But we hadn’t found it We found him, and we found his sneakers. He must have
thrown it away somewhere between Chamberlain and the boggy patch of ground in
Harlow where he died. He perhaps clutched it even tighter at first, as though it linked him to home and safety. But as his fear grew, and with it that sense of being utterly
alone, with no chance of rescue except for whatever he could do by himself, as the
real cold terror set it, he maybe threw it away into the woods on one side of the tracks or the other, hardily even noticing it was gone. I’ve thought of going back and looking for it–how does that strike you for morbid? I’ve thought of driving to the end of the Back Harlow Road in my almost new Ford van and getting out of it some bright
summer morning, all by myself, my wife and children far off in another world where,
if you turn a switch, lights come on in the dark. I’ve thought about how it would be.
Pulling my pack out of the back and resting it on the customized van’s rear bumper
while I carefully remove my shirt and tie it around my waist. Rubbing my chest and
shoulders with Muskol insect repellent and then crashing through the woods to where
that boggy place was, the place where we found him. Would the grass grow up yellow
there, in the shape of his body? Of course not, there would be no sign, but still you
wonder, and you realize what a thin film there is between your rational man costume–
the writer with leather elbow-patches on his corduroy jacket -and the capering,
Gorgon myths of childhood. Then climbing the embankment, now overgrown with
weeds, and walking slowly beside the rusted tracks and rotted ties towards
Chamberlain. Stupid fantasy. An expedition looking for a fourteen-year-old blueberry
pail, which was probably cast deep into the woods or ploughed under by a bulldozer readying a half-acre plot for a tract house or so deeply overgrown by weeds and
brambles it had become invisible. But I feel sure it is still there, somewhere along the old discontinued GS&WM line, and at times the urge to go and look is almost a
frenzy. It usually comes early in the morning, when my wife is showering and the
kids are watching Batman and Scooby-Doo on channel 38 out of Boston, and I am
feeling the most like the pre-adolescent Gordon Lachance that once strode the earth,
walking and talking and occasionally crawling on his belly like a reptile. That boy
was me, I think. And the thought which follows, chilling me like a dash of cold water, is: Which boy do you mean?
Sipping a cup of tea, looking at sun slanting through the kitchen windows,
hearing the TV from one end of the house and the shower from the other, feeling the
pulse behind my eyes that means I got through one beer too many the night before, I
feel sure I could find it. I would see clear metal winking through rust, the bright
summer sun reflecting it back to my eyes. I would go down the side of the
embankment, push aside the grasses that had grown up and twined toughly around its
handle, and then I would… what? Why, simply pull it out of time. I would turn it over and over in my hands, wondering at the feel of it, marvelling at the knowledge that the last person to touch it had been long years in his grave. Suppose there was a note in it?
Help me, I’m lost. Of course there wouldn’t be -boys don’t go out to pick blueberries
with paper and pencil–but just suppose. I imagine the awe I’d feel would be as dark as an eclipse. Still, it’s mostly just the idea of holding that pail in my two hands, I guess–
as much a symbol of my living as his dying, proof that I really do know which boy it
was–which boy of the five of us. Holding it. Reading every year in its cake of rust
and the fading of its bright shine. Feeling it, trying to understand the suns that shone on it the rains that fell on it, and the snows that covered it And to wonder where I was when each thing happened to it in its lonely place, where I was, what I was doing,