The Belt of Orion

PLEASE NOTE: This essay contains events regarding physical trauma that some readers may find distressing. If that concerns you, please feel free to read no further.

David was a quiet kid, well-behaved, intelligent; he was an eighth-grade student of mine many years ago. His face was rather pale; he had dark hair. His most notable feature was his eyes—they were large and dark and kind. I wonder whether they attracted members of the opposite sex as he grew older—I suspect they did.

David, as students will, grew up and moved on to other things. He became a Marine and got married. I worked with him on a paint crew one summer (he worked year-round; for me it was just a summer job)—he was still kind and soft-spoken, but he was now a “beast” as far as his physique was concerned, thanks to the Marines. I couldn’t compare with him in the least when it came to strength.

I have never had a lot of upper-body strength. Most of the other guys in high school PE could climb a rope or hand-walk down the parallel bars or do lots of push-ups; I never could. (Blame it on genetics!) Because of this, I dropped ladders more than once. That is, if I had a ladder extended up to twenty or thirty or forty feet and needed to move it over to reach the next section of the house, I could do it if I kept it balanced and walked carefully, one hand over my head grasping a rung, one hand down at my side grasping a rung. But if the ladder got off-balance and the top of it started imitating a certain tower in Pisa, I was powerless to stop its progress. And down it would come, WHAM! Thankfully, John, the owner of the painting business, was very patient with me.

But dropping a ladder was really, really embarrassing. And potentially quite dangerous to colleagues and clients’ properties.

One night, having finished up painting the interior of someone’s home, David and I stood outside cleaning brushes. At some point he looked up, pointed, and said, “There’s the Belt of Orion.”

“The only constellation I know is the Big Dipper,” I said. “Where’s the Belt of Orion?”

He pointed again—“There—see those three bright stars in a row?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s the Belt of Orion. You can only see it in the winter.”

“Cool!”

Time passed, and I returned to teaching in the fall. David stayed on with the paint crew.

And then one day I heard sickening, heartbreaking news about David. He’d had a terrible accident at work. That evening I went to John’s house to find out the details. Still looking stunned, John related the story.

Sometime that afternoon, David had been moving an aluminum ladder, and it got away from him. It started to fall—and it hit a high-voltage power line.

Immediately thousands of volts of electricity were coursing through the ladder—and through David. David fell to his knees, but the current would not release his hands.

One of the guys on the crew saw what was happening and shouted, “He’s being electrocuted!” The guys all knew that if someone is being electrocuted, you must not touch him, or you’ll be electrocuted too. So he ran to David and started kicking at his arms to get his hands to release.

I don’t know how long the current had him in its grip, and I don’t know how he got away from it. Maybe the line shorted out, or maybe the power company turned it off, or maybe his coworker was able to kick his hands free. But when David was released and fell to the ground, his hands and arms were utterly burned.

But he was alive.

The fire department arrived and took him. Big, tough guys on the paint crew broke down into sobs. It was one of those events where witnesses keep saying, “I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it!”

I’m thankful I was not there. But I watched a TV news report about it that night, and the footage showed a bush near the house still burning even after David had gone to the hospital.

It was a horrible, incomprehensible event—something like that should have happened to me, not David! I was the one who couldn’t keep a ladder aloft!

Had David not been in the kind of physical shape he was, he would have been killed immediately. And he nearly was.

Doctors had to amputate his arms up to the shoulder. And his mind was a blank—he couldn’t speak or respond in any way. He was bedridden and had to have complete physical care, twenty-four hours a day. I was told that after dealing with the situation as long as she could, his wife divorced him. I can’t judge her for that—what an awful burden to be expected to bear indefinitely.

David’s parents put him in a special care facility as his condition deteriorated. I don’t know how long he was in that state, but it was at least a few months, if not a year or more. Again, the fact that he was alive at all was a miracle.

I never saw him after his injury. Why not? I don’t know. It seems to me now that I should have gone to see him, to comfort his family and to show him my respect. But I didn’t go.

And then one day someone told me he had passed away. And I thought of that quiet kid with the friendly eyes and warm smile sitting in my eighth-grade class. And I grieved for the strong young man who had everything taken from him.

That’s why, even now, when I’m outside on a winter night, I look up and find the Belt of Orion.

And I think of David.

Copyright 2023, Steven Nyle Skaggs

Obituary

David [redacted], 27, formerly of Greenville and Taylors, died Wednesday, Dec. 27, 2000. . . .

[He was a] graduate of Bob Jones Academy, [an] Eagle Scout with Boy Scouts of America, . . . and a Sergeant with the Marine Reserves.

Funeral services were held Jan. 2, 2001, in Paulsboro, N.J., with military burial in Eglington Cemetery, Clarksboro.

Published by The Greenville News on Jan. 7, 2001.