Tommy Jacklin

Tommy Jacklin is a young man whose hurried return to Haven with Hester Brookline turns a supply run into a medical emergency. Their attempt to bring back batteries exposes the deadly reach of the town’s transformation: the farther they travel from Haven, the more violently their bodies fail. Tommy reaches home unconscious and dies soon afterward, while Hester survives but is left blind.

Identity and Role

Tommy is identified as Doc Warwick’s handsome young patient and as the son of a father who must be told of his death. The available account gives little background beyond those relationships, but his actions during the crisis define his role: he and Hester leave the Haven–Troy area to obtain batteries, then push back toward town as their symptoms worsen. In that return, Tommy becomes a measure of the danger outside Haven and of the cost paid by people trying to supply it.

The brief description of his body after death gives the loss a particular human scale. When Doc Warwick draws the sheet over Tommy, the outline of his nose remains visible; the narration notes that he had been handsome and had shared his father’s prominent nose. For Bobbi Anderson, this is not an abstract casualty. She thinks of the task of telling his father, and recognizes that Tommy’s death still affects her even as she expects her capacity to care to erode.

The Battery Run and the Return

Tommy and Hester return ahead of schedule because he begins to feel seriously ill only three hours after they have driven out of the Haven–Troy area. Rather than stop and wait, he presses on, moving as fast as he can. The urgency is bound up with the practical purpose of the trip: the pair have been gathering batteries for Haven, while the town’s transformed conditions make supplies increasingly consequential.

Their symptoms accumulate during the drive. Both develop headaches, with Tommy’s more severe. In Derry, he hallucinates a grinning clown looking up from an open sewer manhole; the clown’s eyes resemble shiny silver dollars, and its clenched white glove is filled with balloons. The grotesque image marks how far his illness has advanced, but he continues driving back toward Haven.

About eight miles outside Derry, on Route 9, Tommy begins bleeding from the rectum. Embarrassed, he pulls over and asks Hester for sanitary pads, explaining what is happening without looking at her. After going into the bushes, he returns unsteady, one hand stretched out, and tells her to drive because he can no longer see properly. The reversal is immediate: the driver who has been forcing the journey onward must surrender control as his sight fails.

By the time they reach the town line, the front seat is splashed with blood and Tommy is unconscious. Hester is also gravely ill, able to see only through a dark curtain. Doc Warwick opens the car door and reassures her that she is back in Haven and can let go of the wheel. She manages to give a more or less coherent account while Hazel McCready holds her, but she too loses consciousness before they reach the doctor’s home. Warwick drives at an extraordinary speed to get them there.

Death and Its Consequences

On Tuesday, August 9, Doc Warwick pulls the sheet over Tommy and lets it settle across his body. The scene confirms that the emergency has ended in death, while the preceding details establish the course of his final journey: worsening headaches, hallucination, bleeding, loss of sight, and unconsciousness. Tommy does not recover after reaching Haven.

Hester’s outcome makes the return’s cost sharper rather than relieving it. Warwick says that her bleeding has stopped and expects her to survive, but he does not believe she will ever regain her sight. Tommy’s death and Hester’s blindness are thus distinct consequences of the same attempt to return to Haven after their bodies begin failing outside it.

For Bobbi Anderson, Tommy’s death carries an obligation as well as grief: she thinks someone must tell his father and expects that person to be her. Her response contrasts with the emotional hardening she senses in herself. She knows she is supposed to be past caring about deaths like his, and imagines that such feelings may eventually burn away, yet they still trouble her. Tommy’s final scene therefore registers both the bodily price of Haven’s crisis and the remnant of ordinary human concern that its transformation has not yet erased.