“We will forget this”

“We will forget this” is the name of a promise that binds a childhood crisis to an unresolved family history. When William Henry Devereaux, Jr.’s mother finds him in the cellar, she answers his distress with the certainty that the two of them will put the moment behind them. Years later, the memory returns, and their exchange over his absent father reveals that forgetting and forgiveness are not the same.

The Promise in the Cellar

The promise arises from a specific, misreadable scene. The boy has taken a coil of rope, climbed onto a chair, and tied a knot around one of the pipes running across the cellar ceiling. He is testing whether the knot will hold and whether the pipe can bear his weight. From another child’s perspective, the arrangement might look like preparation for swinging from an imaginary tree; when he turns and sees Mother of William Henry Devereaux, Jr., he understands that she has reached a different conclusion. His response is an outburst of grief he did not know he carried.

The narration is careful about what the boy’s act does and does not mean. He does not want his life to end. Rather, he wants to know that the pipe could support him later if circumstances worsen and become unbearable. That distinction matters: the scene is not presented as a settled intention but as a test, made amid pain, of whether some means of endurance would be available. The boy himself does not fully comprehend the feeling that has brought him to the rope, so the scene’s meaning is partly unavailable even to the person living it.

Mother of William Henry Devereaux, Jr. does not demand an explanation. The boy moves from the chair into her arms, trusting that she will not be angry. Her fingers press beneath his shoulder blades as she holds him and tells him that the two of them will forget. The promise offers immediate assurance where neither a full account of the boy’s feelings nor a resolution of their cause is possible.

Two Possible Objects of Forgetting

The promise’s force depends on its ambiguity. The adult narrator considers whether the mother means that they will forget the pain of the father’s abandonment, the discovery in the cellar, or both. He is certain that the words can encompass both events, but admits that he does not know how such forgetting will happen. Time, grace, or their reliance on one another might accomplish it; in the moment, what matters is the mother’s certainty and the boy’s trust in her word.

This uncertainty keeps the promise from functioning as a simple claim that the past can be erased. It joins two experiences without declaring them identical: the father’s departure and the private scene in which the boy is found in distress. The mother’s first-person plural, as remembered by her son, makes forgetting a shared undertaking rather than an instruction directed at him alone. Her assurance gives him a relationship to rely on before either of them can say exactly what, in the long run, they will be able to leave behind.

Memory’s Return

The memory comes back to the adult narrator during a moment when the visible world briefly seems transformed. Looking at railway boxcars, he recalls the cellar and then sets his own fleeting sorrow beside the death of William Cherry, who has recently lain down on the tracks. The comparison does not equate the two experiences: the narrator explicitly recognizes that he cannot know the pain that led William Cherry to die. Instead, he wonders whether the world had also seemed strange to him before his death, or whether it had remained ordinary to the end.

The juxtaposition gives the recovered childhood episode a new frame without supplying a definitive interpretation of it. The narrator questions whether sentimentality about a boy’s passing sorrow is a mistake, even as the memory makes that sorrow newly legible. The boxcars remain boxcars when his altered vision passes; the past, by contrast, has become something he can now examine. The return of the memory therefore complicates the old promise: what was meant to be forgotten has not vanished, though its reappearance does not cancel the comfort it once provided.

Forgetting and Forgiving

When the narrator asks his mother whether she remembers what she promised, he cannot tell from her eyes whether she is willing or able to revisit the cellar scene. Her immediate concern is practical: boxes that did not fit in the U-Haul have arrived at the post office, and she wants help collecting them. She says she was not worried about him; she needed his help. The exchange moves between an intimate question about the past and an ordinary errand, without resolving the first at once.

Their attention then turns to the father, whose whereabouts they had once wondered about for close to a decade. Mother of William Henry Devereaux, Jr. says she has not forgotten; she has merely forgiven, and urges her son to do the same. He replies that he bears the man no ill will, while she points out that this is not necessarily forgiveness. Her distinction reframes the childhood promise. Forgetting is not proof that the abandonment never mattered, and the passage does not establish that either mother or son has forgotten it. Forgiveness, by contrast, is named as a separate position toward the father—one she has reached and wants her son to consider.

The expression thus marks both the shelter of a mother’s immediate reassurance and the limits of treating the past as settled. As a child, the narrator trusts her certainty without knowing how forgetting will be achieved. As an adult, he can recover the scene and ask what the promise meant, while his mother insists that a different act—forgiveness—remains at issue. Its significance lies in that difference: the words comfort without erasing the history that later returns between them.