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Chapter 15
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Old God’s Time, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Memory
Grief and Ghosts
Abuse of Institutional Power
Personal Trauma vs. Collective Trauma
Summary
Analysis
Tom delves further into the memories he suppressed, thinking of Winnie. After June’s death, Winnie moved mechanically through life, only barely graduating from law school. Upon visiting her apartment, Tom saw bottles and, later, a needle; Winnie told him that it belonged to a diabetic friend, and Tom chose to believe it until others convinced him that she was a heroin addict. Tom staged an intervention where he told Winnie that he’d cut her off unless she went to rehab. After a huge fight, Winnie acquiesced and entered treatment for a month. She was clean for a few months but died after relapsing. Fleming did what he could to support Tom, who understood Winnie’s death even less than he’d understood June’s. Tom imagines how it must’ve felt for Fleming to bring Tom onto the case given his past.
The revelation of Winnie’s death is striking in that it contrasts significantly with the cheery persona Tom has remembered her as having throughout the novel. The most likely reason for this is not that Tom is misremembering Winnie, but that he has chosen to remember the version of her that existed before June’s death devastated her life. Her difficult addiction and her eventual death from it serves as an example of how radically trauma can change—and ultimately destroy—even the most lighthearted person.
Themes
Tom then thinks of Joe, who wrote Tom long and detailed letters from Albuquerque. Curiously, Joe never wrote about a romantic partner, which saddened Tom. In Albuquerque, Joe worked as a doctor on the Zuni reservation. Joe loved serving the Zuni community despite their problems. However, Tom eventually received news that Joe was dead. When he travelled to America to claim his body, the sheriff told him that Joe had been murdered by a father who blamed Joe for the death of his son. The man had immediately become remorseful and turned himself in, which upset Tom since it made him easier for him to sympathize with the man. Tom brought Joe’s body home and put his Scott Medal in the ashes. Since Joe’s death, Tom’s life has moved mechanically and uneventfully—until Wilson and O’Casey showed up at his door.
Joe’s death and Tom’s response to it once again raises the question of what it means to be a murderer. Tom’s frustration at his empathy for Joe’s murderer reflects how Tom himself understands the desire to murder someone in order to avenge a loved one since, although he did not kill Matthews himself, he aided and abetted it. The fact that Joe was murdered due to a father’s love, then, highlights the novel’s suggestion that vengeful murder often breeds more pain—which is also supported by June’s ultimate suicide despite her murder of Matthews.
Themes
