None of us wanted what happened to us, either. Edith, in particular, hated it. I think she blamed herself. But it wasn’t her fault: Lyman was driving. Still, there’s no point in fixing blame. It happened and it’s over. Come August it’ll be ten years.
Only I think I mentioned earlier how I thought the big back seat of Lyman’s Pontiac would be good for my wife. It shows how much I know, because it was and it wasn’t. My wife didn’t die. Coming home from the fairgrounds, after the nickel toss and the beer and the Ferris wheel, she was asleep in the back seat with me. Up front Edith was dozing in the passenger seat beside Lyman. I wasn’t paying a lot of attention; I was half asleep myself, watching the month-old wheat stubble and the dark shining corn flow by beyond the fence line.
I came to when we bounced off the near side of the iron bridge rail. We were shooting across to the other side then where we caught the far end of the bridge; the car spun, crossed back to the right side of the highway, cleared the bridge, and then dove nose first off the road-edge; it slammed into the bank of the barrow ditch and rocked back with a leaded jolt onto its top. We were thrown upside down scrambling on top of one another with sharp cutting edges of glass everywhere. There was the bad smell of gasoline, the sound of something dripping. Lyman was out cold; Edith was moaning in shock about her arm. Mavis and I were shoved together, her face twisted away from me against the dome light and her knees drawn up against her stomach. She was crying.
“The baby.”
“Are you all right?”
“But the baby.”
“We’ve got to get out of here. It’ll catch fire.”
I started kicking with my boots at the door, but it was jammed hard against the ditch bank, and the other door was sprung so it wouldn’t open. The back window was smashed free of glass except for jagged pieces around the edges, so I kicked those off and crawled out into the ditch. I began to pull Mavis out after me.
“Please don’t,” she said. “Please don’t move me.”
“I have to. I can’t leave you in there.”
I pulled her by the arms as carefully as I could, trying to cradle her head and to support her back, and she was still crying in a soft whisper. I got her out and laid her down in the weeds away from the car. She was lying there in the dark with her knees up. Over her legs her dress was wet and sticky, but I didn’t tell her that. I went back and pulled Edith; she cried out when I tugged one arm so I shifted to the other, and then Lyman after her, out the back window into the ditch. Then a car was there; against the headlights I could see figures sliding down toward us from the lip of the road.
It was Ed Taylor and his wife. They helped me carry Mavis and Lyman to their car; Edith, though she was still in shock, was able to be led up the steep bank. Ed drove us all to town to the hospital.