its fenders and grille and so on. Forget telling who owned the car originally.

All the way across the field to the stands, I kept an eye out, but I never caught sight of anything that resembled Boomer more than superficially. Boomer was, of course, the name my boys and I had given to that old Dodge wagon, which had served back in the 1970s as my very first bus and which, after 168,000 miles, had finally thrown a rod and generally collapsed. I’d pushed it out behind the barn and stashed it on blocks, in case Abbott or I or one of the boys ever needed parts from it, which need never arose, as my boys were by then obsessed with off-road vehicles and four-by-fours and I was driving first the GMC and then the International. And then Abbott had his stroke. The old Dodge got more or less forgotten over the years that it sat back there, and in time meadow grass and tall weeds and berry bushes grew around it. Until one day in June of this year, when Jimbo Gagne came out to the house unannounced and asked to buy it. He said he liked its power-to-weight ratio, it had plenty of both, and he would like to get it running again and enter it in the demolition derby at the fair.

I said, “What the heck, Jimbo, just take it. Haul it out of here and keep it,” I said, and on the spot wrote him a bill of sale for one dollar. He was the first person from town who had come out to the house in a normal way and on his own since the accident, and I was so grateful to him for that, I’d probably have given him my almost new Voyager van for a dollar, if he’d asked me for it. Jimbo is one of Billy Ansel’s Vietnam vets, the one who’s been working at the garage the longest, nine or ten years now, and though he still lives over in Ausable Forks in a trailer with his wife and a dozen sled dogs that he houses in oil drums spread around the yard, he’s practically a local person now, because of his association with Billy Ansel’s garage. People talk against the way he uses oil drums for doghouses, but I can’t see how they’re any worse for dogs than house trailers are for people. Jimbo is a lanky brown-eyed man with stringy black hair who wears one of those long Fu Manchu mustaches and a gold earring and looks downright evil. But he’s actually a very shy and sensitive man, a respectful soft-spoken gentleman, underneath that pirate’s costume, and when he came with Billy’s wrecker to haul old Boomer away, he treated me with courtesy and kindness. He knew that I would take one look at that tow truck and remember the last time I’d seen it, when it had slowly drawn the bus out of the water-filled sandpit that snowy morning last January, and so he telephoned before coming out and in a joking way said he was calling ahead in case I didn’t want to be there when he took old Boomer away.

“I know how sentimental you are about that junker, Dolores. It’s like I am about some of my dogs. But I ain’t going to put your car down. In fact, I’m going to give the old boy a second life. Maybe you should think of it that way,” he suggested.

I did, but I also made sure not to be home when he arrived with the big blue wrecker. In fact, that night Abbott and I drove into Placid for supper at the Ponderosa restaurant, where they serve good beefsteaks cheap and have a long salad bar that Abbott particularly likes to partake of, because he can reach everything from his wheelchair. He always returns for seconds and even goes after salad for me. “Sit … now … and … I’ll … serve,” he says. “Everyone … must … serve … sometimes,” he says.

I’m not inclined to notice, but now and then poor Abbott must feel a wave of guilt because of the way I’ve taken care of him in these last years of our life together, and the few occasions when he can perform some little physical task for me are no doubt of greater importance to him than they are to me. I try to keep alert to such opportunities and to make myself available to them, but they rarely come along, due to his condition. To me, it never matters, because it’s his mind that takes care of me, not his body. In the old days, before his stroke, he took wonderful care of me with his body, which I will say was always a creamy white and tender delight to me, providing me with all the necessary and loving services a woman could imagine, and consequently I did not pay sufficient attention to his mind, which from the beginning was superior to mine, more logical and just. Now Abbott and I live together like the perfect brother and sister, and I do not think I would have been intelligent enough to do that back before he had his stroke.

When we reached the edge of the field, we had to cross the track behind one of the fire engines to get to the right-hand corner of the grandstand, and I saw a few folks there that I recognized, volunteer firemen from Sam Dent, and I know they saw and recognized me — I’m pretty easy to recognize, even in twilight dark: I’m big and have red hair, and here I am pushing this small man in a wheelchair. Not wanting to put myself in a needy position, though, I merely nodded a short hello, which I was glad of right after, as not a one of those boys acknowledged me and Abbott when we passed by the fire engine and crossed the track.

We came up on the gate, where I paid, and passed through to the bottom of the grandstand. The thing was nearly filled already, with lots of folks standing around at ground level by the rail. I knew many of them, naturally — most of the town of Sam Dent comes out for the demolition derby — and saw them glance at us and then look quickly back toward the track and stage in front or nudge the person next to them, who would then take his turn casting a quick expressionless glance at us. No one said a word to me and Abbott or even acknowledged our presence. I knew it was not Abbott they were snubbing; it was me. But he was with me, so they ignored him too. That made me mad.

Several times I started to say hello, to force the issue, but before I could open my mouth, the person had turned his back to me.

I studied the stairs for a second; they looked steep and long. Down here in front, I might be able to see some of the action over and around the crowd of people at the rail; but not Abbott. “Hold on tight, honey,” I said to him. “I believe I can get you up there a ways.”

He has the good use of his left hand and arm, although his right is gone, of course; consequently, when he grabbed the left armrest tightly, he had to flop his whole body against that side of the chair for leverage, which put the chair all out of balance. Still, it was the only way to do it. I backed him around and drew the chair up backward to the first step, thinking I’d try to lug him up one step at a time, thinking also that maybe someone kind would see me struggling and would come to my aid. It’d probably have to be a stranger. A tourist, even. I grunted and yanked, and the chair came along with a thump, and we were up one step. Then another. Then a third, until soon we had made the first landing.

Out of breath, with my back and legs hot and wobbly from the effort, I had to stop for a breather, when, all of a sudden, of all the people I did not want to see, there was Billy Ansel standing right next to me, with a woman I didn’t know bouncing up the stairs behind him.

He grinned widely, which was not exactly a characteristic expression, and said, “H’lo there, Dolores! Come out to see the demolition derby, eh? Attagirl, Dolores!” he said in a loud voice, and for a second I thought he was making cruel fun of me. His grin made his teeth show through his beard, like he was clenching them. He was dressed up, in his usual way, khakis and white shirt and loafers, but I saw he was carrying a small paper bag with a bottle in it, and then I realized he was drunk.

I took a look at the woman with him. She was maybe thirty-five trying to look twenty — barefoot, in tight cutoff shorts and a tee shirt with the words “Shit Happens” printed across the front. Taller than Billy and skinny as a stick, she was dark-haired and had a small head made to look even smaller by one of those pixie haircuts that used to be so popular with teenagers. Her thin lips she had painted over and around with bright red lipstick, trying to make her lips look full; it only worked from a distance, though. Not the sort of woman you’d expect to see in Billy Ansel’s company. She was drunk too.

“Goddamn, Dolores, you look like you an’ ol’ Abbott here could use a hand,” Billy said, and he passed his brown bag to his friend. “Oh, sorry, this here’s Stacey,” he said. “Stacey Gale Morrison, from Ausable Forks. Stacey Gale, like you t’meet Dolores an’ Abbott Driscoll, old friends from Sam Dent. Salt of the earth, both of ‘em,” he declared.

“Pleased to meetcha,” Stacey Gale said. She didn’t put her hand out to shake, and neither did I.

“Where you headed, Dolores? All the way to the top? Lemme give a hand here.”

“No, that’s okay,” I said. “I can manage.”

“The hell you can. Here, you get on one side, an’ I’ll grab hold the other, an’ we’ll scoot ol’ Abbott right to the top, just like that. What’s a neighbor for, right? We got to lend each other a helping hand, right, Abbott? Neighbors got to help each other out. Am I right?”

Abbott swung his head around and looked straight into Billy’s bearded face, probably seeing grim things there that no one else could. “You … help … Dolores … help … me …,” Abbott said to him. “Give … thanks … then … all … around,” he added.

“How’s that, Abbott? I didn’t quite getcha. What’d he say, Dolores?” Billy asked. “No offense, Abbott.”

I told him, although I doubt he really got it.

“Damned straight. Let’s go, Dolores,” he said, and he grabbed onto one side of the chair, and I grabbed the other, and we lifted Abbott and his wheelchair together and crab-walked our way sideways up the stairs. Stacey Gale came along a few stairs behind us, looking slightly put out by the whole thing.

At the top, we put the wheelchair down, and I set the brake and parked it there on the landing. The folks who were seated along the last row silently moved in a bit on the long bench and made room for Stacey Gale and then Billy Ansel and, finally, me. I noticed a few familiar faces down along the row — a couple of the Hamiltons and Prescotts, some Atwaters from up to Wilmot Flats, a bunch more from town — but everybody kept themselves face-forward, like they hadn’t noticed our arrival.

I sat down on the end seat, with Abbott on my left and Billy Ansel on my right, and dropped my head and put my face in my hands. Oh, this was hard on me. Much harder than I’d imagined. My heart was pounding lickety-split, and my ears were hot. I was truly sorry that we had come.

“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.

“Oh. Well, I guess it’s not really all that important,” he said, and he took a quick swig from his bottle and kept looking at it while he talked. “I mean, it’s not old news, actually. But any kind of news travels fast in this town, so I thought you knew. But I guess you folks’ve been out of touch.”

“Pretty much,” I said, still waiting.

“Yeah. Well, what it is, Nichole Burnell was s’posed to help this big-time New York lawyer sue the town and the state for negligence. She was like a witness.” He paused for a second. “I thought you knew all about this.”

We shook our heads again.

“Yeah, well, when she refused to help him, when she wouldn’t tell the judge or whoever what they expected, this lawyer, a guy that Sam and Mary and the Ottos and who knows how many other people in town had hired, he had to drop the case. And then everyone else who was going to sue, they’ve been dropping out too. The Ottos went first. I don’t think they were ever that serious and were probably happy for the excuse. It just got too … it got too complicated, I guess. People just said the hell with it, the Burnells are off the case, the Ottos are gone, it’s a big mess, so the hell with it, let’s just get on with our lives. You know.”

I told him that a lawyer had come out to the house and had tried to get us to sue too, but I didn’t remember the man’s name. “Tall guy. Drove a big Mercedes-Benz sedan. Abbott sent him packing, though. Probably the same lawyer as you’re speaking of,” I said.

“Yeah. Probably was.”

The men who had carried Nichole up the stairs to the top of the grandstand had set her down in the aisle there, in the same manner that Billy and I had situated Abbott over here, and the Burnell family had found seats for themselves at the farther end of the same topmost bench. The derby was about to start, and people had turned their attention back to the track now, where a batch of old cars were lining up in single file, making a big racket as they positioned themselves to enter the derby area for the first heat.

Abbott said, “What … did … Nichole … witness?”

“How’s that?”

“Abbott asked what did Nichole witness.”

“Oh.” Billy was watching the cars now. Out in the shadowy track beyond the fire trucks, the half-wrecked cars shuddered and rocked on their wheels, their engines hammering like kettledrums. That’s part of the fun of it — the huge uncontrolled noise of it. All sixteen drivers in the heat sit out there and race their motors as loudly as they can, and clouds of exhaust and sparks fly out, and everyone cheers wildly with excitement. The announcer, a short balding fellow in a green satin jacket, stood on the stage facing the grandstand, and you could barely hear him, despite the excellent loudspeaker system, as he singled out individual drivers to comment on and make fun of, since most of the drivers are local and there are inside jokes that everyone knows.

Then down on the track one of the green-jacketed referees waved a small yellow flag, and one after the other, four of the gaudy battered old junkers came roaring into the derby area, which is more like an arena, a large rectangular muddy pit, than the finish-line section of a racetrack. The four crossed in front of us, spinning wheels and cutting reckless half circles, lurching forward and then suddenly stopping, until all four of them were lined up at the right, side by side and facing away from the direction they’d come. At a signal, a second line of four cars sped into the arena, digging up the dirt with their tires as they abruptly stopped, turned around, and backed up to the first set, rear bumpers, or what was left of them, against rear bumpers. A third row of cars charged out and slapped on their brakes, and as soon as their front grilles faced the grilles of the second bunch, the last set roared in, swiftly spun and whipped around, reversing direction, and backed their rear bumpers up against the rear bumpers of the previous four. And then they were ready — four rows with four cars in each row, all squared off like sixteen gladiators, armored and breathing fire and exhaling smoke, snarling and growling into each other’s faces. The helmeted drivers were young men and boys, most of them grinning fiercely and punching the air with fists or waving out the windshield opening at the cheering crowd. It was a thrilling spectacle, even to me.

I glanced off to my left, to see how Abbott was enjoying his favorite aspect of the fair, but to my surprise, he was ignoring the cars altogether. Instead, he looked intently past me and straight at Billy Ansel, and I realized that he was waiting for an answer to his question. What did Nichole witness?

I didn’t know whether to say anything or not, which is unusual for me, as I’m rarely undecided. I hate that state, so I made a decision not to say a word. Leave it to the men to settle, was my decision. I was aware that somehow I was at the center of this, my honor, perhaps, but I was not sure how. I just trusted my husband to know.

Billy was hunched over, pretending to be engrossed in the scene down below, but I could tell that he knew Abbott was watching him. The girl, Stacey Gale, was off on her own planet.

Finally, Billy chanced a self-conscious glance at Abbott and got caught at it. “Pretty good, eh, Abbott?” he said. “The ol’ demolition derby.”

Abbott didn’t say anything. When he chooses, his gaze alone makes a powerful statement. Without a word, just by sitting there and putting on a hard look, he can set me or Reginald or William to jabbering elaborate apologies and explanations, until finally he smiles and we can stop. Sometimes I think that’s why Reginald moved to Pittsburgh and William joined the army, just to get away from their father’s gaze. For privacy. Me, of course, I never really thought I needed that kind of privacy.

Billy said, “You’re still wondering about that Nichole Burnell business, I suppose. Well, I don’t know what to tell you. There’s not much more to it than what I already said.

Their lawyer, this guy Mitchell Stephens, he couldn’t get Nichole to testify the way he wanted her to, that’s all. And then I guess he didn’t feel he had a strong negligence case anymore, so he went home. Since then, other folks have heard about it, and they’ve started having second thoughts themselves, and their lawyers, too, have started dropping out, one by one. So now it looks like we won’t be seeing any lawsuits, after all. Which is fast bringing this town back together,” he said. “The girl has done us all, every single person in town, a valuable service. Even you, Abbott. Even you, Dolores, believe it or not.”

Abbott said, “Why … us?” Billy looked like he understood him fine, so I didn’t translate.

What he did, though, was stammer a bit and then say something to the effect that what was good for the town was good for everyone in it, which, by my lights, seemed to evade the question somewhat. Also, he still hadn’t answered Abbott’s earlier question, What did Nichole witness? Down below, the first heat was well under way, and the cars were slamming against one another, making an incredible noise as they roared back and forth in the mud and struggled to smash each other into submission. There were only about half the original sixteen still moving, crawling like huge wounded beasts in the mud to get away or, if they could, lining up to get one more good bash in before giving out themselves. Stacey Gale was hollering along with everyone else in the crowd, shrieking every time one of the remaining cars got in a good loud hit and the car it hit got stopped and couldn’t move again, eliminated.

Billy put his bottle down on the bench next to him and started wringing his hands, and I felt a wave of sympathy for the man. I already knew what he would say next, and Abbott surely did too. Billy was the messenger bringing bad news, and no one wants that job. In a low, uncertain voice, Billy said, “You ought to know, I guess. Somebody’s got to tell you.”

I nodded my head yes, but Abbott didn’t even blink.

“What Nichole said she witnessed,” he said, “was the accident. She was sitting in the bus up front next to you, Dolores. I guess I was the only other witness, but I was driving a ways behind you, and not paying much attention, either. So what Nichole had to say counted a whole lot. Because they subpoenaed me, Mitchell Stephens did, and when they did that, I told him and the other lawyers that I frankly couldn’t say for sure how fast you were driving that bus that morning. When it went over. Which is the gospel truth. All I knew was the speed that I myself usually drive up there. Fifty-five to sixty, is what I told them. Nichole, though, she was very certain. She said she remembered it clearly — she knew how fast you were going when the bus went off the road. That’s what she told them.”

He paused and looked back down at the track, where the winner of the first heat had been determined: car number 43, a pink beetle-shaped Hudson with “Death to the APA” painted across the roof, “Tatum” on the hood, and “The Bone Rules” along the sides. That was the driver’s name for himself, I guess — The Bone. In reality, it was Richie Green, a good kid, not really a bone. Tatum is Tatum Atwater. Wreckers and pickups with winches were rapidly hauling the smoking carcasses of the losers off the track and onto the field, and a second group of sixteen cars was lining up to enter the arena.

“How fast did the child say I was going?” I asked him. To save Abbott the trouble, I suppose.

“Seventy-two miles an hour is what she told them.” He wouldn’t look at me when he said it, but he said it. I have to hand Billy that.

“She told them I was driving seventy-two miles an hour?”

“Yes. Dolores, I thought you knew.”

“How would I know?”

“No way, I guess. I just figured you knew, like everybody else. I’m sorry, Dolores,” he said.

“No, don’t be sorry to me, Billy. Not as long as you know the truth.”

“Well, yeah, I know the truth.”

“That’s two of us, then,” I said. There were three of us, of course, counting Nichole. Well, four, actually, counting Abbott. But Abbott knew the truth because he happened to believe me, and I only assumed that. Abbott hadn’t been there with me that January morning, out on the Marlowe road with the snow coming down and the sight of the mountains and the valley so lovely that when you see it your legs go all watery and you have to hold your breath or you’ll say something foolish, with the children all easy and at play in the school bus, and me in charge of picking them up on time at their homes scattered across the town and carrying them over those narrow winding roads for miles, until we came to the big road and began our descent to the school in the valley below. Abbott wasn’t with me then; I was alone.

Now, in addition to the truth, I knew what nearly everyone else in town knew and believed, and if they didn’t, they were learning and coming to believe it this very minute, probably, from the person standing or sitting next to them here at the fair — they were learning that Dolores Driscoll, the driver of the school bus, was to blame for the terrible Sam Dent school bus accident last January. They were learning that Dolores had been speeding, that she had been driving recklessly, driving the bus in a snowstorm at nearly twenty miles an hour over the limit, that Nichole Burnell, the beautiful teenaged girl who’d come out to the fair in her wheelchair, a child who herself had almost died in the accident, had sat next to the driver, that Nichole had seen how fast the vehicle was moving, that she had told it to a court. Dolores Driscoll was the reason why the bus had gone off the road and tumbled down the embankment and into the icy water-filled sandpit. Dolores Driscoll was the reason why the children of Sam Dent had died.

What did I feel then? I remember feeling relieved, but that’s a weak word for it. Right away, without thinking once about it, I felt as if a great weight that I had been lugging around for eight or nine months, since the day of the accident, had been lifted from me. A huge stone or an albatross or a yoke. One minute it was there, and because it had been there for so long, I had grown used to it; and the next minute it was gone, flown away, disappeared, and I was suddenly able to recognize what a terrible weight I had been carrying all these months. That’s strange, isn’t it? You’d expect me to feel angry, maybe, unjustly accused and all that. But I didn’t. Not at all. I felt relieved. And, therefore, grateful. Grateful to Billy Ansel, for revealing what Nichole had done, and grateful to Nichole for having done it.

And for once, possibly for the first time in our life together, I did not know what Abbott was thinking or feeling. Even more peculiar, I didn’t care, either. He might be angry, he might be resentful, he might even think I had lied to him. I didn’t care; it didn’t matter what Abbott thought. I felt myself singled out in a way that had not happened to me before, and although I have never experienced such a solitude as that, I have also never felt quite so strong.

I looked over at Abbott; he had no idea what I was feeling, and it actually pleased me that he didn’t.

As soon as Billy had ceased speaking, Abbott had swung his attention back to the derby. The second heat was now almost over. Billy was concentrating on his bottle, and when he wasn’t drinking, he appeared to be studying his feet. Stacey Gale was like Abbott, all caught up, apparently, in the smoke and the furious sound and sight of the cars smashing one another to bits.

I said nothing. I just sat there and contemplated my strange new feelings, letting them wash over me — relief, gratitude, aloneness — naming them to myself as they came, one hard upon the other, in a series, or a cycle would be a better word, for each wave of feeling seemed to be the direct and sole cause of the next. Down below, the single surviving car, a mangled old Impala with a front fender crumpled and dangling off it, was pronounced the winner, and the tow trucks rushed into the arena and hauled the losers off, and the cars in the third heat came roaring in.

Suddenly, Abbott raised his left arm, his good one, and pointed. I followed his finger down to the arena and saw what he saw, old Boomer, my Dodge station wagon. Number 57, it was. Jimbo Gagne had painted the car black and had written the number and his first name and a peace symbol across the hood in big yellow letters. Along the side was the name of the sponsor, not-quite-free advertising for Billy Ansel’s Sunoco station. And on the top of the wagon, in huge letters, he had painted the word boomer. I might not have recognized it otherwise. All the window glass was gone, of course, and the trim and hubcaps, and with no muffler it was blatting like the others, but I could identify its beat, and it sounded pretty good to me: Jimbo had not just got it running again, after it had sat dead on cinder blocks for years, but got it running smoothly. It looked good too — glossy black all over, with no chrome, no gaudy decorations; like a ghost car, it was dark and unadorned and all business. The car was positioned in the middle of the pack, not an advantageous spot in a demolition derby, but it was bigger than most of the others in the heat, and like Jimbo had said, it had a good power-to-weight ratio — plenty of both.

What happened then surprised me at the time but seems natural now. The flag was dropped, and the cars commenced to smash into one another, ramming each other from behind, the stronger cars quickly driving the weaker against the heavy steel railing in front of the stage and grandstand, shoving them sideways and backward through the mud, with wheels spinning and tires smoking and clods of dirt flying through the air. And every time Boomer got hit, no matter who hit it, the crowd roared with sheer pleasure. A car with the words “Forever Wild Development Corp.” painted over the hood slammed Boomer from the side, driving it into another car, the Cherokee Trail Condominium car, and everyone in the stands stood up and cheered. I could see Jimbo wrestling with the wheel, frantically trying to regain control, shoving the gearshift forward and back, rocking Boomer until it was freed from the Cherokee Trail car, when another car hit it from the front and sent it up against the rail, pinning it there, and everyone cheered happily to see it. But somehow, before the referees were able to slap it with one of their flags and pronounce it out, Jimbo got it moving again, and Boomer charged back into the pack in the middle. Seven or eight of the cars were dead by now, stalled, trapped against the rail or boxed in between two other dead cars and unable to move. But Boomer was still alive.

My heart was pounding furiously. I was standing now, everyone was standing, and if he hadn’t been positioned at the top of the stairs, Abbott wouldn’t have been able to see. I hoped that Nichole, at the other side of the grandstand, could see this. Everyone wanted to see Boomer get hit, and again and again they got their wish, as Jimbo seemed unable to get free of the pack long enough to do any of the hitting himself. The other drivers were ganging up on Boomer, going around one another, abandoning good clear shots at nearby cars for a glancing shot at Boomer. Its front bumper had been torn off, and the right front fender dangled like a broken limb. Jimbo kept working, though, and the old engine wouldn’t let go, and every time one of the other cars slapped Boomer from the side or rear and sent it into the guardrail or against one of the stilled cars piled up in the middle, Boomer would come to life and chug back for more.

Until finally there were only three cars left that could still move, and they were moving slowly, like prizefighters with all the fight gone out of them, coming forward on instinct now, bashing one another blindly, stupidly, straight ahead, again and again. There was a torn-up Ford Galaxie four-door from Chick Lawrence’s garage in Keene, with Tom Smith driving, and I recognized JoAnn Bruce’s old brown Eagle, sponsored by Ethel’s Dew Drop Inn in Willsboro and driven by JoAnn’s cousin Marsden. All the other cars were smoldering in dented and bent heaps, permanently stopped and eliminated. The Galaxie was at the left of Boomer, and the Eagle was at the right, and at last it looked like certain elimination for Boomer and Jimbo Gagne.

The crowd started to applaud then, clapping hands the way they had when Nichole Burnell had first arrived. They didn’t cheer; they just applauded. The drivers in the Galaxie and the Eagle revved their motors and spun their wheels and lurched toward Boomer, stuck in the middle, and suddenly it seemed like everyone in the stands stopped clapping at once and the grandstand went silent, as the two cars crossed the space between them, on a line toward the black station wagon sitting at the center of that space. Boomer was held by the mud, with its rear wheels blurred and tires sending up dark gray smoke and chunks of dirt. Jimbo wrestled with the gearshift but couldn’t seem to shift and rock the car free. It was a terrifying moment — in my memory, it takes place in utter silence, and everyone is watching with great seriousness, as if a matter of terrible importance is being settled before them, instead of this dumb smalltown demolition derby.

And then it happened. Boomer backed slowly away, a few inches, a foot, three feet — just enough to miss the charge first of the Galaxie and then, a split second later, of the Eagle — and unable to swerve away in time, the two cars hit each other instead of Boomer, and when Jimbo saw that, he shifted into first gear and shot straight ahead, right against the two of them, spinning them away and half around again. The crowd erupted joyously, filling the night air with wild shouts and cries, and when Jimbo had Boomer lined up on the Eagle, with the rear bumper headed straight toward the right front end of the other car, the people hollered for him to do it! Do it! Do it! and when he smashed into the fender and wheel and tore the steering rods of the Eagle, stopping it dead where it stood, and the official smacked it with the flag, the crowd jumped up and down and yelled with delighted approval and slapped each other on the shoulders and backs.

Then Jimbo went after the Galaxie, which was struggling in the mud to turn and protect its front end. Boomer was moving smoothly now; Jimbo had control of it. He spun the steering wheel, got Boomer backed away from the wreckage of the Eagle, and turned and aimed its rear end, which still had the bumper attached, toward the Galaxie. The black station wagon came on slowly, chugging and slogging across the open ground between them, while the Galaxie tried to turn, to take the blow from behind. People were calling out Boomer’s name now, almost chanting it: Boo-mer! Boo-mer! Boo-mer! At that instant Jimbo squeezed a last burst of speed out of the old station wagon, and it slammed into the Galaxie cleanly, catching it on the rear door, just behind the driver, driving it sideways through the mud into the heap of cars beyond it, where it ended jammed tightly against them, unable to move. The official scrambled across the arena and whacked the Galaxie on the hood, and Boomer had won.

Everyone in the place was happy. Even Abbott had a grin on his face. I myself was neither happy nor disappointed. I remember having decided beforehand that as soon as this heat was over, regardless of how it ended, we must leave this place. Or I must, and Abbott would have to leave with me. Naturally, I was glad when it turned out that my old car had emerged victorious over the others. Glad for Jimbo Gagne, glad for the town of Sam Dent, glad, I suppose, for Billy Ansel’s Sunoco station too. But that’s a trivial kind of pleasure. Not what I’d call happiness.

To tell the truth, up there in the stands, after Billy had revealed to me what everyone in town now regarded as the truth, in the passage of but a few moments’ time I had come to feel utterly and permanently separated from the town of Sam Dent and all its people. There was no reason for me to want to stand up there alongside them in the grandstand, to help them cheer first to see a car once owned and driven by Dolores Driscoll get destroyed by a bunch of other cars and then join in when the very same people cheered to see it turn and destroy the others. This demolition derby was a thing that held meaning for other people, but not for me.

I do not believe that Nichole Burnell could have joined them, either; nor would any of the other children who had been on the bus with me that morning. All of us — Nichole, I, the children who survived the accident, and the children who did not — it was as if we were the citizens of a wholly different town now, as if we were a town of solitaries living in a sweet hereafter, and no matter how the people of Sam Dent treated us, whether they memorialized us or despised us, whether they cheered for our destruction or applauded our victory over adversity, they did it to meet their needs, not ours. Which, since it could be no other way, was exactly as it should be.

Nichole Burnell, Bear Otto, the Lamston kids, Sean Walker, Jessica and Mason Ansel, the Atwater and the Bilodeau kids, all the children who had been on the bus and had died and had not died, and I, Dolores Driscoll — we were absolutely alone, each of us, and even our shared aloneness did not modify the simple fact of it. And even if we weren’t dead, in an important way which no longer puzzled or frightened me and which I therefore no longer resisted, we were as good as dead.

“Abbott,” I said, “let’s go now. It’s time for us to leave.”

Without waiting for an answer, I stepped behind his wheelchair, released the brake, and tipped it toward me on its rear wheels, preparing to thump it down the stairs, one step at a time. It would be a bumpy ride for him, but I knew he could take it. He’s not as fragile as he looks.

But as I rolled him to the edge of the landing, a young fellow seated in the row in front of me stood up and, to my surprise, turned to help. I recognized him but did not know him personally. He was from Sam Dent, one of Carl Bigelow’s sons, I think, a bearded potbellied young man wearing a John Deere duck-billed cap, a squinty-eyed fellow who looked like he did a lot of beer drinking down to the Rendez-Vous, one of a hundred young men in town just like him. He wanted to give me a hand. Another man suddenly appeared on my other side, an older man who looked like a summer person, gray-haired, trim, in sandals and Bermuda shorts and blue dress shirt. Then a third and a fourth man moved into place, and before I could say a word, they had lifted Abbott’s chair and were carrying him smoothly down the stairs.

I followed along behind. The crowd had gone silent now, and it seemed that everyone had decided to watch us descend the stairs. I held my head up and tried to look like I didn’t notice. When I reached the ground, I said thanks to the four men, and took over Abbott’s wheelchair, and pushed him quickly through the gate. As I myself exited the grandstand, I glanced back and saw that the fourth heat of the derby had begun, and the crowd had gotten itself attentive and noisy all over again. Even Billy Ansel. Life goes on, I might have said, if there had been anyone to hear me. Nichole Burnell I could not see from there.

The sky was a pale sheet of light sent up from the fairgrounds, but the field was dark as we crossed it toward the parking lot, passing the hulks of wrecked cars, idling pickups, and tow trucks. The grass was wet with dew. Except for a couple of drivers seated or snoozing in their vehicles, everyone was over by the stage and the railing, watching the derby, and the sound of the cars as they roared back and forth and collided with one another was dulled and dimmed, softened, like background noises in a bad dream. Over by the midway, the Ferris wheel spun slowly, rising and falling in the distance like a gigantic clock. The faint music of the merry-go-round mingling with the gravel-voiced calls and come-ons of the midway barkers was strangely sad to me; it was like the sound of childhood — mine, Nichole’s, everyone’s. Even Abbott’s. Our childhoods that were gone forever but still calling mournfully back to us.

There’s not much more to tell. I got Abbott to the van, situated him by the side door and lowered the lift for him, raised him up and locked the wheelchair into place next to the driver’s seat. Then I came around and got in myself and started driving. We departed quickly from the parking lot, which was pretty much filled, with no more cars arriving this late and no one but us leaving this early, and soon we were on the road, headed home.

When the fairgrounds and all its illumination were sufficiently behind us, the sky darkened nicely, and the stars seemed to come out all at once, a wide swath of them spreading like sparkling seeds overhead. It was a clear night, fresh and cool, and I knew that autumn was going to come on fast now, the way it does up here.

Over to my left, the East Branch of the Ausable ran through the darkness, and a dark spruce woods hove up on my right. At the edge of the road, low and close to the ground, first on one side, and then on the other, I began to see the eyes of animals suddenly flash and glitter as I passed along the way, reflecting my headlights back at me and then as quickly flaring out. For a brief second, though, their eyes were pure white and flat, like dry, coldly glowing disks, and it was as if the animals had all come to the edge of the forest, and there by the side of the road they had waited and watched for me, until I had passed them by and the safe familiar darkness had returned.