Passing the Torch, 1962

I was mopping the kitchen floor when I heard the crunch of tires on the sandy marl driveway. Barefoot and sweaty, I wore a sleeveless blouse and shorts, my hair pulled into a hasty ponytail. Mom was sleeping, should sleep another three hours. She worked graves at the hospital, emptying bedpans and prepping women for delivery, got home as I was fixing the boys breakfast, went to bed by ten, woke after we returned from school, never slept enough.

But now it was summer, and my brothers read comics over their cereal, while I reminded them to stay quiet. It wouldn’t take long before they’d forget and shout over a game or get into a fight. I made them baloney sandwiches for lunch and sent them out to play, hoped they wouldn’t be back until time to wake Mom. They disappeared on their bikes down the sandy lane bordered by saw palmettos and hickory trees.

Now what? I thought irritably, blotting my wet forehead with the back of my hand. Sloshing the mop into the bucket, I hurried through the open garage to keep whoever it was from knocking on the front door.

“Butch,” I stammered. I was stunned. He’d never been to my house, lived a mile down the road. We took the same school bus, even in our senior year sometimes, and on the ride home had conversations about books. We were both JFK fans, and he’d been reading Profiles in Courage. My bias was already poetry and fiction. His was politics and history. I remember being thrilled: these were my first discussions of ideas.

We rode the bus because we didn’t have cars. Our lack united us, though we never articulated it. We were from the poor side of town, had few connections with classmates who’d driven themselves to school the last two years. Our relationship was limited to bus conversations, never became anything else. We’d graduated weeks ago. I hadn’t thought about him since, vaguely expected to see him in the fall when we both started at the nearby junior college. He’d been working after school to save tuition money and I’d won a scholarship.

“Butch,” I repeated, staring from his grim face to the box of books in his arms. He thought I’d like them, he said brusquely, setting them down inside the garage. Furiously, he went back to the car for another, and another. Three boxes of books. He thought I’d use them. His parents spent the money he’d saved. He wouldn’t be going to college in the fall. And in moments, he was gone. I don’t remember saying anything, think I was struck dumb with grief.

I cherished those paperbacks, moved them with me from Vero Beach to Gainesville to California and Colorado, discarding some at each move until finally they were gone. I never saw Butch again. My family moved to the Jacksonville area, and I didn’t return to Vero for over thirty years. I knew he was gone. A booklet from the tenth reunion found me in Colorado and listed his name among the few already dead then. There was no information about the deaths, but the Vietnam War was on, and all the names were male.

I had no other contact until I decided to attend the 50^th reunion, curious to see what had become of Vero and thinking any of us still standing had accomplished something worth commemorating. At that reunion, the list of those gone had grown to 24 of the original 140. It would increase to 26 before the year was done. Of those, Joye Duncan came as a dismaying surprise, for she was one I’d hoped to see.

I’d been a devoted reader, but by the 7^th grade, The Black Stallion and Lassie Come Home weren’t doing it for me anymore. Neither were my mother’s Reader’s Digest Condensed Books. When I asked the librarian for help, she directed me to the teen romance section and those stories bored me. At a loss, I came upon Joye reading and told her my dilemma. “This is good,” she said, off-handedly holding up the hefty novel, something called War and Peace. Joye set me on the path, and the 800 section of the library, which they’d been keeping secret, became my touchstone, even after I’d finished Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, enriching my conversations with Butch on the bus. I had wanted to tell Joye that story, but it was not to be.

No one at the reunion remembered what happened to Butch. Online I found out that he was buried in Vero Beach’s Crestlawn Cemetery on August 6, 1971. He would have been 26 or 27. He died less than a decade after that summer day when he interrupted my mopping to pass me his torch. That act kept William Buffington alive in my memory all these years. His dog-eared copy of Profiles in Courage was the last of his books I let go.