“The town in exile”

“The town in exile” is Ev Hillman’s defining image after Haven’s catastrophe: he remains the town’s memory even as its people and ordinary life have been scattered. The phrase makes his isolation more than private grief; he embodies a community displaced from itself.

The Phrase and Its Referent

Ev is introduced as Hilly Brown’s grandfather, a seventy-three-year-old Haven resident whose past includes service in the Battle of the Bulge. A German potato-masher exploded near him, leaving two small steel plates in his head. His history binds him to events far beyond the Maine town, but the phrase “the town in exile” gives his long local life its central meaning: he carries Haven’s accumulated memory when the community has been thrown into crisis.

The description is repeated plainly: “He was the town in exile.” The repetition turns an image into a concise characterization. Ev is not merely a witness to Haven’s history; he stands in for a place whose continuity has been broken.

Isolation After the Catastrophe

On the Monday after Haven’s explosive Sunday, Ev spends the morning in Room 371 of Derry Home Hospital, keeping watch over Hilly. He has rented a furnished room on Lower Main Street, where he sleeps—mostly sleeplessly—after hospital nurses send him away for the night. His days and nights thus divide between vigilance at Hilly’s bedside and lonely hours in temporary quarters.

In the dark, Ev sometimes thinks he hears chuckling from the drains. He tries to dismiss the sound as evidence that he is going mad, then recognizes that he is not—and wishes, at moments, that he were. The episode gives exile an unsettling inward dimension: the town’s rupture follows him even into the privacy of his room.

Haven as Memory and Map

The narration explicitly contrasts Ev with Ruth McCausland: if Ruth had been Haven’s heart and conscience, Ev, at seventy-three, was its memory. He had lived in the town for a long time, seen much of it, heard more, and earned his place as a good listener. His role is therefore not simply that of an elderly survivor. He is a storehouse of local knowledge, made especially significant when catastrophe threatens the community’s shared life.

Leaving the hospital on Monday evening, Ev stops at the Derry Mr. Paperback and spends nine dollars on a Maine Atlas whose maps divide the state into sections of six hundred square miles. He turns to Map 23, finds Haven, and draws a circle around the town with a compass. He does this without stopping to wonder why; tellingly, he does not place the compass point at Haven Village, which lies at the edge of the township. The small act makes the phrase visible: Ev’s attention still gathers around Haven as a whole, not merely its village center.

Meaning and Narrative Function

The phrase joins two conditions that seem to contradict each other. Ev is profoundly rooted in Haven—its past lives in what he remembers and has heard—yet he is also “in exile,” separated from the town by the aftermath of its explosive Sunday and by the immediate limits of hospital visiting hours. His old age and wartime injury deepen the sense of accumulated history without reducing him to either: he remains alert to his own fear, attentive to Hilly, and capable of orienting himself on a map.

Through Ev, exile becomes a communal condition as well as a personal one. Haven’s memory has not vanished, but it has been concentrated in a man living in a rented room, returning to a hospital, and circling his town on paper. The image gives the damaged community a human bearer: the place persists, for the moment, in the memory and attention of the person who knows it best.