Ben

Ben, Sue’s young son and Gerry Fenn’s nephew, moves through the pilgrimage and the catastrophe at the shrine with a child’s shifting attention: absorbed in play, unsettled by unfamiliar people, and finally intent on helping the adults he loves. His apparent immunity to the evil overwhelming the crowd is more than a contrast in temperament. When Sue and Fenn falter, contact with Ben restores their strength, making him an unexplained source of protection amid the disaster. Yet the closing uncertainty over what he saw prevents that protection from becoming a simple answer.

Identity and Childhood

Ben is seven years old during the pilgrimage. At first, he treats the field as a place for adventure rather than as a religious gathering or a scene of impending danger. He races between the benches imagining himself as Indiana Jones, dodging imagined enemies and transforming the real crowd into the setting for his game. The book places this private excitement against the growing congregation: people are arriving early for the Mass, some hoping to see Alice Pagett and others seeking proximity to what they believe is her holiness. Ben is largely oblivious to the reverence and tension gathering around him.

His game ends not through a dramatic revelation, but through a collision with an unfamiliar man. Ben’s expression changes when he sees the man’s severe facial illness, and he draws away. The encounter frightens him enough to break the spell of his imagined adventure. He runs on, now wary of the packed field and its strangers, and decides to find his mother. The episode shows both his ordinary vulnerability and the quickness with which a child’s attention can shift: the imagined chase gives way to a real encounter he cannot comfortably interpret.

Ben is also surrounded by the suffering bodies of pilgrims who have come seeking help. Sitting beside Sue, he notices people with serious disabilities and illnesses, and the sight is no longer entirely unfamiliar to him. His earlier fright at one man does not define his response to everyone in the crowd. The contrast matters: Ben is not presented as untouched by fear or as possessing an adult understanding of the sick. He remains a child, affected by what he sees but unable to grasp the religious expectations, medical hopes, and mounting collective unease surrounding him.

At the Pilgrimage and Mass

Sue tries to keep Ben near her as the field fills. When Gerry arrives, Ben greets him warmly, and Fenn bends down to answer him and tweaks his nose. The easy familiarity between them offers a brief domestic counterpoint to the assembly around the altar. Fenn then urges Sue to take Ben and leave. Sue hesitates, but after studying him she takes Ben’s hand and agrees to go home. Fenn’s visible relief makes clear that this is a consequential choice, not merely a change of plans.

They do not leave before the procession reaches the centerpiece and the service begins. As the hymn rises, people in the congregation begin to collapse. Fenn and Sue also become dizzy and sink onto a bench. Ben puts his arms around his mother and reaches toward Fenn; when his hand brushes Fenn’s cheek, the reporter’s dizziness lifts. The narrative presents the change directly but does not explain its mechanism. Ben does not announce an intention to heal or protect anyone. His simple physical closeness coincides with Fenn’s recovery, establishing a pattern that becomes more significant during the later crisis.

The adults’ reactions remain distinct from Ben’s. Fenn recognizes the spreading disturbance as a form of mass hysteria, while Sue is overcome by weakness. Ben is not shown understanding the causes of either condition. His role emerges instead through what happens when he is near them: the adults regain a steadiness that they could not summon by themselves. In a gathering where belief in Alice’s power has drawn thousands together, the most immediate effect comes not from Ben’s public status or religious authority, but from his presence beside his family.

The Shrine Disaster

After the shooting and the onset of the disaster, Ben is upset and clings to Sue, but he still does not understand everything happening around him. He asks why people are screaming. Sue holds him close and reassures him. When he looks around, however, he says that he is not afraid. The difference between his fear earlier in the day and this composure is striking, but it does not make him a detached observer: he wants to comfort his mother and urges her to leave.

Ben points out that he can see Uncle Gerry near the altar. Sue follows his direction and sees the destruction there, including Fenn lying on the steps. She and Ben go toward him despite her dizziness. When Sue’s sickness and weakness return, Ben comes back to her, wraps his arms around her, and the symptoms vanish. Sue recognizes that her calm and strength seem to come from her son, although she does not understand why. She holds his hand as they move toward Fenn, trying to shield him from what is happening at the altar even as he remains curious about it.

Fenn is too weak to move when they reach him. Sue asks him to touch Ben and hold his hand. Fenn initially tells them to go, but when Sue places Ben’s hand in his, his vitality begins to return. This second recovery gives the earlier contact more weight: Ben has helped both Sue and Fenn at moments when their strength failed. The text does not claim that he consciously chooses to transfer or dispel their weakness. Rather, the repeated effect invites Fenn—and the reader—to consider whether Ben’s innocence has a protective force in a setting where other people are being overwhelmed.

Ben also notices details the adults are struggling to process. He points out blood on Alice’s dress, and later notices the figure at the tree. His observations do not amount to a full understanding of the deaths or the destruction around him. His attention remains personal and concrete: he identifies his uncle, responds to his mother, and asks about what he can see. The contrast between that child’s scale of attention and the catastrophe surrounding the shrine keeps him from becoming simply a symbol of innocence; he is a boy attempting to orient himself amid frightening events.

Protection and Uncertainty

Afterward, Fenn tries to make sense of why Ben seemed different from the adults. He recalls that Ben did not witness Alice’s radiance or levitation, and thinks that the boy had not seen Einor or experienced the earthquake and opening ground as the others did. Fenn also remembers that other children in the field did not share their parents’ terror, though some young people did. The apparent protection is therefore neither presented as a general feature of childhood nor explained as a power Ben can deliberately use.

Fenn’s account of Ben’s effect is more tangible than his broader speculation. He felt his strength return when he touched the boy; Sue experienced a similar change. Fenn imagines Ben as a kind of human conductor through whom weakness passed and dissipated into the ground. This is his attempt to describe the repeated physical result, not a confirmed explanation. The novel leaves open whether Ben’s innocence is a spiritual defense, an unusual human capacity, or something Fenn cannot yet understand.

That uncertainty deepens when Fenn remembers Ben asking about the lovely lady in white who stood by the tree while the crowd screamed and the altar burned. The recollection unsettles Fenn’s earlier belief that Ben had not seen the supernatural events. Ben’s apparent freedom from the horrors is therefore incomplete or at least difficult to define: he may not have perceived the same things as the adults, but his later question suggests that he noticed something they could not settle into a shared account. The Lady in White remains unexplained, and Ben’s words make Fenn doubt both his own memories and his theory of the boy’s innocence.

Narrative Significance

Ben’s role develops from comic, self-contained play into a quiet but consequential presence beside Sue and Fenn. His imagined adventure initially runs parallel to the crowd’s expectations of a miracle: while adults invest the field with sacred meaning, Ben supplies it with the figures and dangers of a game. As the pilgrimage turns into disaster, that imaginative distance gives way to concrete attachments—his mother’s hand, his uncle’s weakness, and his wish to go home.

The ending preserves rather than resolves his significance. Ben appears to protect the adults through contact, and Fenn finds courage in the possibility that innocence can resist evil. Yet the boy’s question about the woman in white complicates the comforting idea that he was simply untouched by what happened. Through Ben, the novel places a child’s limited understanding beside the adults’ failed explanations: his innocence may be a defense, but it does not close the mystery at the heart of the shrine.