Different Seasons

The boys stop for a rest, and Gordie tells the other boys a story that he made up about Davie Hogan, a large boy who is bullied and tormented until he decides to get revenge. The revenge takes place during Pioneer Days, a town festival, which ends with a pie-eating contest. Davie drinks an entire bottle of castor oil before the contest, then hoovers his way through five pies before the castor oil takes effect, and he vomits all over the nearest competitor. Then the vomiting reflex spreads through the entire crowd, and Davie goes home triumphant. The boys are disappointed that the story ends there without a real conclusion. Gordie suggests that Davie’s dad probably came home and gave him a beating, and the kids at school kept right on teasing him. Teddy suggests that a better ending would be for Davie to shoot his family and run away to join the Army Rangers.

The boys get up and start walking again. Chris asks Gordie if he is going to write down the Davie story. Chris expresses some awe for the way stories seem to pop out of Gordie’s head like soap bubbles. He says that Gordie is going to be a great writer someday. Chris tells Gordie that their gang will break up by the end of the new school year. Gordie will be in college prep courses, while the other three will be in vocational classes, and they will drift apart. Gordie protests. He says that he won’t take pre-college courses. Chris tells him not to be stupid. Chris won’t let him throw away his gifts.

Chris’s eyes look bleak and dead when he tells Gordie that Chris knows what people think of his family—all criminals and losers—and they see Chris as just another loser, like the time everyone assumed that he took the classroom milk money. Chris admits that he took the money, but afterwards, he felt guilty and tried to give it back. He gave it to the teacher, and she took it and used it to buy herself a new skirt and never told anyone that Chris had returned it. Chris couldn’t tell anyone because no one would believe him over a teacher, and if it had been any other kid, the teacher wouldn’t have taken advantage of him.

Gordie realizes that Chris is about to cry. He suggests that Chris take the college courses in high school. Chris scoffs at the idea. The administrators make all those decisions anyway. Maybe he’ll try, he thinks, but he doesn’t know if he can because his friends might hold him back. He points to Vern and Teddy. He tells Gordie that friends are like drowning people, clinging to your legs; you can’t save them. All you can do is drown with them. Chris then runs to catch up to the other boys.

They decide to camp for the night in the woods. Gordie wakes in the middle of the night to find himself huddled with the other boys in their blankets. Chris is sitting up, listening to something. Then they hear a scream in the night. The terrified boys argue about whether the sound is a bird, a mountain lion, or a woman. Eventually, the boys decide to take turns watching while the others sleep. Gordie dreams of Vern and Teddy’s bloated corpses dragging Chris underwater, and instead of helping him, Gordie flees.

Gordie has the last watch. He watches the sunrise, and as he is about to turn and go back to the camp, he sees a doe standing no more than 10 yards away. They look at each other, and Gordie is stunned by a sense of momentousness. Gordie never tells anyone else about that encounter. He remembers it as the cleanest part of the trip, and he goes back to it whenever there is trouble in his life.

The boys resume their journey. After walking for a few hours in the heat, they come to a pond formed behind a beaver dam. Hot and tired, the boys go for a swim. The pond turns out to be full of leeches, and the boys scream and dance, brushing the leeches off themselves and each other. Gordie looks down and sees a leech clinging to his testicles.

The older Gordie looks back at that long, hot day and wonders if their fates might have been different had they done the sensible thing and hitchhiked instead of walking. Maybe Chris, Teddy, and Vern wouldn’t have died young—never having flipped those coins and turned up all tails. On second thought, the older Gordie knows that they would never have done that. It would have seemed wrong.

The older Gordie pauses to tell the reader that the older boys who first found the body—Vern’s brother Billy and his friends—are coming back to see it again, and they are driving around by the roads just as the four questers are drawing close. By mid-afternoon, clouds are beginning to gather and lightning begins to strike.

A moment later, Vern spots the body. At first, all that Gordie sees is a hand. Then the rain finally begins. They approach the body of Ray and turn it over. Gordie is struck with the utter negative of death, the nevermore of it. Ray will never get up, never touch anything, smell anything, experience anything ever again. Gordie thinks that death seems like the most unnatural thing in the world.

As they contemplate the death of a boy their own age, Vern’s brother, Billy, arrives with his friends, including Chris’s older brother. The two groups of boys argue over who is going to have the glory of reporting finding the body, and Gordie is determined that the prize that they have earned won’t be taken from them.

As the older boys are bearing down on Gordie and his friends, Chris takes the gun from his backpack and fires a warning shot. The storm redoubles, and Vern and Teddy flee, but Gordie stands firm with Chris as Chris threatens to shoot the older boys. The older boys finally back off, promising that they’ll get back at the younger boys someday soon.

Vern and Teddy come back, and the boys head back toward home. As they walk, Gordie thinks about some things that bother him about the body; Ray’s face is bruised as if he was in a fight, but he doesn’t look as if he was hurt badly by the train. Also, he had supposedly been out picking berries, but his berrying pail is nowhere to be seen. The older Gordie wonders what happened to it and often thinks of going back and looking for it. He also wonders if maybe Ray had gotten lost, been hit a glancing blow by the train and died slowly.

The boys get home but don’t report finding the body. The older boys—Vern’s brother and his friends—make an anonymous report. None of the parents ever find out about the boys’ adventure. Several weeks later, the bigger boys track down Gordie and his friends one at a time and beat them up.

Over time, Vern and Teddy drift away from the group and find a new set of friends—younger boys whom they can lord it over. Many years later, Vern dies in a housefire, and Teddy dies in a car crash. Gordie believes that they may have forgotten the entire adventure.

Chris enrolls in the same pre-college courses that Gordie takes, and Gordie helps him to study. After graduation, Chris enrolls in pre-law at the University of Maine. Chris never becomes a lawyer. He steps between two fighting men, trying to make peace between them, and is stabbed, dying almost instantly. When Gordie hears the news, he drives to a solitary place and cries alone.

Gordie becomes a successful author—just as Chris predicted—but the writing isn’t as much fun as it used to be, and he sometimes wonders what the point of a life is spent playing “let’s pretend”. One day, he sees Ace, one of the older boys—now in his fifties—who “cheated” by driving out to the body. Ace is living a meaningless life between his job at the mill and his stool at the local bar. Gordie reflects that the Castle river is still running, and Gordie is still here as well.