This Is Because That Is
I have overslept. I’m going to be late. My family lives in town, and usually I walk 10 blocks to school. I’m never tardy, but today it’s clear I won’t make it in time unless Daddy drives me. This morning, bless him, he does and he drops me off at the top of the hill where Catoctin and College cross West Patrick Street. It’s a warm, sunny morning in late May 1964. I am in the eighth grade. It is the last day of school at West Frederick (MD) Junior High School.
I look down the hill to the red brick school building where several hundred students mill around in groups. Regardless of our place on the junior-high-popularity food chain, our race, our parents’ standing in the community, we are all beyond happy. Energy and spirits are high. God is in His Heaven and all’s right in the world. We are not old enough to anticipate tragedy on the last day of school.
The driveway to the school splits in a V. The left side leads to the back of the building, a canopied area where school busses pick up and discharge students who live out in the county. We are mindful of the busses and stay well away from them as they enter and exit the drive. Someone is playing the Beatles on a transistor radio. I Feel Fine. Teachers monitor the area and today, the last day of school, they are bantering with students. A unified energy we are, instructors and students, excited that the year is coming to an end.
Then, something dreadful happens. A yellow school bus full of animated junior highs enters the drive. Just behind the bus comes a seventh-grader on a bike, a pudgy black kid with a huge grin on his face. He has pedaled full tilt down the West Patrick St. hill and is now coasting into the bus lane, too fast, on the last day of school. We stop breathing. We cannot register what we are seeing. He’s not slowing down. He is frozen, and the momentum of the bike is in charge. The bike glides between the right-hand curb and the rear of the yellow school bus. Then, as if choreographed in slo mo, the front wheel of the bike goes under the right rear wheel of the bus and pulls the boy under it. The rear of the bus rises in the air, as if over a speed bump, and runs over the child’s torso.
All merriment has ceased. Once happy mouths have dropped. The area is dead quiet. We are in shock. In the space of maybe four or five seconds, the lives of a few and the memories of many are forever altered. On the last day of school.
I run to the main office where teachers are checking their mail, chatting with receptionists and administrators, unaware of what has happened. I turn over this terrible burden to them.
“A boy has been run over by a bus!”
They can tell by my face that this isn’t a last-day-of-school joke.
A secretary calls an ambulance. A teacher goes to get the school nurse.
Back at the bus canopy, terrified teachers cluster around the boy. He lies motionless, limp, on the warm blacktop. His eyes are closed. There is no blood. The ambulance comes and takes him away on the last day of school.
A classmate, Stevie S., comments, “Another n***** bites the dust.” I cannot believe what he has said. I never speak to him again.
The bus driver sits alone in the shade under a tree. He is thin and young. Maybe 20. Dressed in blue jeans and a clean white T shirt that someone has ironed, he holds his head in his hands. He was a student here at West Frederick Junior High School not so many years ago. Now, he works on the family farm where he drives a tractor. For two years, now, he has driven the school bus for extra cash. He has a clean record. We look at him and quickly look away. He is ashen and appears sick. It is not his fault, but he may never make peace with that fact.
My mother is an emergency room nurse at Frederick Memorial Hospital. She frequently shares the highlights of her day with us over the dinner table. There is the woman who was scalped when her pony tail got caught in machinery where she worked. The man who stuck a vase up his you-know-what and couldn’t get it out. And any number of women who didn’t know they were pregnant and were about to deliver.
This evening, I have personal knowledge of the event. I was there on the last day of school.
“He was dead by the time they brought him in. His internal organs were flat and ruptured and squished out of place. He couldn’t have survived.”
She is clinical, cold, detached. She sounds scornful, judgmental, which I don’t understand. She’s like that with all the disasters that befall people under her care. You see what happens when you (fill in the blank)? Let that be a lesson to you.
Against her better judgment, the poor boy’s mother has given her beloved child permission to ride his bike to school. He loves riding the bike, but he lives out in the country and there are few places to ride in rural Frederick County that are as satisfying as riding on paved roads in town. All year long he begs to do it and all year long she says no. Too dangerous. Finally, she says yes, just this once, on the last day of school. And now he will never return. She lives with guilt and gutting pain for the rest of her very long life.
A series of interconnected events has set this day in motion. They are forever linked in my memory of that May day in 1964. Me. My dad. The students. The boy. His mother. The bus driver. The teachers. My mom.
No one did anything wrong. It just happened, that’s all, on the last day of school.
I found it!
Hooray for your first post. And what a scene this is. I LOVE the image of the bus driver sitting under a tree with his head in his hands. This was spare and suspensefu,l and I want more!