Benedict's Old Wharf

Benedict's Old Wharf is both the physical setting of Claude Daigle's drowning and the place where its meaning changes. Christine comes there carrying the Penmanship medal Rhoda took from Claude, and drops it among the pilings after deciding she cannot return it to the Daigle family. Later, Miss Fern imagines an accidental sequence of events at the wharf; Rhoda's confession replaces that account with a deliberate confrontation over the medal. The location thus holds together the story's material evidence, Christine's effort to conceal it, and the gradual disclosure of Rhoda's responsibility.

Setting and Physical Features

The wharf lies at Benedict, where Christine asks to go alone after lunch with Miss Octavia Fern. Its pilings provide the specific place where Christine disposes of the medal: she opens her bag at the end of the wharf and drops the object among them. The action is private, but not morally uncomplicated. Christine recognizes that hiding the medal makes her complicit in Rhoda's wrongdoing, and understands her choice as part of the change anxiety and guilt have brought about in her own character.

A summerhouse stands on the wharf, and becomes part of Miss Fern's reconstruction of the drowning. She suggests that Claude may have hidden there to escape Rhoda's persistence. The evidence does not establish that he actually did so; the summerhouse belongs to a conjecture offered by Miss Fern, not to Christine's later-established account of the assault. Keeping that distinction matters: the wharf's surroundings invite a plausible explanation before the truth is fully known, but do not themselves confirm it.

Competing Accounts of the Drowning

When Christine asks what Miss Fern thinks happened on the day of the picnic, Fern offers an interpretation that softens Rhoda's responsibility. In her account, Claude hides from Rhoda on or near the wharf, and backs into the water when she approaches. Because Claude is a capable swimmer, Fern supposes Rhoda would have expected him to reach shore. She speculates that Rhoda may have worried about his new suit, feared a scolding, or misunderstood his failure to surface as a childish trick.

Fern's explanation also accounts for Rhoda's departure without treating it as proof of intent. She suggests that a guard's call frightened the child and that Rhoda may have watched from behind crepe myrtles, unable to understand what was happening. In this version, Rhoda fails to act at first and is later too afraid to admit what she saw. Fern calls this a panicked abandonment in an emergency, comparing it to the way even adults may flee under pressure. Her interpretation is compassionate, but it remains an inference assembled from uncertain possibilities. The wharf is therefore a setting for competing knowledge: Fern explains the drowning by imagining what a frightened child might have thought, while Christine is still struggling to learn what Rhoda actually did.

The Medal and Rhoda's Confession

Rhoda's later account identifies the wharf as the place where the conflict over the medal became fatal. She says Claude refused to hand it over when she demanded it, then ran away and hid on the wharf. Rhoda found him there and threatened to hit him with her shoe if he would not give her the medal. After she struck him, he surrendered it, but then tried to get away. Rhoda says she struck him again and that he fell into the water.

Her account continues beyond the moment of the fall. When Claude tried to pull himself back onto the wharf and threatened to tell on her, Rhoda says she struck him again so that he would let go. She admits that she continued when he did not immediately release his hold, and connects the blood on her shoe to this part of the encounter. The confession makes the wharf more than the site of a fall or a missed rescue: it identifies the place where the demand for the medal, Rhoda's fear of being reported, and her escalating violence converged. The object Christine later drops among the pilings is thus directly bound to the cause of the confrontation.

Christine's Concealment and the Wharf's Significance

Christine's visit places her in an uneasy relation to the scene before she knows the full account. She has already visited the Daigles and concluded that she cannot return the medal. At the wharf, she disposes of it and tells herself that protecting Rhoda is her duty because the child is her own flesh and blood. Her reasoning links maternal loyalty to concealment: she acts to shield Rhoda even as she recognizes that the act deepens her own guilt. The wharf consequently marks a moral decision for Christine as well as the site of Rhoda's actions.

The location's narrative importance rests on the contrast between what is first imagined and what is later confessed. Fern's explanation treats the water, the guard's call, and a child's fear as circumstances that might account for an accidental drowning followed by silence. Rhoda's account instead supplies a motive—the medal—and a sequence of choices at the same wharf. The piling gap where Christine hides the medal and the place where Claude struggles to return are distinct details, but together they make the wharf a material center of the concealment: evidence is discarded there, while the truth it might obscure is gradually spoken aloud.