The Sweet Hereafter (2 page)

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 them selves, 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 got into alcohol early, when he was still going through 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 Rendezvous, 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 D.W.I 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 Rendezvous. 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 dirty 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 In than 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 a 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 four teen. 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 stat 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 them selves, 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 the lung 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 the 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 under stand. 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 season al cash to town, but as Abbott likes to say, Short .

term … profits … make … long … the I’m.

. . 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 newspaperhe 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, the sting 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 bother 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 re-hired 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.