Royce Merrill's Boston Post Cane

Royce Merrill's Boston Post Cane becomes a striking piece of evidence during Mike Noonan's journey into the past: lying beneath the lake, wrapped in ribbons, it connects a familiar object from Mike's present to the vanished world of Sara Tidwell and the Red-Tops. It makes the time-slip materially legible, even as it marks Royce's absence and death.

Discovery beneath the lake

Mike peers into the water beneath a birch, half-expecting and half-dreading the drowned boy he had seen there. The boy is gone. Among the rocks, roots, and waterweed lies a cane with a gold head, wrapped in a rising spiral of white ribbons edged in bright red. The wind eases, stilling the lake's glints long enough for Mike to recognize it as Royce's Boston Post Cane.

The discovery follows the loon’s two calls, which Mike has privately taken as a yes-or-no code, and his question about whether the experience is really happening. The cane does not answer him directly; instead, its unmistakable identity supplies a concrete object within the otherwise disorienting landscape.

A clue to time and death

The cane's position in the lake brings two different times together. Mike understands that he has arrived before Royce was born: Royce's birth will take place in 1903, while Sara is present and singing with her family, two years before she and the Red-Tops are gone. The object belongs to the later life Mike knows, yet it rests beneath the water in the earlier scene.

This temporal mismatch also explains why Royce has not answered the phone. Mike recognizes that Royce's days of answering it are over: the cane is not merely a familiar possession displaced into the past, but a sign of its owner's death in Mike's present. Its location among the lake's roots and rocks turns that recognition into a physical, submerged fact.

Ribbons and the song

The white ribbons with red edges give the cane an unexpected visual transformation. Their spiral recalls to Mike the baton carried by a class marshal at a high-school graduation, an association that turns the wrapped cane into something resembling a ceremonial staff. The resemblance leads him to understand why the old man had not answered the telephone, joining the ribbons' striking appearance to the news of Royce's absence.

Mike addresses the object through a line from a spiritual, telling the cane to go down, Moses, toward the Promised Land. The words echo the cane's position beneath the water and the passage's recurring language of drowning, while Sara's song draws Mike onward toward the fair and the live performance he is about to witness.

Narrative significance

The cane briefly makes an impossible crossing tangible. Mike's experience is not established by explanation alone: he identifies a specific object, recalls the future date of Royce's birth, and infers the death that explains the unanswered phone. The cane therefore serves at once as a relic from Mike's present, a marker of the past he has entered, and a quiet confirmation that the drowned boy is not the only presence associated with the lake.