Before
Every town has lost a child. Search the archives, ask the clergy. You'll find stories of runaways slipping out of windows in the dark, never to be seen again. You'll be told of custody battles gone ugly and parents taking extreme measures. Occasionally you'll read about kids snatched from parking lots or on their walks home from school. Here today, gone tomorrow. The pain is passed out and shared until the only ones who remember are the only ones who ever really gave a damn.
Our town lost Luke Drake. By all accounts he was a normal twelve-year-old kid who rode his bike and got into just enough trouble. On a balmy autumn afternoon in 1979, he and his brother, Milo, were patrolling the banks of the Oriskanny with their BB rifles when a grouse fumbled out from some bushes. Milo shot the bird in the neck, and it tried to fly but crashed into a riot of brambles near the water.
"I shot, you fetch," Milo told Luke, and those words will probably always kindle insomnia for Milo. Because in the act of fetching, Luke slipped on a rock covered with wet leaves and fell into the river.
It had been a rainy autumn, and the river was swollen and unpredictable. Even in drier times, it was a rough patch of water that only fools dared navigate. Branch in hand, Milo chased the current along the banks as far as he could, but soon his brother's head bobbed out of view, and no amount of shouting "Swim!" or "Fight!" could bring him back.
Experts combed the river for at least fifteen miles downstream. No luck. Luke Drake was declared missing on November 20, and after a few weeks of extensive but fruitless searches, almost everyone assumed he was dead, his body trapped and hidden beneath a log or taken by coyotes. Perhaps his family still holds out hope that he will show up at their doorstep one day, a healthy man with broad shoulders and an astounding tale of amnesia.
I saw Luke's body on November 22, 1979. Thanksgiving morning. I was almost three years old, and we were visiting my uncle's cabin near a calm but deep bend in the Oriskanny, about seventeen miles downstream from where Luke fell. I don't remember why or how, but I snuck out of the house alone before dawn and ended up sitting on a rock near the water. All I remember is looking down and seeing a boy at the bottom of the river. He was on his back, most of his body covered in red and brown leaves. His eyes were open, looking up at me. One of his arms stuck out from the murk. As the current moved, it guided his hand back and forth, back and forth. It was like he was waving at me. It almost seemed as though he was happy to see me.
My next memory is of rain and my dad picking me up and putting me over his shoulder and carrying me back through the woods as I whispered to him, "The boy is saying hello, the boy is saying hello."
It takes a while to process memories like that, to know if they're even true. I never told anyone about what I saw because for so long it meant something different. For so long it was just a boy saying hello, like an acquaintance smiling at you in the grocery store. You don't tell people about that.
I was eleven when I finally put the pieces in their right places. I read about Luke's disappearance at the library while researching our town's bicentennial for a school paper. With a sheet of film loaded into one of the microfiche readers, I was scanning through old newspapers, all splotchy and purple on the display screen. I stopped dead on the yearbook picture of Luke that had been featured on missing posters. It all came rushing back, like a long-forgotten yet instantly recognizable scent. My uncle had sold the cabin by then, but it was within biking distance of my house, and I went out there the following Saturday and flipped over stones and poked sticks in the water. I found nothing. I considered telling someone, but my guilt prevented it. Besides, nine years had passed. A lot of river had tumbled through those years.
The memory of Luke may very well be my first memory. Still, it's not like those soft and malleable recollections we all have from our early years. It's solid. I believe in it, as much as I believe in my memory of a few minutes ago. Luke was our town's lost child. I found him, if only for a brief moment.