'You don't count the cost, Hilly,' his father said on that occasion. He would say it a good many times before Sunday, July 17th, 1988.
At the age of five, Hilly got on his sled and shot down the ice-coated Brown driveway one December day and out into the road. It never occurred to him, he told his ashy-faced mother later, to wonder if something might be coming down Derry Road; he had gotten up, seen the glaze of ice that had fallen, and had only wondered how fast his Flexible Flyer would go down their driveway. Marie saw him, saw the fuel tanker lumbering down Route 9, and shrieked Hilly's name so loudly that she could barely talk above a whisper for the next two days. That night, trembling in Bryant's arms, she told him she had seen the boy's tombstone in Homeland - had actually seen it: Hillman Richard Brown, 1978-1983, Taken Too Soon.
'Hiiillyyyyyyyy!'
Hilly's head snapped around at the sound of his mother's scream, which sounded to him as loud as a jet plane. As a result, he fell off his sled just before it reached the foot of the driveway. The driveway was asphalted, the glaze of sleet was really quite thin, and Hilly Brown never had that knack with which a kind God blesses most squirmy, active children - the knack of failing lucky. He broke his left arm just above the elbow and fetched his forehead such a dreadful crack that he knocked himself out.
His Flexible Flyer shot into the road. The driver of the Webber Fuel truck reacted before he had a chance to see there was no one on the sled. He spun the wheel and the tanker-truck waltzed into a low embankment of snow with the huge grace of the elephant ballet dancers in Fantasia. It crashed through and landed in the ditch, canted alarmingly to one side. Less than five minutes after the driver wriggled out of the passenger door and ran to Marie Brown, the truck tipped over on its side and lay in the frozen grass like a dead mastodon, expensive No. 2 fuel oil gurgling out of its three overflow vents.
Marie was running down the road with her unconscious child in her arms, screaming. In her terror and confusion she felt sure that Hilly must have been run over, even though she had quite clearly seen him fall off his sled at the bottom of the driveway.
'Is he dead?' the tanker driver screamed. His eyes were wide, his face pale as paper, his hair standing on end. There was a dark spot spreading on the crotch of his pants. 'Oh sufferin' Jesus, lady, is he dead?'
I think so,' Marie wept. 'I think he is, oh I think he's dead.'
Who's dead?' Hilly asked, opening his eyes.
'Oh, Hilly, thank God!' Marie screamed, and hugged him. Hilly screamed back with great enthusiasm. She was grinding together the splintered ends of the broken bone in his left arm.
Hilly spent the next three days in Derry Home Hospital.
'It'll slow him down, at least,' Bryant Brown said the next evening over a dinner of baked beans and hot dogs.
Ev Hillman happened to be taking dinner with them that evening; since his wife had died, Ev Hillman did that every now and again; about five evenings out of every seven on the average. 'Want to bet?' Ev said now, cackling through a mouthful of cornbread.
Bryant cocked a sour eye at his father-in-law and said nothing.
As usual, Ev was right - that was one of the reasons Bryant so often felt sour about him. On his second night in the hospital, long after the other children in Pediatrics were asleep, Hilly decided to go exploring. How he got past the duty nurse was a mystery, but get past he did. He was discovered missing at three in the morning. An initial search of the pediatrics ward did not turn him up. Neither did a floor-wide search. Security was called in. A search of the whole hospital was then mounted - administrators who had at first only been mildly annoyed were now becoming worried - and discovered nothing. Hilly's father and mother were called and came in at once, looking shell-shocked. Marie was weeping, but because of her swollen larynx, she could only do so in a breathy croak.
'We think he may have wandered out of the building somehow,' the Head of Administrative Services told them.