David Foster Excerpt

David Foster

Don’t you worry, you have all eternity to correct your mistakes…

The four boys were pushing hard. They looked exhausted, even though they were all built like dockers. One of them could hardly see, his eyes twinkling ‘cause of the sweat dripping from his forehead over his eyebrows, and certainly because the sun was going down right in front of him. Maybe he was just crying, like we do sometimes when we are sad, Pamela and I. Pamela is my little sister; she’s shy and she always clings to my jacket.

The cart was quite heavy – the chassis was from an old Morris, I heard. All that was left on it were the four wheels with worn tires, the steering wheel and the brakes. The rest had been stripped away by parts dealers right after the accident. The chassis was covered with wooden planks to make a floor, on which an old armchair with sawn-off legs was nailed from below as the driver’s seat.

This is how it goes: The boys push it up the hill, jump on it and roll all the way down to the ponds. Sometimes there are six or eight or even more of them lying on the planks, all from the villages or the school. It’s so much fun, they say.

They’ve been doing this for years. We help them, Pam and I, and we don’t find it so hard, maybe it’s because they do all the pushing. We’ve been doing this for a while, summer after summer…

Suddenly old Travis’s head jumps up from the high weeds of the cornfield next to our road, like a scarecrow, pointing his threatening finger at us and whining like a door hinge needing oil.
“You don’t play with that cart, boys! Sampson is gonna jump on it, I’ve seen him tonight!”

I was quite scared of him, of his eyes glittering like two knives. Pam hid behind my back and David looked the other way, but Travis didn’t even seem to notice us. The boys just shrugged, too much out of breath to answer.

“Ask old Martha about that Morris, and you’ll never wanna climb back on it,” he added. Then he disappeared the way he came. But the boys were already pushing the cart down the hill. They ran fast trying to catch up with it, and barely managed to jump on board in time for the spin, but we did alright, Pam and I, and we all whizzed down to the ponds. Boy, it was fun, and Sampson didn’t jump on it!

I believe in Sampson. I’ve seen him quite a few times, from far away though, from the ponds, on that road at the top of the hill near Glen Corner. He always hums the same tune, which the wind carries down to us. David doesn’t believe in him; he says it’s the wind itself that hums while blowing through the trees and that there is no Sampson. But David never wants to play “torch march” in the dark with us either. We often do – we light bulrushes that we’ve soaked with paraffin under the tank tap outside the kitchen, and we walk along the ponds, north to the bridge or south to the bat cave.

This is when Sampson shows up and hums. He must like our flambeaux. David sits there on the cold stone, watching the black ducks on the silvery ripples and the swallows and bats under the crinkly clouds. I forgive David for his cowardliness. He’s so afraid of the cook, who he nicknames alternately the crook or the cock, although he’s now just as big as him. It comes from when David was much smaller. I was smaller too and I can remember some of it: We heard this strange music coming from the back of the school premises after dinner, so we walked there, David and I, both in our dressing gowns. This is where the cook had his bedroom.

Yes, it was a boarding school in the English country side, big, with lots of buildings made of red bricks and white French windows, and numerous wings, all within a huge park with lots of trees, paths and ponds, one of these beautiful schools where on Sundays, Jaguars, Aston Martins, Bristols and Lotuses invade the premises, driven by upper-class Londoners visiting their offspring. Except that in this school no one came, because no one had parents.

Well, at least we didn’t have parents, Pam and I, or parents who wanted to come, and neither did David. Our parents, if we ever had any, must have been rich; otherwise we wouldn’t be here. We’d be at Barnardo’s, or even worse, working in the mines in Rhodesia. This is what nasty Miss Wilson, the math teacher, always threatened us with in her unbearable Scottish accent. So there we stood in the courtyard, in our pajamas, peeping into the cook’s lair to listen to a music we’d never heard before, where the singer was going: “Do it, doing it, do it, doing it, like a sex machine…”

The cook was frenetically moving to that loud noise. I never saw such a dance either. James Brown was singing and dancing for the first time ever in Eagles Hall Orphanage. David walked in while I stayed outside, then the cook turned around, with his black leather jacket on and his dark curly hair with all this shiny cream in it. When he saw David, he shouted at him so terribly that I thought he was really going to kill him, because he had the eyes of a madman. Then he leapt at him, lifted him from the ground and started to spank him, still shouting.

I ran away. I don’t know what happened, ‘cause David never told me, just as he never told me his last name, but I never asked either. I just know he had a broken finger and had to wear a metal sleeve on it for months and it shone in the dark. He was never the same afterwards. In fact, he’s worn it ever since then. But David became an even bigger boy and he also became the school driver. He did still pick up the cook from the train station sometimes on Sunday evening, well… he had to, but that was before the accident. It must have been a dreadful accident because the entire school talked about it for months and even years afterward. I knew all the details, well… nearly, mostly from David himself. I could write a book about it, at least a short story. Maybe someday I will.

David had been sent by Mrs Ward, the Headmistress, to fetch two children from Manchester at the train station. When he arrived at the station, the stationmaster told him the train would be at least three quarters of an hour late, as some man had been found dead on the track just past Ravenbridge and the train couldn’t go on until the police were done. So David thought he’d wait at the Swan’s Inn, and there he had a couple of pints like every Sunday, except that on this Sunday he was on duty. But the train was delayed by two hours and by the time he picked up the children he was a little tipsy, not that tipsy though – he could still drive, or that’s what he thought, and maybe he was right, I don’t know.

So they drove back on that very road that goes along the hill crest down to the ponds and to the Orphanage. It was around nine o’clock and Coach Number 3 from Brunswick was driving up the hill, its headlamps on, blinding David, or that’s what he always insisted on. Suddenly, he sees this young girl – she was in her early teens – walking in front of the coach. He slows down, but the girl turns her head towards the coach and suddenly jumps onto the other side of the road to avoid it, and is just in front of David’s car. The girl screams and David screams. He’s gonna hit her, but David turns the steering wheel real quick and avoids her, too quick perhaps ‘cause the car leaves the road and falls down the embankment and down and down to the ponds, the quickest way. This is how Dave had his accident.

David is a bit weird; maybe it has something to do with this accident. He always thinks he can correct his mistakes and “bend the past back where it should have been”, as he likes to say. You just have to wait, he told me, and you get the chance to correct your mistakes, everybody does – that’s how God meant it. I don’t think Dave made any mistake; he saved that girl’s life after all, but he doesn’t drive the Morris anymore…