In Sunday school, in the fall of the year when I was twelve years old, I was told that I would be ushering and passing a collection plate at the Christmas pageant, an annual living crèche in the First Presbyterian Church of Princeton. I hated Sunday school. I resented having to attend. I learned nothing. I went to school Monday through Friday and that was enough. I was a spiritual wasteland, then as now. But I shrugged and didn’t think about the pageant until the day was nigh and Julian Boyd—who was thirteen, and did not go to Sunday school—told me about adventures he was having skating up the ice-covered Millstone River, and asked me to come with him on, as it happened, the afternoon of the Christmas pageant. With no hesitation, I said I would.
My mother saw this in a different light. She said, “You are not going skating with Julian. You are ushering at the Christmas pageant.”
I pointed out that I was just one of several ushers.
Her next remark was identical to the first one.
John Graham, twelve years old, had been invited by Julian to skate up the Millstone on the same afternoon. John was in no way burdened by religion, and planned to go. Charlie Howard, twelve, had already skated up the river with Julian, and would be coming along this time, too.
My mother was—in a word she liked—adamant. I howled and moaned and griped and begged. Adamant.
The afternoon came, and by now you may have guessed where I was. In church. Passing the plate. Mad as hell. Obedient.
John Graham had come down with a severe cold, and stayed at home in bed.
Julian and Charlie died at an isolated place called the Sheep Wash, where the current of the Millstone sped up and the ice as a result was thin. Next day, their bodies were collected off the bottom with grappling hooks. Each boy’s arms were stiff, and reaching forward, straight out from the shoulders. They had gone into the water through the thin ice, then clung to stronger ice closer to the edge of the river, but had not been able to climb out. Their arms reached over the ice, supporting them, until the cold killed them.
Their small coffins were placed side by side in the crossing under the choir loft in the Princeton University Chapel. Helen Howard, Charlie’s mother, was nearby, with Charlie’s father, Stanley Howard, a professor of economics; as was Grace Boyd, Julian’s mother, with her younger son, Kenneth, and her husband, Julian Boyd, editor of “The Papers of Thomas Jefferson.” This was the second such funeral for the Boyds, who had lost a daughter some years before.
I did not know Charlie Howard well, and the impact of his death stopped there. Not so with Julian, whose future has remained beside me through all my extending past. That is to say, where would he have been, and doing what, when? From time to time across the decades, I have thought of writing something, tracing parallel to mine the life he would have lived, might have lived. A chronology, a chronicle, a lost C.V. But such, of course, from the first imagined day, is fiction. Actually, I have to try not to think about him, because I see those arms reaching forward, grasping nothing
From John McPhee’s essay titled ‘Tabula Rasa’ in the April 19th issue of The New Yorker