Bobby Jr. looked up from the steamer trunk with a newspaper clipping in his fist and a lawyer on the telephone in his wife hand. “Dad, who is Mr. Aldridge?” he asked. I took the phone from Tracy and said, very quietly, “This is Bobby Ray Tolliver.” A man with a deep Tennessee voice answered. “Mr. Tolliver, my name is Hollis Aldridge. I represent the family of the late Mrs. Eunice Hanley, of Nashville. I understand that your son has found some letters. I have been trying to reach you for three weeks. Mrs. Hanley left something for you in her will, and she asked me to deliver it in person.”
I sat down on the garage step with the phone to my ear. For forty two years I had waited for a call like that, and dreaded it, and I did not know whether to be glad or afraid. “Mr. Aldridge, I am not sure I deserve it,” I said. “I was the driver that night. I should never have been on that road.” There was a pause. Then the lawyer said, gently, “Mr. Tolliver, I think you had better let Mrs. Hanley tell you herself. I will drive to Branson tomorrow. And I will bring Mrs. Hanley granddaughter, who has been asking to meet you.”
Bobby Jr. had put the clipping in my hand. It was brittle and brown. The headline said, Tour Bus Slides Off Interstate in Ice, Eleven Injured, None Seriously. I knew it by heart. In February of 1983, I had driven thirty eight senior citizens from Branson to Nashville, to see the Opry, in a storm that grounded every plane in Missouri. I had been behind the wheel for fourteen hours. The bus slid on black ice near Dickson, spun, and came to rest against a guardrail. Nobody was lost. But Mrs. Hanley, who was seventy, broke her hip.
A forced lock on a luggage bay, a steamer trunk of letters, and a driver who finally answered a call from Nashville.
I told Bobby Jr. everything, there in the garage, with Tracy standing against the door. The company insurance had paid. The lawyers had said that any word of apology would be an admission of fault, and that I should say nothing. Darlene, my wife, had been outraged. She could not bear that I did not even write. So she sat at the kitchen table that month and wrote a letter to every one of the thirty eight passengers, with her own money, a check for five thousand dollars in each, for their pain and trouble. Then she brought them to me. I took them from her. I put them in the trunk.
“Why, Dad?” Bobby Jr. asked. I looked at my hands. “Because I was ashamed,” I said. “I had broken my own rule. I should have pulled over at Memphis and let someone else drive. I stayed behind the wheel because I wanted to be the one who got them home.” I swallowed. “Your mother said it was a good man mistake. She said there was nothing to forgive. But I could not stand to have her send those checks, because it made it real. So I asked her to keep them in the bus until I was ready.”
The lawyer arrived the next morning in a rented sedan, a gray haired Southern gentleman in a bow tie, with a young woman beside him in a navy coat. The young woman was Eunice Hanley granddaughter, Beth, about thirty, with her grandmother kind face. They sat on my porch swing, and Mr. Aldridge took from his briefcase a thick cream envelope, sealed with red wax. “Mrs. Hanley passed last spring, at ninety nine,” he said. “She told me she had been waiting for forty two years for you to say something. She was never angry. She only wanted to hear that you were all right.”
I opened the envelope with a hand that did not feel like mine. Inside was a single page in a looping, strong hand. Dear Mr. Tolliver. I want you to know that I rode your buses for twenty more years. After that night, I never once felt unsafe. You were the only driver who ever stayed with us in the snow, wrapping our feet in your own coat, until the rescue came. You are a good man. Do not let one bad road make you forget it. Your friend, Eunice. There was a small check inside, for one dollar. A joke, she had written. For the tour.
The next month, we mailed every letter. Bobby Jr. and Tracy and I sat at the kitchen table for three weekends, with a roll of stamps and a map, finding the addresses of thirty six surviving passengers or their families through church directories and old tour rosters. Darlene checks were stale, of course, so we wrote new ones, five thousand dollars each, with a short note in my own hand. Replies poured in. Most were gracious. Several were tearful. One, from a retired schoolteacher in Joplin, said only, I always wondered what happened to the man in the coat.
Coach number one went to the Branson Heritage Museum on the first of June. Bobby Jr. and I painted it ourselves, silver and blue, with Tolliver Tours in Darlene favorite script. We put a brass plate on the luggage bay. For Darlene, who wrote the letters. Seventy people came to the opening. A white haired woman in the front row stepped up to touch the bumper. “I rode this bus,” she said, “in 1979.” I told her she could ride it again whenever she liked. She laughed. And my son, standing behind me, put his hand on my shoulder.
That evening, in the empty bus barn, I sat in the driver seat of coach number one with the engine silent and the dashboard cold. Bobby Jr. climbed in beside me, in his Sunday suit, and set a small box on the dashboard. It was the laminated bus pass, from my birthday. He had put a bow on it. “Dad, I did not understand,” he said. “I thought you were done.” I turned the key. The old Eagle coughed and caught. I put my hand on the wheel, and I drove her out of the barn, slowly, into the Missouri twilight, with my son beside me.
