Johnny's suicide

Johnny Gordon’s suicide comes immediately after he has managed to tell Peter Gordon that he loves him, making the death both a family catastrophe and the terrible close of a moment of reconciliation. Johnny’s last counsel is that Peter should resist the hardening effect of other people’s judgments and learn kindness; he then goes upstairs, and Peter later finds him hanged from a rope kept by the window for fire escape. The intimate farewell and the practical, shocking discovery stand together, with no explanation offered that can undo their contrast.

A Farewell Between Father and Son

Johnny approaches Peter while the boy is examining a microscope slide of a bacillus that kills rodents, using a flashlight fixed to a wooden stand to direct light beneath the lens. He admires Peter’s drawing and hands, takes one of them, and admits how difficult it is for a father to speak. He says plainly that he loves his son. Peter is silent at first, his large eyes fixed on Johnny; then he answers that he loves him too. The exchange gives their affection a direct expression that had previously been difficult for Johnny to voice.

Johnny’s advice is not simply to ignore other people. When Peter promises never to mind what people say, Johnny cautions that people who do so can grow hard. He urges Peter to be kind and warns that the strength he sees in his son could make him capable of hurting others. Asked what kindness means, Johnny defines it as trying to remove obstacles from the way of those who love or need someone. The counsel gives the scene a moral center: strength is not presented as a virtue by itself, but as a capacity that must be governed by care.

Before leaving, Johnny says that he has always been something of an obstacle to Peter, but that he now feels good because Peter understands. He pauses with a small smile, lays his hand on the boy’s head, calls him a good boy, and goes upstairs. The gestures and the language form a farewell in retrospect. Their tenderness does not announce what is about to happen, but, set beside the death that follows, it gives the parting an unmistakable finality.

Discovery Upstairs

Peter later hears a noise and finds his father upstairs. The account gives no extended description of the discovery; instead, it follows Peter as he stands wondering what words he will use to tell Rose Gordon Burbank that he has found Johnny and cut him down. Johnny has hanged himself from one of the ropes coiled by the window for escape in case of fire. The rope’s ordinary, practical purpose is thus made inseparable from the crisis: an object kept for safety becomes the means by which Peter’s father dies.

Rose calls from below, asking what Peter is doing upstairs and telling him to try not to wake his father because she thinks he is very tired. Peter does not answer. He stands looking beyond her at the opposite wall, while she follows his gaze and asks what he sees. The gap between Rose’s understanding and what Peter has discovered makes the scene’s silence especially painful. Peter must find words for an event that has already changed the household, while Rose is still speaking as though Johnny were only resting.

The narration records another precise detail from the aftermath: Johnny appears to have just finished combing his yellow hair, and still holds the black pocket comb he always carried. Before Rose speaks again, he drags his thumb over its teeth repeatedly. The small, repetitive movement belongs to the image of Peter standing with the knowledge of his father’s death; it supplies no explanation for the suicide, but fixes the moment in an ordinary object and gesture rather than in an account of motive.

The Inn and the Public Aftermath

News of the suicide draws neighbors and tourists to The Inn / Red Mill. People identify it as the place where the death occurred, and customers drinking in the saloon look across at The Inn windmill. They also watch Rose Gordon Burbank as she goes out to take clothes from the line or water flowers, curious to see whether some trace of the tragedy remains in her or in Peter. Private bereavement becomes a public spectacle, with the people left behind made objects of scrutiny.

Rose runs The Inn / Red Mill as an eating house, but the stories surrounding Johnny’s death leave her with few customers. Diners know that the room in which they eat may lie just below the place where the suicide happened; the setting brings the deaths and disappointments of their own lives to mind. The tragedy therefore affects more than the family’s memory of Johnny: it changes how strangers experience the building and whether they are willing to enter it.

A Stigma Outlasted by Change

The town’s attention does not remain fixed on Johnny. Many people who knew him move away as livelihoods around Beech prove marginal and desperate. A barn converted into a roadside garage closes as automobiles break down less often, weeds grow around the red gas pump, and a chicken farm fails. The man who sold unusual rocks and petrified wood also never makes a success of his business. New bartenders arrive, and The Inn / Red Mill is painted red and renamed the Red Mill.

The change in the establishment’s name does not erase the history, but it allows ordinary commercial life to resume around it. Passing salesmen are too tired to heed the stigma or arrive too late to hear about it; their only alternative is a dirty room above a store. Meanwhile, the war diverts attention and confronts the town with a wider, unsettling pattern of death: men people had known, drunk with, quarrelled with, loved, or cheated die in the trenches in France. Against that collective loss, Johnny’s suicide remains a defining event for his family and the Inn, even as the town’s memory is absorbed into economic decline, changing travel, and wartime bereavement.