Precious Cargo by Craig Davidson
Reviewed by Melanie Cutting
All children are special. This is something we all know and appreciate, but some children are simply more special than others. In 2008, when aspiring author Craig Davidson was at a low point, emotionally and financially, he applied for a job as a school lunch supervisor, and ended up driving the bus for the school system’s “special needs” students for one year, four hours a day, five days a week. The experience proved to be, in his own words, “transformative.”
Precious Cargo was nominated as one of the CBC’S 2018 Canada Reads contenders, as the “One Book to Open Your Eyes”. Although it didn’t win—being eliminated in the second round of voting— it is a book well worth reading, and it does indeed open your eyes, albeit in a very humourous, entertaining and heartfelt way, unlike many of the more serious contenders for the Canada Reads award.
As the author learns more and more about the lives lived by youngsters with disabilities through his daily interactions on the school bus, he is able to very effectively convey his knowledge and corresponding emotional growth to the reader. Davidson depicts himself as a very affable and easy-going guy, the perfect candidate for a bus driver of special needs students, certainly not one of the “by the book” drivers that he encounters regularly. The book opens with his keen writer’s-eye take on the job interview and training. Although bus #3077 is old and small (actually a busette), it has been specially equipped to handle a wheelchair, a skill Davidson finds a bit intimidating at first. Finally, he is ready to roll.
There is only a handful of students on his little bus: 17 year old East Indian Nadja, who finds everything “nice” and favours the colour pink; Vincent, giant economy-sized Grade 12 student and pop culture expert; 13 year old autistic Gavin, non-verbal but physically expressive; Oliver, 13, video game nut with Fragile X Syndrome “an anomaly in the X chromosome…that can lead to delayed development – physical, intellectual, emotional or any combination of the three. Oliver’s own signifiers seemed to draw a little from columns A, B and C”; and finally, Jake, 16 years old, uber- intelligent, quadriplegic, cerebral palsy victim. Four months earlier, Jake and his mother had been struck by a drunk driver, killing the mother and severely injuring Jake. “One of his lungs collapsed. The other had a hole in it. There were lacerations to the liver, bruising to the heart and kidneys. He suffered damage to his pancreas and lost two-thirds of his spleen. Two pelvic fractures. Broken nose. Cuts and bruises all over.” And yet somehow, this young man, already dealing with so much, survived.
Although Davidson formed warm relationships with all of his passengers over the course of the year, he was especially drawn to Jake, to whom he became a surrogate big brother. “In the hundreds of hours we eventually spent together that year, on the bus and off, Jake never once seemed defeated. No, not once.” Later, he describes the first time he got a laugh out of Jake: “He had the most wonderful infectious laugh – it bubbled up from the soles of his feet, a total body event. From that moment on, Jake’s laugh became the equivalent of auditory cocaine: I’d do just about anything for a fix.”
Eventually, Davidson feels completely in his element with his charges because they all share a nerdy sensibility much like his own. “Rarely has a case of arrested development as profound as mine paid such handsome dividends.”
One of the lessons the author learns in the course of driving the bus is that the kids do not sweat the small stuff. They are used to being different, and, for the most part, accept it. When Davidson witnesses some casual cruelty inflicted by local bullies, he is inspired to strike back. “There goes the retard bus, I heard one of them say. A dark curtain fell over my thoughts. My fingers tightened on the wheel. I couldn’t recall ever being quite so enraged as I was at that moment.” The confrontation that followed was futile, and possibly made a bad situation worse, but Davidson persists in defending his kids. “There would always be pointers and laughers. When we see this in children, it’s understandable. But that year of bus driving taught me that far too many of us reach adulthood still thinking there’s something inherently hilarious about disabilities. Or it could be the laughter is a kind of talisman, a means of warding off the swarming fear and confusion that many must have felt as my bus, with its passengers, crossed their sightline.” It is realizations like this that elevates this book beyond the merely entertaining into the category of “one book to open your eyes.”
Interspersed among the chapters of Precious Cargo are pages from another book, The Seekers, an unpublished novel, featuring characters bearing an uncanny resemblance to the five kids on the bus. It was a mystery as to why these excerpts appeared, and who wrote them, but towards the end of the book it becomes clear that The Seekers is Davidson’s love letter to his “precious cargo”, in which their alter egos are “oddballs and castoffs” but they also have extraordinary powers, and ultimately, it is their job to save the world.
In the final chapter, Davidson sums up his experience. “Here’s the thing: every day was the best day, even the crappiest ones. Every single day I spent with those kids. And I was grateful, so incredibly grateful, because I knew I’d done nothing to deserve it”
Craig Davidson is the author of four books of literary fiction, including Rust and Bone, which was made into a film, and the multi-award nominated Cataract City. He also writes horror novels under the pseudonym Nick Cutter. Precious Cargo was written in 2016, and is available at the Lennoxville Library.