Old God’s Time: Chapter 5 Summary & Analysis

That night, Tom lies in bed and thinks about how he’s aged. He then reminisces about his family. He thinks first of his son Joseph, who immigrated to Albuquerque in 1991 and whom Tom saw off at the airport. Then he thinks about his time with June in Deansgrange, where he first began to notice her slipping away from him. In his memories of this time, June is distant and often disappeared for hours at a time with no way for Tom to communicate with her. One of Tom’s colleagues, Billy Drury, suggested that June had the “housewife blues,” but Tom didn’t believe this since June was still dutifully tending to the children.

Tom recounts earlier memories of meeting June. At the time, she was a waitress at the Wimpy café, where Tom and Billy went after trying to solve a murder of a woman left in a graveyard with her hands cut off (they never solved the case). Tom and June immediately hit it off, even though they told each other very little about themselves. One day, they walked through town together on something of a first date, watching the fishermen work. On another later day, they walked a long way to a sea-field and had sex for the first time in a hollow. Tom believes this is when they conceived Winnie. In the present, Tom lies in bed weeping at the memory.

Tom thinks about how, despite his love for June, she was unknown to him for a long while, much like the murdered girl. June was also unknown to herself, as she was raised in an orphanage and the nuns told her nothing of her mother. She was only able to obtain a photo of her mother by sneaking into the office and finding it in a folder that was otherwise empty. Tom also thinks of June’s primary guardian, Mrs. Carr, whom June allowed to attend their wedding and remain a presence in their life despite being vindictive and unpleasant. June only cut ties with the woman once she suggested that Tom was not Winnie and Joseph’s father.

In another memory about a month after Tom and June started seeing each other, Tom underwent a long and difficult train ride to see her in the evening—something he’d done nearly every day since they’d begun going out. It was raining when he met June on the platform, so they took shelter under a stone arch. She told him that she didn’t know who she was, and that there was no person for him to marry. They hadn’t discussed marriage at all, but Tom realized he would marry her if she asked. She told him the story of getting her mother’s photo; Tom responded with stories of his own past and affirmed his willingness to marry her. However, he sensed that June was still holding something back from him. In the present, Tom wonders what the meaning of his life has been and realizes it’s his family—but especially June.