Bus Crash in Alabama (1956)

In 1956, Paul Edgecombe and his wife Janice boarded a Greyhound bus bound for the University of Florida, where their granddaughter Tessa was graduating. Paul was sixty-four then, a mere stripling compared to the man he would become; Janice was fifty-nine and as beautiful as ever. They sat in the seat all the way at the back, and she was fussing at him for not buying her a new camera to record the event. He opened his mouth to tell her they had a day to shop after they got down there, and that she could have a new camera if she wanted one—and then everything in his memory goes white for a bit, like film left out in the sun.

The Crash

Outside Birmingham, in a driving rain, a tire blew. The bus waltzed sideways on the wet pavement and was hit broadside by a truck hauling fertilizer. The truck slammed the bus into a bridge abutment at better than sixty miles an hour, crushed it against the concrete, and broke it in half. Two shiny, rain-streaked pieces spun in opposite directions; the one with the diesel tank exploded, sending a red-black fireball up into the rainy-gray sky. At one moment Janice was complaining about her old Kodak; at the very next, Paul found himself lying on the far side of the underpass in the rain, staring at a pair of blue nylon panties that had spilled out of someone's suitcase. WEDNESDAY was stitched on them in black thread. There were burst-open suitcases everywhere, and bodies, and parts of bodies. Seventy-three people were on that bus; only four survived the crash. Paul was one of them, the only one not seriously hurt.

Janice's Death

Paul got up and staggered among the burst-open suitcases and shattered people, crying out his wife's name. He kicked aside an alarm clock; he saw a dead boy of about thirteen lying in a strew of glass with P.F. Flyers on his feet and half his face gone. He felt the rain beating on his own face, then went through the underpass and it was gone for a while. When he came out on the other side, it was there again, hammering his cheeks and forehead. Lying by the shattered cab of the overturned fertilizer truck, he saw Jan. He recognized her by her red dress—her second-best; the best she had been saving for the actual graduation. She wasn't quite dead. She was trembling all over. One of her shoes had come off and he could see her foot jittering. Her eyes were open but blank, the left one full of blood. As he fell on his knees next to her in the smoky-smelling rain, all he could think of was that the jitter meant she was being electrocuted, and he had to hold the roll before it was too late. He screamed for help, but no one came. The rain pounded down, a hard, soaking rain that flattened his still-black hair against his skull, and he held her in his arms and no one came. Her blank eyes looked up at him with a kind of dazed intensity, and blood poured from the back of her crushed head in a freshet. Beside one trembling, mindlessly spasming hand was a piece of chromed steel with the letters GREY on it. Next to that was roughly one quarter of what had once been a businessman in a brown Wool suit. He screamed again, and turned toward the underpass, and there he saw John Coffey standing in the shadows, only a shadow himself, a big man with long, dangling arms and a bald head. He called out to John, begged him to help, to please help Janice. Rain ran into his eyes; he blinked it away, and John was gone. He could see the shadows he had mistaken for John, but it hadn't been only shadows. John was there, maybe only as a ghost, but he was there, the rain on his face mixing with the endless flow of his tears. Janice died in his arms, there in the rain beside that fertilizer truck with the smell of burning diesel fuel in his nose. There was no moment of awareness—the eyes clearing, the lips moving in some whispered final declaration of love. There was a kind of shivery clench in the flesh beneath his hands, and then she was gone.

Aftermath and Meaning

Paul put his wife's poor, mangled head down on the wet pavement of the interstate highway, got to his feet—it was easy; he had a little cut on the side of his left hand, but that was all—and screamed John's name into the shadows of the underpass. He walked toward those shadows, kicking aside a teddy-bear with blood on its fur, a pair of steel-rimmed eyeglasses with one shattered lens, a severed hand with a garnet ring on the pinky finger. He demanded to know why John had saved Hal's wife but not his, why not Janice. There was no answer; only the smell of burning diesel and burning bodies, only the rain falling ceaselessly out of the gray sky and drumming on the cement while his wife lay dead on the road behind him. No answer then and no answer now. But standing in the pouring Alabama rain and looking for a man who wasn't there in the shadows of an underpass, standing amid the spilled luggage and the ruined dead, Paul learned a terrible thing: sometimes there is absolutely no difference at all between salvation and damnation. John Coffey had saved him in 1932, had inoculated him with life, had electrocuted him with life, and now that gift meant he had to go on living while everyone he loved died around him. He has never had pneumonia, or the flu, or even a strep throat since that day; he has had colds, but they have been infrequent. The ills that have taken his friends and same-generation loved ones until there are none of them left—the strokes, the cancers, the heart attacks, the liver diseases, the blood diseases—have all left him untouched, have swerved to avoid him the way a man driving a car swerves to avoid a deer or a raccoon in the road. The one serious accident he was in left him untouched save for a scratch on the hand. He will pass on eventually, of course, but he will have wished for death long before death finds him. Truth to tell, he wishes for it already.