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Chapter 1. Beth: The Town
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Catching Teller Crow, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Trauma and Grief
Abuse of Power, Racism, and the Law
Storytelling and Truth
Time
Female Friendship
Summary
Analysis
Beth and her dad visit the ruins of the children’s home, well outside of town. When Beth sees a crow perching on the ruins, she waves—and the crow flies away. She wonders whether her wave caused the crow to leave: one of her science teachers once told her that “correlation does not imply causation,” but her dad says that if two events happen one after another, detectives assume that the first event caused the second unless someone proves otherwise.
Here Beth contrasts scientists’ and detectives’ storytelling, two very different modes of processing information about the world. In scientific storytelling, “correlation does not imply causation:” just because Beth waved and then the crow flew away, the storyteller can’t assume that Beth’s wave caused the crow to fly away. By contrast, detectives do tend to assume causal relationships between events that occur in sequence: if Beth waved and then the crow flew away, the crow probably flew away because Beth waved. Beth’s focus on different modes of processing information here suggests that storytelling will be important to the novel. Her focus on the crow also foreshadows the bird’s possible importance.
Themes
Beth’s dad isn’t angry anymore. In fact, Beth knows he was angry about her death before, not angry at her. When Beth thinks about the random injustice of her death, she gets angry too—but she avoids thinking about that in favor of taking care of her dad. Seeing that he’s “frustrated” by the crime scene, she asks why the home was built so far from town. He explains that the home used to be a rich family’s private house.
Injustice makes Beth’s dad angry—which suggests that he became a detective to serve justice, perhaps even to make up for his own police officer father’s unjust treatment of Aboriginal people. Meanwhile, Beth is repressing her own anger about her death on her father’s behalf, hinting that her decision to haunt him may be psychologically unhealthy for her as well as for him.
Themes
Beth’s dad shows her a photo of the house taken a couple weeks before the fire. In the photo, 10 or so children are smiling unconvincingly in front of the house, while three adults stand nearby. Beth asks whether one man in the photo—skinny and pallid with glasses—was the children’s home’s nurse. Beth’s dad says that the man is Alexander Sholt, who donated the house and a lot of money for the children’s home.
Government workers presumably placed the children in the home because the children’s parents either died or were accused of abuse or neglect. As such, the children may have personal reasons to be unhappy. Yet their faked smiles may hint that the home itself is unpleasant in ways that they, as powerless wards of the state, can’t do anything about.
Themes
Beth’s dad points out the nurse, a tall man with unkempt hair, and the home’s director, a short man with a beard. When Beth asks what their jobs entailed, her dad explains that the nurse handled the children’s health, while the director gave the children classes and handled the home’s operations. He says the men were trying to improve the children’s lives; noting his melancholy, Beth thinks that her dad can’t help the person who died anymore, but he can find out the truth about his death.
The thought that the director and nurse died while trying to help children saddens Beth’s dad, emphasizing that he likely entered law enforcement to pursue justice and help people. Beth seems to believe that even in situations where he can’t help people, finding the truth—figuring out the home’s story, as it were—may improve his mood. This suggests that the truth is a good thing in itself, even when it can’t tangibly help people anymore.
Themes
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Beth and Beth’s dad review the facts of the case. The fire started at approximately 10 p.m. one night. The children claimed they left the house before the fire alarm sounded because “the wind” warned them to flee, but Beth’s dad suspects they’re lying: they might have been up past curfew and seen the fire before the alarm. When Beth asks whether they might have something to conceal, Beth’s dad says that troubled children often avoid “speaking to people in authority about anything” regardless. He notes that the children were from the city and wonders whether it was a good idea to send them far away from their families.
Beth’s dad dismisses the idea that “the wind” could have warned the children, showing that he is resistant to believing fantastical stories—even though he can see his daughter’s ghost. His worry that the children were sent too far away from their families suggest that government programs can sometimes hurt the people they are supposed to help, and his nonjudgmental description of troubled children who won’t “speak[] to people in authority” implies that children sometimes have good reason not to want to interact with police officers.
Themes
Beth asks why the nurse didn’t flee. Her dad speculates that the nurse might have died or been knocked out before the alarm. Beth suggests the director did it—but her dad says it’s more likely that the fire caused both the nurse’s death and the director’s disappearance. Maybe the director ran out into the wilderness and got lost. Beth asks why the search teams haven’t found him, then, the way they found “that girl who was wandering around” the area. She suggests they go interview the girl.
Beth and her dad spin different stories that fit the available facts about the case as a way of trying to figure out what really happened. This activity shows how telling stories can be a method of discovering the truth, not just a way of recounting a truth a person already knows or a way of inventing falsehoods.
Themes
Beth’s dad implies that the girl is an unreliable witness but won’t say why. Beth impatiently reveals that she knows the girl had drugs in her system and makes a joke about not having done “many” drugs herself. Beth and her dad laugh—until he stops abruptly. Beth, sure he’s going to say he misses her again, wishes he could grieve more like Aunty June, who tells funny stories about Beth to Beth’s cousins and encourages them to grieve with laughter as well as tears. Beth, marching to the car, tells her dad to come interview the witness.
Beth contrasts her dad’s unrelenting misery at her death with her Aunty June’s attempts to remember Beth happily. Beth’s obvious preference for Aunty June’s more balanced style of grieving implies that her father’s misery makes Beth feel trapped in misery too. On the other hand, Beth and her dad’s laughter over her joke about not doing too “many” drugs shows readers what their relationship might have been like before grief overshadowed it.
Themes
