Free The Sweet Hereafter by Russell Banks Page B

the trampled snow but had not been brought up to the road yet. And among these were the bodies of Risa’s son, Sean, who had been in front but whose body had got jammed under a seat, and the Ottos’ boy, Bear, and my twins, Mason and Jessica.
    I had seen them myself, I looked straight down into their peaceful ice blue faces, and then quickly drew the blankets back over them again, turned and walked away alone, numb and solid as stone, and climbed slowly, on legs that weighed like lead, the steep side of the frozen embankment to the road. Photographs of them alive and smiling would have made me cry and fall down and beat the earth with my fists; their actual dead faces only sealed me off from myself.
    I don’t know where I was going, whom I was looking for. Yes, I do know. Lydia. I was looking for Lydia to tell her that our children were dead, and that I had not been able to save them, and that finally we were all four of us together again.
    The last of the ambulances had left for the medical center in Marlowe, where they were taking the survivors before dispatching the most seriously injured children to Lake Placid and Plattsburgh, and the firehouse in Sam Dent, where they had set up a temporary morgue, and there was a break while the workers waited for them to return for the rest. The wrecker from my garage, driven by Jimbo Gagne, was being brought around by the dump road from Wilmot Flats, preceded by a huge town snowplow, for that road had not been used since fall and was under six or eight feet of snow.
    Except for Dolores Driscoll, who was uninjured and had remained down by the sandpit, lost and mumbling in a kind of shock but refusing stubbornly to leave the scene, there were no more survivors. Everyone knew that now.
    Those of us who had not left with the ambulances knew what we were waiting for the removal of the last of the bodies of our children.
    Some people sobbed and wailed into the arms of friends and strangers, whoever would hold them; a few had been placed in the back seats of friends’ cars; a few others, like Risa, just stood among friends and relatives and stared silently at the ground, their minds emptied of thought or feeling.
    I guess I was one of these, although at first I had tried to keep on working down below alongside the other men, as if my own children had not been on the bus, as if this had happened to someone else and not me. At first, a few people-Jimbo and Bud from the garage, who had raced out at once with the wrecker when they heard on the CB that there’d been an accident (a message that in fact I myself had called in, although I don’t know how I managed that; I don’t even remember it), and Wyatt Pitney, the state trooper, and a couple of guys on the rescue squad had tried to get me the hell out of there, but like Dolores, I wouldn’t leave.
    Later, I learned that people thought I was being courageous. Not so.
    There were selfish reasons for my behavior.
    I shoved everyone away and kept more or less to myself, silent, stone faced, although continuing nonetheless to help the other men, as we received one child after another from the divers and wrapped them in blankets and dispatched them in stretchers up the steep slope to the road and the waiting ambulances, as if by doing that I could somehow prolong this part of the nightmare and postpone waking up to what I knew would be the inescapable and endless reality of it. No one spoke.
    Somehow, at bottom, I did not want this awful work to end.
    That’s not courage.
    It was still snowing pretty hard; close to half a foot of it had fallen since the bus had gone over. There was no horizon. The sky was ash gray and hung low over the mountains. Within a few hundred yards the spruce trees and pines in the wide valley below the road and the thick birch trees and the road itself quickly dimmed and then simply faded into sheets of falling snow and disappeared entirely from view. There was a long disorderly line of cars, pickups, snowmobiles,