The Sweet Hereafter

The Sweet Hereafter Summary | Chapter 1 Summary

This story is told from the perspectives of four different narrators. The first chapter belongs to Dolores Driscoll who begins by telling us that she thought it was a dog that she saw on the road on that fateful morning. Sometimes when it is snowing and drifting, you can see some optical illusions but she is sure it was a dog. Anyway, she always acted as if things were real, even if they were not. At least, then, you would err on the side of the angels.

Dolores has been a school bus driver in the town of Sam Dent, New York, for 22 years. This particular morning is no different from other bitterly cold mornings she has seen. Seventeen below and they are calling for more snow, she tells her invalid husband, Abbott, and then heads out to the barn to ready her bus in the early morning hour.

Her first stop is at the top of the hill on McNeil Road where she waits for the three Lamston kids who are always five minutes late. She sips her coffee and takes in a few minutes of calm in the warm bus. The Lamstons are dirt poor with a drunken father and a weary mother holding them all together. The kids do not speak and have the looks of impending doom and fright every day and every day she tries to coax them out of themselves but the shell is too hard… but maybe tomorrow.

In start contrast, her next passenger, Bear Otto is her very favorite of all the kids who ride with her every day. He is the adopted son of two ex-hippies who are artists and are more socially responsible than you would think given their lifestyle and the way they dress.

The stops continue and more kids pile on the bus… the Hamiltons, the Prescotts and the Walkers. Dolores muses about the coming snow and reminds herself to put chains on the bus tires before the afternoon run. That is not such a hard job, but takes longer now that her hands are feeling their age. She blows the horn when she passes her house, knowing that Abbott would be sitting in his wheelchair and having another cup of coffee.

Dolores prides herself on her attention to detail of the bus. She leaves the big mechanical things to a garage in town, but for the most part, she does the maintenance herself because no one else could do it any better. She takes down the license plate numbers of those cars that do not stop for the bus and has real pride on her spotless record all these years.

The next child to get on the bus that morning is Sean Walker, a boy of 10, but with a learning disability that made him seem much younger. He has a particularly had time when his mother leaves him on the bus this morning and watches her out the window for a long time as they pull away.

Snow is falling now but Dolores can still see the black road and heads for Billy Ansel's house to pick up his identical twins, Jessica and Mason. Their mother died four years ago and Billy heads for work as soon as the girls are on the bus so that he does not have to be in the house alone. He follows the bus every morning in his pickup truck and waves to his girls who are sitting in the very back seat.

Dolores is nearing her last stop now, the Wilmot Flats area of town, where she picks up nine children who seem to be beaten before they have even begun. Their parents are just children themselves, there is talk of intermarriage and alcohol abuse and that is not a combination for starting a child out right.

Suddenly a dog ran out of the gates at the Flats and scared Dolores to death, although there was nothing particularly threatening about the mongrel. Her mind was somewhere else, maybe on her own two grown sons, or maybe on the impending snow.

She was in the home stretch now. The snow was feathering down. Billy Ansel was in his pickup truck behind them, waving to the girls. That is when it happened. That is when a dog ran into the road and stood in the center as if it did not know what to do next. Was it real or just an illusion? Dolores could not be sure and so she relied on her instincts, jerked the steering wheel to the right and slammed her foot on the brake. And that's when all the children she had just picked up, all 34 of them, started tumbling and flailing in a tangled mass and the ground came rushing up to meet them.