Boston Post cane

The Boston Post cane appears in two sharply different contexts: as an anticipated award at Royce Merrill’s funeral and as an object Mike Noonan expects to see during a return to the lake. The contrast places a recognizable civic custom beside the haunting’s more intimate signs, linking public remembrance with Mike’s private, bodily memory of a drowned child.

The Funeral and the Town

After reading that Maxwell Devore had died, Mike went to the Village Cafe for supper. Audrey told him that Royce Merrill had died without regaining consciousness and that his funeral would take place Tuesday afternoon at Grace Baptist Church. Many townspeople, she said, would attend partly to see Ila Meserve receive the Boston Post cane. Mike declined to say that he expected to be at Mattie Devore’s victory party during the funeral.

The cane thus enters the scene through a public ritual that Mike intends to miss. Its presentation is one reason people will gather, but the funeral also carries a private and politically charged contrast for him: while the town mourns Royce, Mike anticipates celebrating Mattie’s success. The cane’s ceremonial role belongs to the community’s visible account of loss, set against the less public conflict unfolding around Mattie.

The Lake and the Expected Apparition

On Monday morning, Mike returned to the water and approached the birch curving over the shore, a place where he had stood on the preceding Friday evening. He expected to see the dead boy’s face in the water and to experience again the lake’s taste and the child’s remembered plea for help. In this anticipated vision, he also expected to see the Boston Post cane wrapped in a ribbon.

Nothing appeared: neither the boy nor the ribbon-wrapped cane, and Mike tasted none of the lake. The expected cane is therefore part of the vision’s specific imagery, not an object he actually finds at the water. Its absence accompanies the disappearance of the other signs that had made the place feel charged with a terrible past.

Meaning Through Contrast

The cane’s two appearances set public recognition against private haunting. At the funeral, it is associated with a named recipient and a gathering of townspeople; at the lake, Mike imagines it transformed by a ribbon and placed within an apparition of death. The text does not explain how the cane would figure in the vision, but its anticipated presence brings the town’s ceremony into the same mental scene as the drowned boy.

When Mike returns to the house, he finds the refrigerator stripped of its magnetic letters and fruit and vegetable magnets. He never finds them again, and time is nearly up. Against that unexplained disappearance, the cane remains an anticipated but absent sign: an object recalled from the town’s public life and carried into Mike’s expectations of what the water might reveal.