Ray Brower's corpse

Ray Brower's corpse is the dead body of a twelve-year-old boy from Chamberlain, Maine, who went missing while picking blueberries and was struck by a freight train on the GS&WM Railroad tracks near the Back Harlow Road in Harlow. His body becomes the object of a quest for four Castle Rock boys—Gordon Lachance, Chris Chambers, Teddy Duchamp, and Vern Tessio—who hike along the railroad tracks to find it over the Labor Day weekend of 1960. The corpse serves as the story's central symbol of mortality, the loss of childhood innocence, and the rite of passage that binds and ultimately separates the friends.

Discovery and Condition

The boys find Ray Brower's corpse in a boggy patch of undergrowth at the bottom of a washout on the railroad embankment, where early spring rains had eroded the fill. The first thing they see is a single pale white hand sticking out of a tangle of blackberry brambles, the fingers limply splayed. The body is face down, with the head pointed toward the tracks and arms stretched over the head like a diver about to execute. He is wearing a solid-color dark green tee-shirt and bluejeans, but his feet are bare; his filthy low-topped Keds are caught in blackberry brambles a few feet away, knocked off by the force of the train's impact. When the boys turn him face up, they see ants and bugs all over his face and neck, running briskly in and out of the round collar of his tee-shirt. His eyes are open but terrifyingly out of sync—one rolled back so far that only a tiny arc of iris is visible, the other staring straight up into the storm. There is a dried froth of blood above his mouth and on his chin from a bloody nose, and the right side of his face is lacerated and darkly bruised. A beetle comes out of his mouth, treks across his cheek, steps onto a nettle, and is gone. His torso has swelled up, and there is a faint gassy odor about him, like the smell of old farts. The body is covered with black ants trundling back and forth across the hand. When the storm's hail begins to fall, the hailstones fill his eyes, making them go wide and white, starey and pupilless, like the eyes of Grecian statuary; the melting hail runs down his cheeks as if he were weeping.

The Quest for the Body

The search for Ray Brower's body is the central event of the boys' Labor Day weekend. Vern Tessio overhears his brother Billy and Charlie Hogan discussing the body under the porch of his house; they had seen it while joyriding in a stolen car on the Back Harlow Road. Vern runs two miles to the treehouse to tell the others. The four boys decide to find the body and report it, hoping to become heroes and get their pictures in the paper. They hike along the GS&WM railroad tracks from Castle Rock into Harlow, a journey that takes them through the Castle Rock Dump (where they confront Milo Pressman and his dog Chopper), across a trestle over the Castle River (where they barely escape an oncoming freight train), and through a leech-infested beaver pond. The journey is arduous, hot, and increasingly frightening, but the fascination of the thing draws them on. As Gordon Lachance reflects, they had come to believe they deserved to see it.

Confrontation and Abandonment

Just as the boys find the body, a thunderstorm breaks, and Ace Merrill, Eyeball Chambers, Billy Tessio, Charlie Hogan, and other older teenagers arrive, having learned of the body's location from Billy and Charlie. A confrontation ensues over who has the right to report the discovery. Chris Chambers pulls out his father's .45 pistol and fires a shot into the water, forcing Ace's gang to back down. But the boys ultimately decide to abandon the body rather than risk being accused of killing him or being sent to the reformatory. They leave Ray Brower lying alone in the bog, his arms flopped out as if to welcome the sunshine, with bluebottles circling and the gassy smell of decay rising from him. The body is later reported to the authorities by an anonymous phone call, almost certainly made by Ace Merrill.

Symbolic Significance

Ray Brower's corpse is the story's central symbol of mortality and the loss of childhood innocence. For Gordon Lachance, the sight of the body—particularly the distance between the boy's bare feet and his Keds hanging in the bushes—drives home the finality of death: "The kid was dead; stone dead. The kid was never going to go out bottling with his friends in the spring... The kid was can't, don't, won't, never, shouldn't, wouldn't, couldn't." The body becomes a contested prize, fought over by two groups of boys, and its discovery marks a rite of passage that separates the friends: Chris Chambers, Teddy Duchamp, and Vern Tessio all die young, while Gordon Lachance becomes a writer. The image of the body—the pale hand, the ants, the hailstones in the eyes—haunts Gordon's dreams and his writing, appearing in his story "Stud City" and in his reflections on mortality. The missing blueberry bucket that Ray Brower was carrying when he disappeared becomes a symbol of the lost boy and the unanswerable questions about his final hours. Gordon imagines finding it years later, holding it in his hands, and trying to understand the suns that shone on it, the rains that fell on it, and the snows that covered it—a way of connecting with the boy he once was and the boy who died.