Farnoll College Tales

Henry’s Tale

When I was seventeen, I was full of hopes for a wonderful future. I was cocky, I was chipper, I was confident.

I was the star quarterback and the Homecoming King at a small high school near Mount Lebanon, Pennsylvania, and I thought I had everything I would ever need. I was courted every day by college and professional football teams, my father was starting to consider the money I would make as a professional athlete as a significant part of his retirement plan, and high school girls of all shapes and sizes gave me the idea no favor would be too much to ask. 

My mother was more sensible than either of the males in the family. “Max, he’s just a boy. Let him pick a college himself and see where his heart will take him,” she said. “Professional sports are for those few top athletes. Right now, he’s just a big frog in a small pond.”

My father waved her away. He had been living and breathing football for most of my life, starting when I first threw a tiny, oblong-shaped ball out of my crib.

He had waited a long time for me, I realized. He was over thirty-five when he married and over forty when my mother presented him with their only child. Every day, his life inched a little more toward the wings and mine inched a little more toward the footlights. He bragged about me at his office, he attended my practices when he should have been calling on clients, and he clipped every article in the media about my games.

In November of 2077, my team had a perfect record, 8-0, and the big game was two weeks away. The feared rivals of Greensburg were nearly perfect themselves, and they had played more prestigious opponents. On Thursday morning, one day before the game with a smaller school, I boarded the school bus for the seventeen-mile ride. I sat in my usual seat with my usual seatmate, a younger boy who lived two doors away.

The morning, like many November mornings in Pennsylvania, was full of bright sunshine here and dense fog there. The school bus had every light burning.

Just before we turned off the main road to go toward the school, the driver stopped to pick up a boy at the farmer’s market. I watched the boy enter the bus and take his seat. That is the last thing I remember about that day.

The next afternoon, as I awoke, my mother was dabbing my face with a towel. Tears were streaming down her face, as they would for many days afterward.

“Oh, Henry, can you see me?” she asked.

“Of course I can see you, Mom,” I replied, perhaps a little impatiently. “Where are we?”

“We’re here, at the Mercy Hospital, honey. Everything is going to be all right now,” she told me.

My father was sitting in a nearby lounge chair, slumped down. I was certain he had been crying.

“Susie, is he awake?” he asked. “Does he know you?”

“We’ll have to see, Max. He is focusing his eyes on me,” she said.

“Why are you talking about me as if I weren’t here?” I demanded.

My mother looked at me, still crying, and said, “Because you were not here for over a day. You were unconscious. You have broken a number of bones, and the doctor is sure you have a serious concussion.”

The town’s newspaper was displayed on a large panel on the top of the bedside cabinet. “Four students dead!” it said, in large type.

“What happened? Who died?” I asked.

“Those girls who sit in the back of the bus,” my mother said. “That pretty one from the dairy, her sister, and two others.”

It took a long time, and the story had to be repeated again and again, before I could grasp the full impact of what had occurred. The farmer’s market had been covered with a dense fog, and the traffic behind the bus could not see its lights. A large truck drove over the small car directly behind the bus and plowed into the bus’s rear. The bus turned onto its side and traveled about fifty feet, into a field. The occupants of the car were dead and so were four of my friends. Many others were seriously injured and were lying in that same hospital with weeping parents hovering over them.

The doctors and nurses came and went, shaking their heads. My seatmate’s kid sister pushed him into my room in a wheelchair. One of his legs, entirely wrapped in dressings, stuck straight out.