Zenas Gardner

Zenas Gardner is Nahum Gardner’s son, whose disappearance at the family well marks a further stage in the destruction of the Gardner household. The account of his fate comes chiefly through his father’s increasingly confused remarks: Zenas never returned from the well, and Nahum believed the strange influence affecting the farm had reached him there.

Identity and Family Context

Zenas belongs to the Gardner family, alongside his brothers Thaddeus Gardner and Merwin Gardner. By the time Thaddeus dies, Nahum describes Zenas as having recently done little but stare into space. This change in his behavior places him among the family members already affected by the crisis, before Ammi Pierce comes to ask what has become of him.

Disappearance at the Well

When Ammi asks about Zenas, Nahum cannot provide a clear account. He says that Zenas is in the well and lives there, a reply that leads Ammi to search the house for himself. Nahum’s words do not explain how Zenas came to be missing, but they establish the well as the place around which his disappearance is understood.

Nahum later gives a more extended, disordered explanation. He says Zenas never came back from the well and describes the strange influence as drawing people toward it. In Nahum’s account, the farm’s water had become dangerous, and the force associated with the meteorite had grown strong enough to overcome Zenas. These are the claims of a distressed father, not an independently verified account of what happened to his son.

Nahum’s Explanation and the Well

Nahum connects what he saw at the well with the anomalous colour he had previously observed in the farm’s plants and with a coloured object that college men had removed from the stone. He believes that the same influence had spread through the farm and that it had affected Zenas. His explanation joins the boy’s disappearance to the wider pattern of decline, while its broken and repetitive delivery conveys how little control Nahum has over the events he is trying to describe.

Remains and Narrative Significance

A later examination of the well finds Zenas and Merwin only partly identifiable, their remains chiefly skeletal. The discovery gives physical confirmation that Zenas did not simply leave the farm, while offering no clear account of the precise circumstances of his death. His fate thus remains bound to the well: Nahum’s statement that Zenas was there first sounds like a bewildered fragment, but the later search makes the well the concrete site of the family’s loss.