The Sweet Hereafter by Russell Banks Read Free Book Online Page A

the black, and Lydia was feeling bad for the first time, although we did not yet know why. By May they’d remove her thyroid; by the following May she’d be dead. We merely thought we deserved a vacation, so to speak.
    We rented a house, a villa the travel agent called it, but it was a house, a modest three bedroom cinder block affair surrounded by a chain link fence. It was a compound, more or less, situated up on a hill in an inland village a dozen miles west of Montego Bay. There was a small swimming pool and a terrace and a yard stuffed with flowers, and we had a part time gardener and a cook, as advertised, local folks whose relation to us was the same as the one most folks back home in Sam Dent bore to summer people. In Jamaica we were winter people, which was a little unsettling at first, but in a day or two we got used to it (it’s amazing how fast you can accommodate yourself to luxuries like domestic help and swimming pools), which gave me so me insight into the Adirondack summer people.
    We weren’t big drinkers, Lydia and I, but we were smoking a lot of dope. Both of us. Not so much back at home, because after all we both had to work every day and take care of the kids and couldn’t very well walk around stoned all day and night, and unless you were a teenager marijuana was somewhat difficult to acquire in Sam Dent.
    Even so, by the time we went to Jamaica, marijuana had become our recreational drug of choice, you might say, which meant that three or four times a week, usually late at night in our bedroom at home, we got high. In Jamaica, though, there was an abundance of very strong dope, which they called ganja and sold cheap. There was cocaine too, but we bought ganja. Every other kid on the street sold it; you could smell it in the marketplace, on the crowded streets of Montego Bay, even in the yard of our house.
    I would rise early, and feeling wicked and weirdly dislocated, would walk out onto the terrace and look over the hills to a silvery wedge of sea glistening in the morning sun, and the breeze would carry the smell of the natives’ wood burning cook fires and marijuana smoke across the tops of the trees straight into my face, and just like in Vietnam, I would think, What a damned good idea, to get stoned early and stay stoned all day long and go to sleep stoned. So I’d roll a joint and take off. It made the dream and the threat of travel and being surrounded by permanently poor black people whose language was in comprehensible to me both safe and real it woke me up without scaring me.
    With marijuana, your inner life and outer life merge and comfort each other. With alcohol, too, they merge, but they tend to beat up on you instead, and I didn’t particularly like getting beat up on. Which is why I have never had a problem with alcohol. Until now, I mean. Since the accident.
    I admit it; what do I lose by admitting it? I do have a problem with alcohol, and I’ll probably continue that way until something terrible happens and brings me up short, something I can’t or won’t imagine now.
    It could be the collapse of my business; although frankly I don’t think that would do it. It could be my own death.
    But back then I had a problem with marijuana, and I did not know it. I thought it was just me taking unnecessary chances, and I was still young and undamaged enough, despite Vietnam, to think you could get away with taking unnecessary chances without admitting that you had a problem. I believed that it was an interesting way to live.
    Lydia too although she was more cautious than I and followed a ways behind me, just in case I stumbled and fell, which was her habit and temperament in most things. We were a powerful couple, and I cannot think of her without feeling my heart instantly harden against the thought, because when I remember her and how powerful and happy we were and why I loved her so’ I think at once of her death. Just as with the twins, Jessica and Mason. I can barely say their