Lucy accidentally causes Noah Fly's death

Lucy Fly’s accidental killing of her brother Noah Fly begins as a childhood game turned into an attack: cornered in an apple tree by her brothers, she leaps at Noah to stop him, and he is fatally impaled on a rusty nail. The death changes Lucy’s place within her family and becomes the cause of a three-year silence.

The Tree and the Attack

During the summer holidays, when Lucy was seven or eight, she used the largest apple tree in the garden as a climbing frame and lookout. Its trunk divided into two sloping limbs; Lucy favored the one stretching over the lawn, from which she could jump onto the grass. To make the leap more difficult, she sometimes stuck a pitchfork, garden spades, or sharp planks into the ground and tried to clear them. The tree gave her a position from which to watch unseen, but the objects below also made her play dangerous.

One bright day, Lucy was reading Pollyanna in the branches when her seven older brothers returned from a Boy Scout fishing trip. At Noah’s command, they surrounded the tree and pelted it with stones to dislodge her. Lucy feared that jumping down would leave her at their mercy, while remaining in the tree exposed her to the stones. With Miriam Fly away running a jumble sale at the town hall and George Fly absent, she believed no one would come if she called for help. She noticed a particularly heavy, sharp-edged stone on the grass; Noah picked it up and raised his arm to throw. Lucy pushed down against the branch and sprang onto him. Noah fell backward onto a long rusty nail protruding from one of her planks, which pierced him between the shoulder blades. He sat up with the plank attached to his back, then fell again, dropping the stone. He died in hospital that night.

Aftermath and Consequences

The account leaves the parents’ devastation unelaborated, then follows the quieter consequences within the family: Lucy stops bothering anyone and keeps to herself, and she no longer likes sitting in the apple tree. The distinction between what she intended and what happened remains stark: she meant to squash Noah, not puncture him. George Fly, acting against the town council’s wishes, chopped down the cooking apple tree, hacked it into pieces, and burned it. Lucy never knew whether smoke brought tears to his eyes; by then, she was no longer watching.

Silence and the Question of Blame

Lucy Fly did not speak for the next three years. Her last words came in the hospital, as a kind nurse led her away from the ward, holding her small hand along a corridor that smelled of sickness and disinfectant. The nurse asked, “You understand that it’s not your fault, don’t you?” Lucy answered, “Yes, no, yes,” because she did not understand the question and did not know which answer the nurse wanted. The exchange leaves responsibility unresolved at the level of the child’s understanding: the death was accidental, but Lucy’s silence followed it, while the reassurance offered to her could not yet be taken in.

Family Context and Retrospective Framing

The attack grew out of a family dynamic in which Lucy’s seven older brothers were allowed little direct contact with her because Miriam Fly thought their attention to a young girl would diminish them. Miriam regarded the boys as angels; Lucy knew them as cruel pranksters, and Noah was the nastiest. When they surrounded her tree, their violence was not an isolated reversal of a warm sibling bond but an escalation of the hostility that had shaped her place among them.

The account also resists turning Noah’s death into a simple triumph over a tormentor. Miriam continued to speak of having seven sons even after Noah died, making it difficult for Lucy to experience his death as an achievement, though she believed she had some part in bringing it about. In the tree, facing the stones, Lucy briefly imagined becoming a Christian martyr like St. Stephen, then rejected the thought because she had decided years earlier that she was an atheist. That childhood reasoning frames the leap as an attempt to escape an immediate threat, not as a considered intention to kill.