St. Christopher medal

The St. Christopher medal is a small silver medallion worn by Chico (Edward May) in the embedded story "Stud City," a narrative that mirrors and refracts the novel's central themes of loss, guilt, and the search for protection. Though Chico is not Catholic and not Mexican, he wears the medal as a superstitious talisman, wondering if it might have saved his brother Johnny from a fatal accident. The medal functions as a charged object that condenses Chico's grief, his sense of helplessness, and his desperate, irrational hope that a charm could alter fate—a hope that the novel's larger frame, with its multiple deaths and the persistent ache of memory, repeatedly exposes as futile.

Appearance and Ownership

The medal is described as a "small silver St. Christopher's medal" hanging on a chain around Chico's neck. Its material—silver—and its religious iconography mark it as a devotional object, but Chico's relationship to it is entirely secular and superstitious. He is not a Catholic, and his nickname "Chico" is a pose, adopted because of his black hair, Brylcreem, and pointed-toe boots with Cuban heels; his real name is Edward May. The medal is thus an adopted symbol, not an inherited one, worn for its perceived protective power rather than for any genuine faith.

The Medal and Johnny's Death

The medal's significance is anchored in the traumatic death of Chico's brother Johnny. Johnny was killed when a runaway Ford Mustang skidded across the infield at Oxford Plains Speedway and struck him as he changed a tire on a Chevy Charger-class stocker. Chico witnessed the accident, seeing "rubber flaying off the tires of the runaway Mustang" and "the yellow shout of flame." In the aftermath, Chico touches the St. Christopher medal and thinks: "Maybe if Johnny had been wearing one, the runaway Mustang would have missed him. You never knew." This thought reveals the medal's function as a locus for Chico's irrational hope and his guilt—a talisman that might have altered the past, a charm whose absence he implicitly blames for his brother's death.

Superstition and the Limits of Protection

The medal embodies a desperate, childlike superstition that the novel's larger narrative repeatedly undermines. Chico's speculation that the medal might have saved Johnny is immediately undercut by the phrase "You never knew," which acknowledges the impossibility of knowing and the futility of such magical thinking. The medal offers no actual protection; it is a comfort object, a physical focus for grief and guilt that cannot change what happened. This pattern of hope defeated by reality echoes throughout the novel: the boys' quest to find Ray Brower's body is driven by a similar mix of excitement and dread, and their discovery of the corpse—mangled, covered in ants, with hailstones filling its eyes—offers no redemption, only the stark fact of death.

Narrative and Thematic Significance

The St. Christopher medal appears only within "Stud City," the story-within-a-story that Gordon Lachance wrote as an undergraduate and that the novel reproduces in full. Gordon later reflects that "Stud City" was "the first story I ever wrote that felt like my story" and that it contained "things that had troubled me for years come out in a new form, a form over which I had imposed control." The medal, like the story itself, is an attempt to impose control on chaos—to find a symbol that might make sense of senseless loss. But the medal's failure to protect Johnny mirrors the story's own inability to fully contain or explain the pain it depicts. The medal thus becomes a figure for the novel's central tension: the desire to find meaning, protection, or redemption in objects, stories, or rituals, and the persistent, heartbreaking failure of those attempts in the face of real death and real grief.