The Ballad of Sara and Thor: A Novella

By Andrew McCarron

What do you do, moving through the fraught transition into adulthood, when the only unified world you’ve ever known breaks apart and you have to do something magical and quick before its fragments vanish forever?  Composed as a novella, The Ballad of Sara and Thor is at once a morality tale, murder story, and psychological true-detective exploration of the motivations and implications behind the violent death of a beautiful young woman. Set on the outskirts of a picturesque liberal arts college, Andrew McCarron recounts the unsettling realities of a teen romance that takes an irredeemable turn into darkness, confusion, and horror—and a college community’s attempt to make sense of the event, in order to bury it and move on, and this writer’s reckoning with the unspeakable, in order to bear witness.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barrytown/Station Hill Press, Inc.
• Release date: Nov 20, 2017
• ISBN: 9781581771664

Book preview

THOR

1

Thor Wilson murdered Sara James. It happened at dusk on a beautifully crisp Saturday in September at the beginning of the millennium. Of that much I’m sure. As for many of the events that led up to the murder, and of what happened afterward, I know significantly less. But I do know that Thor cut Sara’s throat open with a large camping knife, because I was there when it happened.

A group of us had gathered at my apartment for a dinner of pasta, salad, and garlic bread that I was preparing. A friend and I were renting the second floor of a rectory adjacent to a small Episcopal church, Saint Bartholomew’s. It was located on a winding country road with magnificent views of a mountain range across the river that ran through the region. The parish lacked money, or even a fulltime priest, and so they rented out both floors of its rectory to cover expenses. Assembled on that evening were my girlfriend Chloe, my roommate Darrel, a friend of his named Julie, who was visiting from California, and my best friend Tony, who’d been sleeping on the couch for several weeks. Aside from Julie, we had all recently attended, or were attending, a picturesque liberal arts college located in a corner of New York State known for its scenic beauty.

Tony had spent the afternoon with Thor and Sara walking around a street fair in a nearby town, and had left them in the gravel parking lot behind the rectory so that the couple could talk privately. He turned the corner of the house and climbed up the front stairs to the apartment, announcing as he entered that Thor and Sara were hashing things out in the parking lot and would be there shortly. I looked up from the kitchen table where I was mincing garlic and enthusiastically pumped my fist. Having not seen Thor since the previous winter, I was delighted to hear that he’d arrived out of the blue, driving in from God-knows-where, as if in a chapter from On the Road—a book we all revered, using it as a manual for how life should be.

My first memory of Thor was four years earlier, when he sat next to me in my freshman dorm room and talked about how he’d recently gotten stoned and listened to Neil Young’s Sugar Mountain. It’s the chorus, he explained thoughtfully, before even telling me his name or asking for mine. "‘You can’t be twenty on Sugar Mountain, though you’re thinking that you’re leaving there too soon, you’re leaving there too soon.’ It’s too soon. It really is. Everything’s moving so fast. None of us are kids anymore."

Hearing him say this was more jarring than I cared to admit, because I was secretly terrified of leaving the securities of childhood, and even cried myself to sleep my first night away from home. The world felt like a dangerous and uncertain place, and I instinctively knew that I was green enough to be done in by it.

A few weeks later, Thor and I bumped into one another in the dining commons. We reintroduced ourselves and talked. It was during this conversation that I learned a little about him. Casual friendships come in many forms. Some plod along and then undergo a quick spike of familiarity. Others start out at a high watermark and then level off, or evaporate altogether. From then on, Thor and I would know each other, but never all that well. Still, somehow, I feel that I knew him well enough to tell this story. There were similarities between us. We’d been raised by loving parents in the Northeast, had become enamored of Kerouac and Ginsberg as teenagers, and entered college with hopes of finding fellow travelers.

2

Thor was a film major from the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont, and had that ruggedly handsome look shared by several guys I’ve known from there. Strong brown eyes accentuated his chiseled facial features. His straight brown hair fell below his shoulders. He dressed in white T-shirts, Birkenstock sandals, and beige Carhartt workpants that had a hammer loop beneath the right front pocket. In winter he’d add a wool sweater, scarf, insulated hiking boots, and a fuzzy hand-knit cap with snowflakes on the sides.

Unlike many of his suburban buddies, Thor was ripped with utilizable brawn. He had the shoulders and chest of someone who’d spent childhood and adolescence hauling wood, and was an accomplished acrobat, capable of spontaneous cartwheels, handstands or the scaling of enormous trees. But he was only 5′10′ and maybe 185 pounds, so Thor didn’t come across as particularly big.

During the warmer months, there were camping trips in the mountains and skinny-dipping in a waterfall on the outskirts of campus. He’d occasionally bring along his 16-millimeter camera and take impressionistic sequences of water cascading over the rocks, sunlight glittering through leaves, or the beaming faces of his friends. Thor had only an occasional interest in reading, preferring to spend time turning on, strumming his guitar, or hanging out with friends listening to CDs of The Grateful Dead, Phish, and Classic Rock from the sixties and seventies: The Rolling Stones, The Doors, Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan, Pink Floyd. Sometimes there’d be magic mushrooms or maybe pot brownies, and loads of laughing and absurdist antics. But whether lit or sober, his behavior was zany and kind. He was a good guy, someone who people