The Boy

When they pulled him out of the water they were hoping it wasn't a person. They were hoping that his waterlogged clothes were scraps from an old sailboat, hoping that his hair was mangled seaweed, that his shriveled grey skin was the flesh of a dying fish. Somehow, some way, all these things got caught together to resemble a little boy. But it wasn't the thing itself, surely, please. It could not be somebody's boy.

He had no identification, no tags on his clothes, no cards in his pockets. His coat fabric was woolen, rough, nearly burlap. His shirt was frayed and closed up with wooden buttons. His socks were long, his shoes had buckles, he wore little suspenders to keep up his shorts. All that was missing was the books and apple and you could have seen him running down the lane to the schoolhouse, his friends waiting for him, the teacher spelling in clean lines on the chalkboard. He was of a different time and place, Eastern Europe, decades ago, a century, he looked just the part, it was uncanny. They couldn't understand what he was doing in small-town Minnesota, in a half-frozen lake, buoying up in the dead of the spring thaw.

Had he fallen in? Had he fallen from the sky? Did he slip through that treacherous black ice and get trapped underneath? Had he been preserved somehow for a hundred years or more, only now to float his way back to civilization, to his ancestors that had long forgotten him? Did he have ancestors? Did he have a name? But, of course, all children have names. But to them he was just the boy, and they carried him into town.

"What shall we do with him?" "Where does he go?" "Do we bury it?" "Do we bury him." "Someone get the doctor!" "He's already dead, what'll a doctor do?" "He looks so sad." "I think he looks peaceful." "How can you even tell what he looks like?" "He looks like my little boy." "I don't like this one bit." "Why did we drag him out?" "We should have left him in the water." "We should put him back." "How can you say that?!" "This was somebody's child." "Maybe we should throw you in the lake." "Let's all settle down." "How did he come up anyway?" "He looks so old." "Ancient." "That poor boy." "What do we do?"

They stayed there through the night, through the dawn, into the next day. They drank pot after pot of black coffee and wondered what to do, wrote ideas on paper, called neighboring towns, put a warning out to the police. They waited. They waited and waited and drank more coffee, the ladies brought sandwiches and the men brought beer. They heard nothing back. No children were missing, no families in distress, no costumes gone stolen from any nearby community theatre. It was simply a dead boy, drowned, no more than eight, spread out on a town hall table, and he belonged to no one.

In the end, a week later, they decided to hold an evening mass and bury him in the town cemetery. They all pitched it to buy the boy proper burial clothes, a casket and flowers, every last little thing. They turned out in droves, clutching their children, somber and broken, crying mysterious tears. They spoke of their childhood friends, their parents, their own experiences with death. They sang songs and read scripture, they held a moment of silence that lasted for an entire minute. They took him out to the plot and lowered him in the ground with a crowd so large most could not see what was happening.

"They say," someone mentioned, "that drowning is one of the best deaths. That it's actually a very peaceful way to go. You struggle for breath and your body focuses on that, it locks up. But then, after that, you become very relaxed, you accept it, you enter a state of euphoria. You're not scrambling anymore. You're going home. And then you just... drift away."

One by one they threw on clumps of dirt until the grave was almost completely filled. They walked, slowly and silently, out of the graveyard and to the waterfront. They stood, scanning the water, perhaps looking for bodies, perhaps only watching the ripples. There was still too much ice. It was melting so slowly. It was far too cold for this time of year.