The Other Side of the River

You're the same as anybody else.
Sally Field to Tom Hanks, Forrest Gump

Depending on how you see yourself, the words can be comforting or insulting. It's all a matter of interpretation. Linus was barely six when he realized he was different, a dark haired, shy child in a family of blonde, blue eyed, loud and adventurous souls. He hated guns and was afraid of the sea, preferring poetry and gentle music to the raucus and often crude melodies his brothers made up as they worked in the fields. He learned to read early and would beg the schoolteacher for "real books", hardbound and heavy, rather than the ubiquitous comic books his brothers so admired. His world was made up of words and images only he could see and he soon became an invisible child, forgotten and overlooked by his hard working and distracted parents, dismissed by his brothers as not worth their time or trouble. There was no malice or harm intended, his daddy often said with a shrug, It's just that the boy lives on the other side of the river.

Being a child most people didn't take notice of when he was there - or miss when he wasn't - it was easy for Linus to drift, carried by currents even he didn't understand. He helped the schoolteacher with lessons, fed the seagulls with Doolittle, learned herbs from Rowena, picked wildflowers for Miss Violet and Victoria, joined Miss Clara in tending the graveyard. And he wandered constantly, with a distant, slightly set apart aimlessness - along the coast at low tide, into the back woods, through the square where he didn't hear those who called his name and didn't see those who waved. He carried a small notebook and a pencil stub and would stop here and there to make notes, no one knew why or about what. If he did notice someone, he might tip his cap and offer a small smile but otherwise he went his own way, focused on his own faraway and hazy thoughts, too young to find the words to express or explain them, too inward turned to try. By his teens he had mostly disappeared and become a shadow on the edge of island life, no one seemed to know how he lived or where and on the rare times we would catch a glimpse of him - a solitary and far off figure walking across the back pastures toward the sunset - we would run like the wind but never catch up. He would vanish into the horizon long before we reached the place he had been and there would be no trace of him save for a brief trail of bent grass that would unaccountably end at the end of the cliff. Loving the mystery and hoping that there might be real magic in the man, we pursued him each summer but found only suggestions of his passings by - a whisper of pipe smoke where it shouldn't have been, a broken branch snagged with a thread of denim, a bit of yellow pencil in the dirt of a back road. Summer after summer, the reality of Linus eluded us until it seemed he must be dead or turned into a bird and flown off to the faraway, as Miss Clara liked to think. Uncle Bernie said he had found Land's End and the Allalonestone from "The Water Babies" and was living with his own kind, happy and understood at last, at peace with himself. Nana dismissed it all as romantic drivel and childish notions, Boy drowned and was carried out to sea and that's a fact, she told us firmly, Only magic and mystery was that it took so long. Clearing ground for a new still years later, Bill Allbright discovered a hut made of mud and sticks and branches. A natural rock formation made for a makeshift bench at the edge of the cliff and inside the hut the embers from a fire were still warm. Of Linus, there was no evidence and the only other sign of life was the flock of seagulls circling overhead. Weren't no place to run off, nowhere he could've hid, Bill confessed to Miss Clara, Me on the one side and the sea on the other. Even so, reckon I'll find me another place for the still.

The mystery and magic of the boy who lived on the other side of the river remained. If the seagulls knew the truth, they weren't talking and if the children that came after us ever found him, they weren't telling. There are some things you take on faith or not at all.