1950

1950 stands as the foundational year of the Bowden family's domestic world, the moment when the material and emotional landscape of their lives was fixed. It was the year they found the ridiculously small island twelve miles out into the lake, northwest of New Essex, a place too small to have a name, meriting only a single dot on the charts and a warning of shoal waters. It was the year before Bucky was born, and it inaugurated the family's annual tradition of three or four trips to the island each year, expeditions that would continue without interruption until the summer of the novel's events. The island, with its hill and beach and reasonably deep water just off the beach, became the emblem of their shared happiness, the first expedition of each year a ritual of renewal and escape.

The Purchase of the Farmhouse

The same year marked the acquisition of the family home. Sam and Carol Bowden had looked for a long time before they found the farmhouse in 1950, and hesitated a long time over the price, having several estimates made on what it would cost to modernize it. But both knew they were trapped; they had fallen in love with the old house. It sat on ten acres of farm land, all that was left of the original acreage, with elms and oaks and a line of poplars, and all the front windows overlooked a far vista of gentle hills. The house itself was of brick painted white, set well back from the road, with a long drive on the right-hand side leading back to what was still called the barn, even though it primarily housed the Ford wagon and Carol's doughty and honorable and purposeful MG. The barn was of brick too, painted white, and its upstairs, which had been a hayloft, became the children's area. The purchase was more house than Sam should have purchased, but he could console himself with the constantly increasing value of the ten acres of land.

The Establishment of Security

The year 1950 also anchored Sam's professional and financial identity. He had been a partner in the law firm ever since 1948, and by the time of the novel's present he could survey a life that seemed entirely under control. The marriage was of the very best variety, everybody was healthy, and though they had no savings to speak of and only a very few shares of pale blue-chip stocks, his hefty insurance program gave him a feeling of security. The farmhouse, the island, the annual expeditions, the healthy children, the partnership, the insurance — all of it composed a world that Sam, lying with the sun coming red through his eyelids, could tell himself was fine, a world in which there was absolutely no need to fret, no point in getting hysterical, a world of problems that could be taken care of neatly, quietly, with dispatch and efficiency.

The Fragility of the Idyll

This carefully constructed idyll, rooted in the discoveries and purchases of 1950, proved to be a fool's paradise. When something came in out of the darkness and struck one of them down, Carol articulated what the year had really built: a nice little fool's paradise, a charm that was no longer working. The untouchables had been touched. The security that 1950 had seemed to guarantee — the right to be happy, to raise the kids and eventually shoo them out of the nest and spend a dignified old age together — was revealed as an enormous and infantile trust that the world was made for them to be happy in. Carol came to understand that everything they had was balanced on such a delicate web of incidence and coincidence, and that there were black things loose in the world, of which Cady was one.

The Shadow Over the Year

The year that had given the Bowdens their island and their home also cast the long shadow that would eventually consume their peace. The night after the first expedition of the year, Sam stood in his front yard and felt the world as a very large place, and a man as almost excessively small, puny and vulnerable, with his brood abed. Cady lived somewhere in that night, breathing the darkness. The domestic geography established in 1950 — the house set well back from the road, the absence of close neighbors, the hill rising behind the barn — became the terrain of siege. Sam would later search that hillside with his binoculars, wishing it were not so heavily wooded, not so full of huge gray boulders and dead falls. The very features that had made the farmhouse desirable in 1950 — its isolation, its ten acres, its vista of gentle hills — became the vulnerabilities that Cady exploited, the places where he could hide, the darkness through which he could move. The year of foundation was thus also the year that built the stage for the terror to come, the year whose promise of security made its violation all the more devastating.