Boys

Tagline: In the spring and summer of 1952, the sun shines brightly for a young farm boy – but the shadows yawn dark and deep.

***Content Warning: This episode deals with bullying, harm to children, implied spousal and child abuse, the historical reality of Japanese-American internment, and contains graphic depictions of violence and a scene that may be triggering for survivors of sexual assault. Listener discretion is strongly advised.***

Transcript

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(Sounds of bike pedaling and braking)

NARRATOR

Episode 53: Boys.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

All the ride to school, Scott Curwood imagines the admiring expressions on the faces of his classmates when they see his new bike, a beautiful Schwinn Black Phantom. Even now, he can hardly believe that his parents gave him the Phantom for his birthday – he has, until now, always had to make do with hand-me-downs from his older brothers and sisters and cousins. Why they chose his thirteenth birthday, out of all of them, to spoil him, he cannot guess, but he also does not care to question it too much, out of a primitive, unelucidated superstition that it might cause the blessing to be snatched away.

He crests a hillock, and to the east, beyond the surrounding fields of corn and wheat and beans verdant with spring growth, the little two-room brick school building appears. Already some of the students stand clustered on the playgrounds, passing the wait for school’s start in raucous conversation and spontaneous, tenuous play. Seeing the others, Scott peddles faster, relishing the ascendant mechanical whirring of the bike’s workings beneath him. As he nears the playground, he marks with a proud grin that some of the children have stopped and begun to point in his direction.

This fulfillment of his hopes, however, is soured by three of the faces he spots, unusually having joined the early crowd – the similarly round, fleshy, and dull-eyed countenances of the Crayle brothers. All of them are like miniature versions of their father, Willard Crayle, a giant of a man at over six and a half feet tall, with arms like young oaks and a broad barrel chest. And also like their father, their dull grey eyes, too small for the faces they are set in, gleam with an overflow of piggish cruelty.

As Scott slows to a stop in front of the school building, the other children gather around him, shouting words of admiration and surprise, and more than a few of jealousy. Scott grins through it all, answering with barely concealed elation, but all the while his eyes keep drifting back to the Crayle brothers, who linger at the back of the crowd. From the set of their mouths, he can see that they are as interested as the others, but share none of the other children’s joy at the beauty of the new bicycle.

A unpleasant sweat begins to ooze from Scott’s palms and the small of his back, one that has nothing to do with the warm May morning, and he suddenly wishes that the teacher would arrive and open the front doors. He slowly works his way through the crowd toward the bicycle stand – a crude thing carved from an old cottonwood trunk – and ensconces the front tire into one of the deep slots in the wood, alongside two others of decidedly older and less costly vintage.

More children arrive, alone and in small groups and mostly on foot. After seven minutes, Miss Boulton emerges from the schoolhouse, having arrived early this morning to finish grading papers, and she beckons the children to line up for the start of the school day. As they slowly file inside, Scott spares a backward glance at his bike, feeling loth to leave it behind. The oldest Crayle, Boyd, catches his eye, and returns a slow smile, toothy with malice.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

Boyd, Mack, and Vinny Crayle, aged fifteen, fourteen, and thirteen, are known widely in the county as the resident hooligans, tormentors of smaller and more timid children, and prematurely bulky enough to intimidate peers and even adults, if their father’s reputation was not enough to do so already. There are rumors that Willard Crayle, their father, beats all of them and their mother too, in ways that do not always show, and maybe that he does worse too. Certainly he is a man of violent temper, and this temper is made worse by the savage headaches and back pain he frequently suffers, which the army examiners attributed to a weak heart when he was rejected for military service. That he, unlike so many men near his age, did not serve in the fight against Japan and Germany, seems to rankle Willard, and with every mention of the war his fleshy lips will tighten until they turn pale, his small eyes narrowing to slivers. Once, when drunk at the little local dive called Gary’s Inn, he beat Farren Hollander, a former P-47 Thunderbolt pilot, half to death over some slight that only Willard himself perceived, an outburst that landed Willard in the county jail for several weeks, with talk of real prison time.

Yet, somehow, he escaped real consequences, as the Crayles always seem to manage. This wicked fortune held for his sons too, even when in ’49 they ambushed poor Billy Emmens, whose polio-ravaged legs obligated him to wear heavy braces and walk with the aid of crutches, on his way home from school. Hiding behind a bulky, ancient bur oak alongside the road which Billy always took home, the three boys had leapt out with homemade slingshots as he passed by, launching marbles and rocks and even bearing balls at Billy until he lay in the road, bleeding and barely conscious and permanently blind in his right eye. Though all of the children of the county knew, and most of the adults suspected, who was responsible for the attack, Billy was too terrified to ever identify the culprits to his parents or even the sheriff’s deputies, and so the Crayle boys had gone unpunished. Within a year, the Emmens family had moved away to live with relatives in Iowa.

All of this runs through Scott’s mind as he sits at his desk, unable to focus on his schoolwork, or on Miss Boulton as she speaks before the blackboard. The Crayle boys, all long since forced to sit at the front of the classroom, occupy his field of vision no matter how he slants his forward gaze, and he dare not look away lest Miss Boulton notice and call him up to the front of the class.

Every once in a while, one of the Crayle boys will turn to survey the other students darkly, and it seems to Scott that whenever their gazes meet, there is some unspoken promise communicated from those coldly swinish eyes.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

To his amazement, Scott reaches home in the afternoon without real incident. Only Vinny, the youngest of the Crayles, chanted a mocking, nursery rhyme farewell after him when Scott left school: moneybags, moneybags, pedal on home! Don’t fall off and break your bones!

His older brothers did not join in, and they made no sign to follow him.

Putting away his bike and beginning his afternoon chores, the immediate relief of this begins to give way to a disquieted anticipation. The only cunning or planning that Scott has ever seen evidence of from the Crayles always relates to cruelty, and he knows that the look he saw in their faces that morning, and throughout the rest of the school day, was a sure sign of their twisted minds at work.

Entering the cool dark of the chicken coop and gathering the day’s bounty of eggs from their straw-lined nests, he feels again that chill, prickling perspiration beading on his back, his nape, his palms. He considers for a moment asking his older brothers, Tom and Dave, for help, but then he remembers that Dave is in Korea, and that Tom now helps their father full-time in the fields, working from sunup to sundown and having no time or Scott’s “kid troubles”. His sister Sarah is married and expecting a child of her own, and Rebecca, whose health has always been a little frail, is preparing to go off to state college the coming autumn, with dreams of becoming a schoolteacher herself. Scott would not dare to ask a girl for help, anyway, even an older one. Certainly he doesn’t dream of telling his sun-browned, windbitten father, who is all lean muscle and hard blue eyes and silent Chesterfield exhalations, his body perpetually tense and restless ever since he returned from the battlefields of the Gilbert and Marshall Islands.

A small hen, unnoticed lingering in her nest, pecks at Scott’s hand as he reaches in to collect her eggs. The shock of this, more of a sudden pinch than actual pain, draws him out of his reverie, and the remainder of his tasks – slopping and watering the pigs, making sure the water bowl for the dog and the barn cats is full – drives his thoughts of the Crayles from his head. He only thinks of them again once he is done with chores and his homework, when he steps outside to check over his bike, putting it in the toolshed to shelter it from the spring storm that swells in the western sky, bluing the western horizon. But by then such worries seem more distant, a problem for tomorrow. Here on his family farm, surrounded by his parents and older siblings, he and the Schwinn are safe.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

The last week of school comes, and still, nothing untoward happens, aside from the usual minor torments on the playground. That Sunday, Scott lies awake late into the night, an exhausted Tom snoring in the bunk below him as he weighs the wisdom of leaving the Black Phantom at home and walking the five miles to and from school that final week, the lack of incident somehow aggravating rather than alleviating his trepidation.

Really, he decides, it comes down to whether he is more afraid of what the Crayle boys will do to him, or to the bike. And as he finally falls into sleep, he decides that his body will heal, but if they destroy the Schwinn, he will never get another.

He dreams of a pet rabbit he has never had. In the dream, he watches from the window as a pack of wild, mangy dogs knock over the rabbit’s hutch in the yard, where the birdfeeder is in reality, and as though his feet are planted in molasses, he runs without real movement toward the front door as the pale helpless creature dashes hopelessly for the fence. He opens the door only to see the snapping, frothing jaws of the mutts closing bloodily upon its soft little body, and he awakes to the grey-blue of the early dawn.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

It is Tuesday, during Scott’s shared math lessons with the Crayles in the late morning, that class is interrupted by a sudden, insistent knock at the door. Miss Boulton frowns at the interruption, moving to the doorway and cracking it open so that Scott cannot see the knocker. After conversing in low tones with the visitor, whose gravelly voice Scott can only recognize as male, the teacher looks back into the room with an alarmed and somber expression on her face. Quietly, she calls to the Crayle boys and gestures them over, and the four of them step outside to talk with the newcomer.

In their absence, the other schoolchildren exchange surprised and curious looks. A strange feeling is taking hold inside of Scott, like a heavy fist of ice is clenching tightly in his gut.

Seven minutes tick by on the wood-framed Seth Thomas clock above the chalk board, and some of the children begin to shift restlessly in their seats, and to converse in hushed voices. Sue-Ann Horowitz is sure that the Crayles are getting suspended, maybe even expelled, for attacking Billy Emmens. Jeb Aldner says that’s stupid, since the Emmens attack happened three years ago – but he heard they killed a kid a few weeks ago in Gresham, the next town over. Cathleen Potter says she heard it was a cat, not a kid, and Ken Sugihara, who is probably Scott’s closest friend at school, chimes in and says his parents told him it was a dog. The whole discussion devolves into a heated, and certainly no longer quiet, argument, but Scott pays none of it any mind. His eyes remained fixed on the closed classroom door, his ears straining to catch any stray syllable from whatever is happening outside.

All of the voices fall silent as the door handle turns, and Miss Boulton reenters the classroom. Whether it is merely their heightened attention that gives the impression, or the teacher’s demeanor is truly drastically altered, Miss Boulton’s walk from the door to the front of the classroom seems long and grimly dignified, like the funeral procession of some honored monarch.

Reaching her desk, she places her fingertips upon the stained oak surface like a pianist preparing to play, and leans forward slightly, staring at the stacks of papers and books before her and taking a long, deep breath. Then, in low and measured tones, she tells the class that Willard Crayle has passed away, and that his boys will likely not be back in school before the end of the year.

The classroom is deathly silent then, so still that Scott can hear the blood rushing in his ears. A few of the students exchange stunned glances, and beside Scott, Sue-Ann’s internal conflict between excitement over the absence of the Crayles, and a guilty feeling that she should respect the looming specter of death, is plain in her warring features.

That icy fist in Scott’s abdomen feels now like it is crushing his innards, freezing him from the inside out. He glances out the westward window, with looks out over the open grass field that serves as the school playground. Rolling down the dirt road at the edge of the field, he sees a black car rolling away, and in the rear passenger window he sees Boyd Crayle’s dullard face pressed against the glass, staring back. And even at that distance, Scott could swear he sees a smirk of satisfaction spreading across Boyd’s features.

(Unsettling music)

[Long pause]

NARRATOR

By the following day, the other children already seem to have forgotten about the spontaneous, unspoken understanding to honor the death of even a man so unliked as Willard Crayle, and there is a palpably festive air in the classroom. Some of this may be due to the rapidly approaching summer break, but from the chatter among the students, the absence of the Crayle boys is clearly a significant factor.

Only Scott seems unconvinced that this is a definite boon. As they sit beside the little swing set, eating their packed lunches over the noon recess hour, Scott tries to bring up the matter with Ken, who was one of the most frequent targets of the Crayles’ cruelty. The Sugihara family only moved to the state a few years ago, after losing the Oregon farm they’d lived on for decades when they were sent to the wartime internment camps.

Ken listens patiently as Scott speaks, nodding sympathetically. Yet when Scott has finished, Ken says that they are safe – the Crayle boys won’t be coming back, and no doubt with their father’s funeral and all the farmwork that will pile up in his absence, there is no way the Crayles will have enough time to get up to their old misdeeds.

To this line of reasoning, Scott has no real answer, and certainly no argument. He shrugs, and they finish their lunch in silence, before joining an impromptu game of Red Rover in what remains of the recess hour. As much as he tries, though, Scott cannot wholly lose himself in play, cannot wholly suppress that fear that gnaws at him more with every passing hour.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

The morning of the last school day comes, and Scott wakes to the ever earlier sunrise. It is a bright and beautiful day, the meadowlarks, bobolinks, and robins serenading him as he retrieves the Black Phantom from its makeshift harbor and begins the ride to school, seeing no reason to leave it home anymore and longing to feel it run beneath him one more time before school gives way to the drudgery of summer farmwork.

As he has every trip to and from the schoolhouse since Tuesday, he glances across the fields toward the Crayle house, which lowers from its perch atop a small hill, its unpainted timbers and dark windows reminding Scott of an old skull weathered brown.

There is no sign of movement up there, not that he could see much even if there were. And somehow that troubles him more than seeing the tiny silhouettes of the three brothers standing in the distance, perhaps one of them raising an arm in wordless threat.

Then he turns back to the road, and the view falls away behind him, and he forgets about the house and the bereaved tormentors that dwell therein. At the school grounds, he and Ken handily beat the other students in an impromptu game of baseball before class, and when the teacher dismisses them early  at the start of the lunch hour, the general air of celebration amongst the other children – especially the ones who live in town – makes him forget all about his worries.

That is, until he steps outside, and sees that the Black Phantom is no longer in the bicycle rack.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

He finds it halfway home, lying in the tall golden weeds of the roadside ditch. The wheels are bent and the tires deflated, the seat missing, the chain and brake line snapped. The beautiful red and black paint job is scuffed and scraped, the metal body dented, as though it has been struck many times with heavy tools or perhaps large stones.

Scott stares down at it for a long while. It seems to him that he should cry, or scream, or swear fumingly in the way he has sometimes heard his father do, but he does none of this – he simply stands there on the hardpacked earth of the road, feeling empty and faraway. And then, slowly, something stirs in the lightless inner vacuum of his heart, a distant, cold, towering fury, one that makes his skull ache with its silent intensity.

Carefully, even tenderly, he stoops to right the bicycle, trying in vain to bend the wheels back into shape, then pushing it awkwardly homeward. And all that walk, he knows that if one or all of the Crayle boys were to step into his path now, he would tear into them like a cornered  mother cat, without hesitation or regard for his own survival. In fact he wishes they would appear, so that he could make them regret what they have done even if it were only for a moment, even if it were to spell his end.

Then the farmhouse of his home looms before him, and suddenly his frigid fury is gone, replaced by the dread of what his parents will say when they see the state of his costly Schwinn. He pauses at the edge of the windbreak of plums and hackberries, thinking now wildly of hiding the bicycle’s gruesome remains and simply hoping that his parents never notice.

But he knows that this is futile, that his sharp-eyed father will notice, and so, taking a deep breath, he passes through the windbreak and into the oak-shaded yard.

To his horror, he immediately meets his father, coming out of the toolshed with a wrench in his right hand and oil stains on his arms. His eyes are all that registers surprise as he sees the state of the bicycle. He pauses, wiping a sheen of sweat from his brow with the back of a hand, then strides forward, asking what happened. There is the slight edge in his voice, subtle enough that those who do not know him well would never notice it, but which Scott knows means his father is upset, and Scott’s insides wilt like a sun-scorched flower.

“I don’t know,” Scott lies lamely, his voice coming out as hardly more than a whimper.

“You don’t know,” his father repeats flatly.

Scott shakes his head, still unable to look up and meet his father’s eyes, yet nevertheless keenly aware of the man’s gaze lingering upon him.

“Okay, then,” his father says at last, and to Scott’s great surprise, the moment is over, and his father is walking back to the shade of the barn, where the Hart-Parr tractor, perpetually in need of repair, sits parked.

Stunned and disbelieving, Scott wheels the ruined bicycle back into the shed, and as an impulsive afterthought covers it with one of the canvas tarps that lies folded on the shelves. It seems somehow only appropriate, a gesture of respect for a fallen friend. And as he does so, he swears wordlessly that he will avenge it, taking the broken bike chain as a token and reminder of his oath.

Then, he steps back out to help his father with the farmwork, as he will spend most of his days until school resumes in the fall.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

The first weeks of the summer break pass dreamlike, the long days of sweaty, dusty, insect-plagued field work seeming unending, and yet seeming to have vaporized instantly when the cool nights of cricket-song and blessed rest arrive, which themselves pass all too quickly. His father remarks once that he is growing tall and strong, and far too quickly, and this makes Scott swell with pride – but when he lies in the bunk above Tom’s, sinking slowly into sleep, the recollection of those words makes him feel wistful, and he truly realizes for the first time that childhood is finite, that he is inexorably barreling toward the responsibilities and worries of adulthood, and that sooner than he dares to believe, life will change forever.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

Summer waxes, and the fields of corn and wheat, beans and millet grow tall, the greenery of the growing season beginning to turn toward the parched gold of maturity. Scott spends his days on the little Hart-Parr, working the summer fallow and contending with clouds of clinging field dust, thirsty sweat bees, and angry hornets. At night, he falls asleep to the faint buzz of the radio down the hall, as his father listens to baseball games and news reports on the war in Korea, of the growing threat of nuclear annihilation, and on Senator McCarthy’s claims to have discovered a communist cabal embedded throughout the nation’s highest levels.

Toward the end of July, a wave of sweltering heat descends, and Mr. Curwood allows his boys an extra hour in the midday break and to knock off early in the evening, for which both he and Tom are deeply grateful.

As they sit gathered around a Thursday evening dinner, relishing the relative cool of the house interior, there is a soft, timid knock at the front door. Mrs. Curwood answers it, and with a kindly greeting, she invite Ken Sugihara inside and even offers him a place at the dinner table, the latter of which Ken politely declines. From the sweat staining his shirt, and the lack of any sound of arriving engine, Scott surmises that Ken must have walked the two and a half miles here from his family’s farm. Apparently arriving at the same conclusion, Mrs. Curwood pours a glass of lemonade for the boy and cajoles him into drinking, which he does with obvious relish. After he’s drained half the glass and offered profuse words of thanks, Ken shily broaches the reason for his arrival, asking Scott’s parents if Scott might come over and spend the weekend on the Sugihara farm in celebration of Ken’s upcoming birthday.

Mrs. Curwood shoots an appealing look at her husband, and Scott follows suit. He sees in his father’s face that same strain that always comes when Ken or his family are around, a sort of thinly suppressed tension around the eyes and mouth, and he knows that when Mr. Curwood looks at the Sugiharas, he doesn’t really see them, but those young men who had been his mortal enemies in the Pacific islands, during the war now ended for more than half a decade. And he remembers that his father once told him, very briefly and very softly, that wars never really end for those enmeshed in them, words which had stuck with him because his father almost never spoke of the war at all.

Even so, Mr. Curwood speaks gently to the boy, though he cannot look up from the tabletop to meet Ken’s expectant gaze. And to Scott’s great delight, his father says that he thinks he can spare a set of hands for a couple of days, especially given the heat. Ken too grins at these words, and thanks the Curwoods profusely.

Clearing their plates and draining their glasses, Scott’s father offers to drive Ken back home, and asks Scott if he wants to come along. They both readily accept, though privately Scott wonders if maybe his father asks so he won’t be alone in the ’41 Ford pickup with the boy whose eyes he cannot meet. If Ken notices this, though, he is too polite to give any indication.

Ten minutes later, the boys are bidding each other farewell, both excited for the coming weekend. And on the drive home, as Scott thanks his father, the man offers him a rare but thoroughly warm smile before lighting up a Chesterfield.

(Tender music)

[Long pause]

NARRATOR

Mercifully, and almost as though nature herself is acknowledging the rare occasion, the heat relents the following day, enough for Scott to comfortably walk to the Sugiharas. He carries his few necessities in the old leather satchel normally reserved for his schoolbooks, a hand-me-down passed along from his siblings and once used by his mother when she worked as a secretary in town.

As he walks, his hands keep drifting unconsciously into his satchel. Alongside a few spare clothes and toiletries, he has stowed his broken bike chain in there, having had no chance to talk to Ken about the Black Phantom’s destruction and feeling a compulsion to bring the chain as tangible evidence of the crime.

He smiles as the little cottonwood-shaded pond, inexplicably referred to as McGullan Lagoon by the local populace and lying only a quarter mile from the Sugihara farmhouse, looms near. The previous December, he and Ken and Ken’s older sister Amy had all skated on the frozen pond one gloriously cold but picturesque Saturday afternoon, and it was the first time he had noticed how pretty Amy Sugihara truly was, a realization that had left him terrified and elated and anxious all at once. She’d always been a quiet girl, generally polite but a little condescending toward her younger brother and, by extension, his friends, but that day Scott saw a different side of her, full of playful mischief and clever wordplay, but also thoroughly gentle and warm. His smile broadens at the pleasant memory.

Then he catches a sound upon the breeze, one which makes the smile disappear from his face and his eyes grow wide. It is a soft but definite groan of pain, and it is followed by an awful meaty thwack that seems to reverberate in the air despite its faintness.

Scott breaks into a run, rushing off of the road and toward the pondside, whence he is sure the sound came.

Lying on his side in the growth of cattails and sedge, Ken’s face is for a moment hard to recognize, the area around both eyes already starting to swell and the area under his nose smeared with mingled blood and mucus. Vinny Crayle looms over him, aiming a kick at the prone boy’s stomach, and Mack simply watches dully, a long unfolded pocketknife held idly in one hand. Neither of them look up at Scott’s approach, deafened by their own sadistic efforts.

It is only matter of seconds, though it seems much longer, before Scott absorbs all the detail of this awful scene and spots Boyd crouching further along the bank, pinning Amy beneath his weight as she attempts to crawl away. A flash of white-hot rage makes his vision momentarily swirl when he sees the top of her pale blue shirtwaist dress torn and stained with the mud of the pondside.

Before his brain has made any conscious decision, Scott finds himself running toward Vinny, drawing the bike chain from his satchel and dropping the latter to the ground. Belatedly, Mack turns at the sound of Scott’s footfalls, only to cry out in surprise and pain as the edge of the swung chain lashes whiplike across his face. Even as the larger boy stumbles backward, raising his forearms awkwardly to defend himself, Scott is drawing back and swinging the chain again, and this time it leaves a long jagged gash along the back of Mack’s right hand, in which blood at once begins to well. Dropping the knife, Mack falls backward, screaming wordlessly, and Scott turns from him toward Vinny, whose face is contorted with a toxic blend of shock and rage.

Despite his own injury, Ken is quick to take advantage of the distraction, and just as Vinny decides to turn his attention to the newly appeared threat, Ken seizes a broken cottonwood branch from the ground, about three feet long as thick as his wrist, and thrusts its splintered end upward at Vinny’s abdomen as if it were a sword. The sharp tip of the branch tears through Vinny’s stained plaid shirt and gouges a short, deep chasm in the soft white flesh of his belly, and Vinny only has time to grunt before Scott’s chain slashes his cheek.

Driven by adrenaline, Ken leaps to his feet, and now swings the branch like a baseball bat at Vinny’s skull. The branch connects with a stomach-churning crunch and splinters into fragments, and Vinny falls face-forward into the mud without another sound.

Sparing only a brief look of mutual understanding at each other, Scott and Ken turn as one to face the oldest Crayle, but Boyd has granted no thought to his brothers’ plight. It seems almost as though he has forgotten all but the struggling girl beneath him, whose dress is now ripped all the way down to the small of Amy’s back. As he begins to move toward Boyd, Scott notes dimly in his peripheral vision that Ken is stooping to pick something up from the ground.

Drawing near, he can hear now that Amy is not struggling silently. She is promising to kill Boyd and his brothers if they don’t leave her and Ken alone, her blazing fury audible even through her insuppressible sobs of terror.

Her courage, even in this moment of vulnerability, and the wanton brutality of the Crayles, only swells Scott’s deadly wrath, and this time he does not swing the chain at Boyd’s exposed back, but wraps it like a garrote around his neck and leans backward, supplementing his lesser strength with the weight of his body.

Boyd’s arms begin to flail, and he claws at his neck, trying and failing to pry his fingers under the chain. His face is already a deep red turning toward purple, and seeing this fills Scott with a savage triumph, and he leans back even farther.

Now Boyd allows himself to fall backward, freeing Amy but depriving Scott of all resistance, so that he too topples to the ground, painfully striking the back of his head against a gnarled cottonwood root. A starburst swirls in his vision, and a sudden nauseous vertigo renders him momentarily unable to find his feet. Boyd lies coughing hoarsely in the grass, spewing spittle and phlegm, a scarlet impression of the chain encircling his neck.

Amy rises and begins to run toward the farmhouse. Scott tries even harder to regain his feet, afraid that Boyd will rise and chase her down, but his body seems unwilling to obey his commands.

Then Ken staggers forward, Mack’s pocketknife in his hand, and he falls on top of Boyd. The two bodies, disparate in size and build but both weakened by the damages already inflicted upon them, struggle pitifully for a few seconds. Then Ken rolls over limply, and Boyd lies still but for one hand stretched toward Scott, the fingers flexing rhythmically as though appealing to his erstwhile attacker for help.

Scott hears Ken vomit into the grass, and then he sees the handle of the pocketknife jutting from Boyd’s neck, sees the pulsing stream of blood flowing down from beneath it to the earth. Scott tries to turn his head to see if the younger Crayles have recovered, but his vision swims and blurs, and then a swirling darkness descends from the bright blue sky to swallow him.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

When he wakes, he is lying in a bed in a spartan room he does not recognize. The air is sharp with an antiseptic smell, and he slowly realizes he is in a hospital. As he begins to sit up, his mother’s face looms over him, and her hard-worked hands gently urge him back into a lying position.

“Don’t, honey,” she says, “the nurse said you shouldn’t move too much.”

He looks up at her, and sees his father standing behind her, and he feels cold terror flood through his body along with the nightmarish memory of what happened beside McGullan Lagoon, knowing that some terrible reckoning must await him.

And yet his father only comes forward to lay a gentle hand on his shoulder, and ask with unprecedented tenderness if he feels alright. At that, Scott tries to nod, but instead begins to cry, as freely and unabashedly as he has not done since he was a toddler.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

He spends two days in the hospital, as the doctor evaluates the concussion he took when he fell. The bicycle chain’s lacerations to his palms and inner fingers, which he never even noticed, were cleaned and stitched while he was still unconscious. During those days, the sheriff and his deputies visit him several times, asking him seemingly endless questions until he feels his wakefulness fading again, only to repeat the entire line of inquiry on the next visit.

He discovers also that Ken is being treated for much more serious injuries in the next room, and despite the doctor’s and nurses’ assurances that they will both be fine, Scott cannot rest until they allow him to visit his friend. Ken is dozing fitfully when he enters, his face now puff and shiny and almost three times its normal size, blued with bruising. Mrs. Sugihara sits beside her son’s bed, and she smiles sadly at Scott. Mr. Sugihara and Amy, she explains, have returned to the farm to tend the chickens and the pigs, who cannot be left unfed and without water for long, and he gathers that Amy escaped the event without any harm beyond a few bruises and scrapes – at least physically.

As Mrs. Sugihara talks, Ken’s eyes flutter open, made smaller by the inflamed flesh around them. After a few moments, Mrs. Sugihara politely excuses herself from the room, claiming a need for something to drink, and leaves the two boys alone.

Scott asks if he’s okay, feeling stupid even as the words leave his mouth. Ken says that he is fine, obviously lying. A long silence stretches between them, and then Ken says brokenly that he thinks his sister is afraid of him now. Scott sees glistening tears pooling in his swollen eyes, rolling over his taut skin to wet the pillow.

“I killed him,” he says softly, voice cracking, and then he says no more, only continues to cry. And the image of the pocketknife handle protruding from a ruined throat flashes once more across Scott’s mind, and then is gone, replaced by the present reality of Ken’s quiet anguish. “I killed him, I killed him.”

“We both did,” Scott says softly. He comes forward and takes Ken’s hand, his own eyes wet now, and they weep together without speaking another word.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

That is the last time that he and Ken ever share more than a few awkward exchanges. The three times they meet after that day, Ken is never able to meet Scott’s gaze, and Scott knows that Ken sees not only the Crayle boys in his face, but also that version of Scott that destroyed one of Mack Crayle’s eyes with a bike chain, and would have gladly strangled Boyd Crayle to death if he had not been stopped. And maybe, too, Ken sees a reflection of himself that he does not like, sees the Ken that so frightened Amy.

Before next summer, the Sugiharas will have moved away, returning to the West Coast to rebuild their lives yet again.

After Scott is released from the hospital, the sheriff comes to visit him and his family several times more. On the last such visit, Scott overhears the sheriff telling his father that it was only a matter of time until something like this happened, that ever since Willard Crayle’s death, his sons have only grown more and more lawless, having finally been freed from the tyranny of the only person they truly feared.

And that is the last time the law darkens their doorstep, Scott and Ken never facing any legal repercussions for what happened at McGullan Lagoon. After the two living Crayle boys are released from medical care – which they received, Scott learns chillingly only after the fact, only a hallway away from the rooms where he and Ken recuperated, under constant police watch – they are sent to the Boys Training School reformatory in Kearney, over a hundred miles away. Mrs. Crayle, seldom seen out of the house since her marriage, becomes now a total recluse, refusing to answer the door to any visitors – and will until her lonely death from stroke in 1965, only to be discovered days after the fact by the boy she pays to bring her groceries from town.

As for Scott, he will never be able to recall most of the remainder of that summer break, which his family will tell him he spends mostly shut up in the bedroom he shares with Tom, lying and staring blankly at the ceiling. The one thing that will later stand out clearly in his memory is the evening, just a few days before the beginning of the next school year, that his father comes into the room to talk with him alone. His father doesn’t really end up talking much at all, merely sitting silently beside him on Tom’s lower bunk and laying a calloused, strong tan hand upon his shoulder. And during the brief moment when their gazes meet and hold, there is a bone-deep, abiding sorrow in the older man’s eyes. Scott does see not his father now, but an older version of himself, forever changed by the spilling of blood, forever bearing a rage that has no object and vague regrets for things that cannot be undone, shame that can never be fully shared or even put into words.

And, no matter his age, he will forever mark this as the summer that his childhood ends.

(Bleak, mournful music)

[Darker Pastures Theme - Outro]

NARRATOR

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[Darker Pastures Theme - Outro - Continues]