Ollie's Apology

Ollie Peterson’s bedroom window does not look out over our valley. The view from Ollie’s room is over the tin-roofed car park provided for the tenants and, beyond that, the back of the “city pound”—a vacant lot overgrown with weeds, surrounded by a high chain link fence topped with concertina wire, the final resting place of anything the city doesn’t know what else to do with, and the source of the rodent problem with which the tenants in Beth and Ollie’s building are in unending struggle.

The apartment building in which he and his mother have lived since the day they arrived in Osage Grove sixteen years ago is sandwiched between the long-established trailer park—mostly old people, now—and the end of the pavement. Ollie comes from very humble roots, as they say.

Dylan has been picking Ollie up in front of that building for a ride to school every day since the day Dylan turned sixteen and gained the use of his grandmother’s old Buick—a luxurious boat both the boys loved. Ollie’s building perhaps wasn’t on the most most direct route to school from Dylan’s house, as his new license stipulated, but reasonably so and the town’s cops were flexible on that point as long as Dylan didn’t abuse their flexibility, which he didn’t.

When Ollie awoke on the day of his apology, he awoke dreading the day ahead, even before he remembered why.

He swung out of bed in the darkness, turned off his alarm, and headed toward the shower. Bit by bit, the day ahead came back. First, there would be the call to Turner’s office. Then the meeting with Deb Eccleston. And her mother. And his mother wouldn’t be there after he had insisted that she be allowed. He felt a pang of embarrassment.

He brushed his teeth, then climbed into the old shower with its sliding plastic shower doors. How would this apology go? Would he look at Deb as he made it? At her mother? At Principal Turner? How sincere should he be? He had promised his mother that when he was called into the office today, he would make the apology. He had to do it.

The day felt sour.

He dressed, listening to his mother making breakfast. Bacon, eggs, and waffles. From scratch. His favorite. He understood it was her way of saying thank you, but he was in no mood to offer appreciation. He ate in silence and she didn’t push it.

Dylan always arrived at 7:30 to pick him up for the 8:10 am start of their first class, so, at 7:28, Ollie gave his mother a perfunctory kiss on the cheek and went outside to wait for his childhood friend to arrive.

While the temperature the day before had been unseasonably warm, the temperature overnight had fallen to unseasonably cool, and he could see his breath in the predawn. He felt cold and miserable.

Dylan arrived at 7:30 on the dot. Ollie climbed in and Dylan dropped it into drive. At the end of the block he turned down the music. “So today’s the day, huh?” Dylan ventured.

Ollie looked at him in surprise. His question didn’t have the relaxed tone typical between them. Dylan glanced at him and saw his perplexed look. So, clumsily, he repeated himself. “Today’s the day you make your apology, huh?”

Ollie squinted his eyes into a scowl and looked straight ahead through the windshield. The road dipped to a lower elevation at that point and they hit a patch of thick fog. Dylan slowed, and turned on his lights.

“What happened to ‘if you apologize you’re a pussy’?” Ollie asked as they came back up out of the fog.

“You heard what the law says.”

Ollie looked back at his friend, trying to adjust to this unexpected headwind. “So, now you think my question was antisemitic?” he asked.

“Peterson, this is about more than just you and your question. There’s the school…”

Ollie waited for him to continue, but Dylan fell silent.

“The school? Since when have you—“ Then it hit him. “Your Dad. This is from your Dad.”

“He has a point, bro. What are you risking if you don’t apologize? Nothing. It’s the school that gets investigated, not you. You just go back to class like nothing happened. And what about when people say ‘Bendicksen’s Greenhouse? That place that hires Nazis?’ Everybody in town knows you from the greenhouse, but it’s not you that gets boycotted. It’s my Dad. Do you know how hard he’s worked to get where he is? Stop thinking only about yourself.”

Ollie was stunned. First Mr. Turner and Ms. Farrell. Then Roger Bendicksen. Then his mother. And now his best friend. And every one of them knew he had done nothing wrong. He could have reassured his friend that he had already promised his mother he was going to apologize, so the question was moot, but he didn’t. The betrayal stung Ollie’s heart. “Stop the car,” he said. “I’ll walk.”

“Don’t be an asshole, Peterson.”

“Stop the mother-fucking car,” Ollie screamed.

Dylan jammed on the brakes. “You’re being an asshole, Peterson,” he yelled as his friend jumped out of the car, slamming the door behind him.

There is a place in our town called Poole’s Point, a steep flint stone outcropping that the town grew around. Sometime in the 1930s, the town decided to build a narrow road to the top, where they made a little parking lot and placed a few benches along the rim on which people could sit and take in the view of our valley.

Ollie decided to go up over Poole’s Point to get to the high school. It wasn’t, technically speaking, a shortcut from where Ollie exited Dylan’s car, but Ollie decided to think of it as that. The climb up on the road would get his blood pumping and the descent on the other side was through woods he knew well from the hours he and Dylan and other kids had spent playing and exploring in them. Moreover, there would be no one up there this time of the day and he wanted some time alone and a chance to think and, frankly, to let his anger subside.

The climb up the steep narrow road to Poole’s Point succeeded in getting his blood pumping, and, by the time he reached the top, he no longer felt cold even though the sun, just then peeking over the eastern hills, had not yet had time to warm the air.

As Ollie took the last few steps to the top, our valley came into view, and, when it did, Ollie gasped. Motionless, he stood and stared in wonder at the scene before him.

The first rays of the morning sun had reached down to the floor of the valley and turned the heavy ground fog that lingered there into a sea of brilliant pink—glowing and soft and stretching from our town to the hills far away to the east. The glowing pink sea was unbroken, but for the farmsteads sprinkled about and the line of trees in black silhouette marking the course of the river as it snaked away to the south. The flint bluffs marking the far shore of the pink sea, too, stood in black silhouette, but their peaks were a splendor—gilded in the yellows and oranges and reds of the dawn, which gleamed up from the rising sun and reflected in a magnificent gold off the cumulus clouds that towered above the earth, displaying their golden glory dramatically against the black and grays of the fleeing night.

Ollie’s soul swooned before the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. He walked to a bench and sat down without knowing it, never taking his eyes off the glorious dawn. The start of his first period class was a million years away.

Then Ollie gasped again. There was a herd of deer down there—a giant herd—moving slowly through the pink and silent sea, their heads down, hidden in the fog, gleaning the kernels of grain that had escaped the harvester and fallen to the ground. They had gathered in a huge herd, preparing for the coming winter. There were hundreds of them. “So many deer,” Ollie whispered.

I understand the reader may be thinking here that my description of this scene and Ollie’s reaction to it is too over-the-top, so I’ll add this: Ollie wasn’t the only Grovian (as we call ourselves) struck by the beauty of that particular dawn. It found mention in the next Wednesday’s Osage Grove Leader in the form of a poem and even those stubbornly earthbound old Protestants who sit in the QuikMart sipping their coffee allowed that the dawn had been “beautiful” that morning. And if you can get those guys to use the word “beautiful” in relation to something in nature, God Himself can take the rest of the year off. His annual quota of miracles has been met. More than.

Up on Poole’s Point, Ollie sat enchanted. He heard a car drive up. A young couple with two small children got out of the car. Maybe the father had noticed the dawn on his way to work and rushed back home to get his wife and children and bring them to this spot. Who knows? In any case, lucky kids.

The young couple smiled at Ollie as they took the other park bench and Ollie smiled back. A few minutes later he stole a glance at the young family. The children were sitting wide-eyed between their parents, the father, his arm on the back of the bench, was gently stroking his wife’s hair, and the mother’s cheeks were wet with tears. Perhaps Ollie wasn’t old enough to appreciate it fully, but that may have been the most beautiful thing he saw that morning.