Published September 20, 2005
The farmer’s widow did sell the land. And who could blame her after what happened there? After it was sold, the property sat for a while, as if no one wanted to be the one to break ground, to knock down the farmhouse and the manager’s cottage and the outbuildings, to mow down the grove of trees in back of the house. But eventually someone did. They built condos on the site.
Someone lives there now, in the exact spot where Davy was last seen. I can’t imagine who would want to. But so many people have come along since then, strangers who aren’t familiar with what happened or who don’t want to know. The people who live there probably don’t know the first thing about my brother, that his last happy moments on earth likely took place in the spot where they now scramble eggs or wash clothes or watch TV. They don’t know that their lives are going on in the very place a little boy’s life was cut short.
How can I say that, you ask? Put it out there like that, that my brother is dead? Well, if he wasn’t, he would have come back to us by now. It is that simple. There is nothing that would keep him from us except death. I know that. My mother knows that. As do my father and my sister. Though we would never say it aloud, we have accepted Davy’s death deep inside ourselves. It is not something we know in our brains; it is something we feel in our bones.
My brother was taken from the spot where a condominium now stands. Whoever took him killed him hours or days after he was taken. And now he is waiting for us to find him, waiting for us to bring him home.