Missives From Troy

When he got lost the first time, nobody panicked. There was a general sense of disquiet, of course, and a small search party of four or five people checked behind doors and in out-of-the-way rooms for him. He wandered back in on his own, leaves in his golden hair and a silly sort of smile where his explanation should have been. He got off without so much as a half-hearted scolding and that was reasonably assumed to be that.

It was on the occasion of his sixth disappearance, of some nine days’ duration, that the reaction began to border on something like a general panic.

“He’s a good boy,” his mother would say, worrying a faded tea towel between her thin fingers. “I don’t know what’s come over him to act this way.”

Doctors were summoned and specialists in the field of brain function and psychiatry were seen, but the young man still wandered.

He traveled to foreign fields and distant cities, through towns where no one knew his name or even spoke his native tongue. And yet, he smiled and brought back strange souvenirs and talk enough to fill his mother’s kitchen with concerned neighbors and churchmen.

“That boy’s gone a bit odd,” they’d say. “Caroline, you’ve got to do something about that boy of yours.”

They fit him with heavy boots and showed him all the best bits of folly on the screen, but they found that he would read when he couldn’t walk and at night, when they removed the boots for bed, he found ways to wander right from his pillow.

The doctors and the specialists and the neighbors and the churchmen and his mother told the mayor, “Lock the gates and burn the books!” For some came to speak to the young man about his wanderings and to hear where he had gone and to see his strange souvenirs and smiles, and a look of wandering had come into the eyes of the other young folk in the town. The doctors and the specialists and the neighbors and the churchmen and the mothers were much concerned that the young man’s wanderings would fester and spread in the town to the others who had not wandered of their own initiative.

The mayor heard the concerns of his townspeople and saw the need to keep them from wanderings to other places where there were strange souvenirs and different sorts of words in different sorts of mouths. So the mayor locked the gates and the doctors and the specialists and the neighbors and the churchmen and the mothers went home and slept in their beds.

And while they did so, the wanderers slipped their heavy boots and left the town through the gates which could not be locked and were never seen again.