Shiloh Summary & Analysis

Norma Jean’s skeptical and dismissive reaction to Leroy’s log cabin idea illustrates that she no longer takes her husband seriously. Even when he wants to prove that he’s still capable of providing for them and bringing them closer together, she has no patience for his feelings. This illustrates how estranged he and Norma Jean really are. Leroy knows that his house doesn’t feel like a home, but he foolishly believes that he can fix this by building a new house. Of course, what’s wrong with his marriage (and what makes his current house feel not very homey) has nothing to do with the house itself—it’s an issue of emotional intimacy. But as long as Leroy fixates on building the log cabin and refuses to talk with Norma Jean about his feelings and their past, they have no hope of reconciling. Norma Jean perhaps knows this, and when she says that the log cabin would be out-of-place in town (presumably because it’s too antiquated for the new suburban developments), she’s also hinting at the fact that Leroy’s idea of their marriage is antiquated and out-of-place, too. He promised her 15 years ago that he would build them a house, but keeping that promise now is meaningless—the promise is a relic of the past when they could still see a future together, which is as outdated as a log cabin itself.

Norma Jean is now the family’s breadwinner, an embarrassing and emasculating fact for Leroy. And while Norma Jean seems to be leaning away from their marriage by getting more involved at work, Leroy wants desperately to see this as a sign that they’re still connected, trying foolishly to suggest that because skin creams and truck fuel are both made from petroleum, he and Norma Jean actually have more in common than it seems. Nonetheless, Leroy knows that something is deeply wrong; Norma Jean doesn’t want him around, and there’s no easy explanation for it since she doesn’t seem to be cheating. The notion that it would “startle” her to find Leroy at home suggests a root cause: that she’s gotten used to living without him. Norma Jean has changed over the years, and there’s no longer a clear place for Leroy in her life.

This passage reveals a major piece of Leroy and Norma Jean’s shared past: the loss of their child 15 years ago. The casual revelation of this tragedy, coupled with Leroy’s insistence that their marriage has survived it, suggests that they’ve moved on from losing Randy. But the fact that they never speak about him—and that this silence makes things awkward between them—shows that they actually haven’t moved on. In particular, their inability to speak openly about their shared loss shows how estranged they’ve become in their grief—when two people are unable to grieve a major loss together (let alone even bring it up in conversation), it erodes things between them, sometimes irreparably. But Leroy is overconfident in his marriage and he’s in denial about his grief. In fact, he thinks that he can fix things with Norma Jean not by finally digging into their loss, but by glossing over it altogether. When he says he feels like they’re waking up from a dream, he frames the last 15 years (losing Randy and then being apart because of his trucking job) as not having really happened, and when he says that now they can “start afresh,” he’s suggesting that they could restart their marriage from the beginning, before tragedy and estrangement changed them. Obviously, though, they can’t erase their shared past and Leroy is being foolish.

It’s significant that Leroy buys Norma Jean a gift that she would have loved when they were in high school. He idealizes the early days of their romance and he wants to start their relationship over by returning to what they had at that time. So here, he’s using the organ to try to transport them back to high school. Of course, that doesn’t work; while Norma Jean still loves music, her taste has changed, showing how different she is from the person Leroy married. Norma Jean’s relationship to the songs of the sixties is telling. The story is set in the late 1970s or early 80s, so the 1960s is the decade when they fell in love. While Leroy would like Norma Jean to remember the 1960s fondly and even return to who she was and how she felt then, she has different feelings entirely: she feels like she missed out during the 60s. Leroy ignores the implications of this: that returning to their past wouldn’t satisfy her, and she wants to do her life differently. Instead, he takes false comfort in this moment, feeling like he’s “finally settling down” with his wife—even though 15 years have passed since they got married.

Since returning to live at home full-time, Leroy has told himself that he can fix what’s wrong with his life by pretending that the past 15 years didn’t happen and starting over as though he and Norma Jean were still 18. But the town he has returned to is completely different than the one he left when he started trucking. What’s more is that he didn’t notice any of these changes while they were happening because he was home so infrequently and he was so distracted by trucking, but now the changes are impossible to ignore. This is parallel to his relationship with Norma Jean, in which he didn’t notice her changing for 15 years and now he feels disconcerted to return home to find someone who feels like a stranger.

Leroy is seemingly smoking marijuana as part of his pain management—but his new pot habit could also be another way in which he is trying to live in denial and return to the past, both by associating with teenagers (since he’s so nostalgic for high school) and by regularly taking a drug that blurs his thinking and distracts him from his failing marriage. When Leroy tells Stevie about his log cabin idea and Stevie reacts without interest, the story continues to show how odd Leroy’s fixation on the log cabin is—and, by extension, how doomed his desire to return to the past is. 

This passage introduces yet another aspect of Leroy’s fascination with the past. Not only is Stevie the son of someone Leroy went to high school with (and thus, to Leroy, part of recreating his own youth)—Stevie is also roughly the same age as Leroy and Norma Jean’s dead son would be, which makes Leroy feel fatherly toward Stevie. Again, this passage illustrates how Leroy continues looking for people and experiences that will connect him more firmly to his past while still allowing him to gloss over the more painful parts of his loss. In having a relationship with Stevie—even if it’s just drug dealer and client relationship—Leroy can feel a low-stakes connection to both the person he himself used to be and the son he never got to know.

The way that Leroy recalls Randy’s death is fairly detached from emotion; he recounts the details of the night, but he does not convey how he feels or felt about any of it. This further suggests that Leroy hasn’t really processed his grief over Randy—he’s simply repressed it for 15 years. The tiles of the movies that they were watching when Randy died are somewhat prophetic: “Dr. Strangelove” suggests that Leroy and Norma Jean’s love is soon to be estranged, and “Lover Come Back” foreshadows how Leroy and Norma Jean grew apart and now Leroy wants to reconcile.

This passage continues to explore Leroy’s puzzling emotional response—or lack thereof—to his infant son’s death. He seems to acknowledge the strangeness of remembering superficial details from that evening while forgetting almost everything about Randy. This passage is also significant because it clearly points to the root of their estrangement: Randy’s death. After all, in this moment in the hospital, Leroy suddenly feels that Norma Jean is a stranger or a person whom he has forgotten. It seems that their shock and grief have driven them apart, stranding them both in private experiences of grief that they never share. Now, in the present, Leroy laments that there are no answers to anything, which reflects his sense of powerlessness and his unwillingness to grapple with the past. Saying that there is no answer to what happened to Randy (or, implicitly, to what happened between him and Norma Jean) absolves him of the responsibility of figuring it out and fixing his marriage.

Leroy feels a sense of animosity toward Mabel, and while the feeling is apparently mutual, Mabel’s criticisms seem to be more pointed at Norma Jean than at Leroy. Mabel is disappointed with the way Norma Jean has started letting household chores (such as watering the plants and doing the laundry) fall by the wayside. These criticisms can be seen as a larger critique of Norma Jean’s shifting role in their marriage; Mabel seems to suggest that Norma Jean should return to her domestic role and stop hoping that Leroy will pick up the slack.

Leroy’s comment that now that they have a dust ruffle they can hide things under the bed is both a joke and a metaphor: Leroy has dealt with the tragedy of losing Randy by hiding it under the bed (in other words, by refusing to talk about it and pretending it didn’t happen). Furthermore, the fact that he can only relate to Mabel through jokes emphasizes his issues with communicating. Leroy has difficulty with speaking openly and honestly about how he feels, so he often resorts to jokes, distraction, or silence. This might be especially true in this context, since Mabel seems so self-centered; of course Leroy wouldn’t want to speak earnestly about himself and his emotions with a mother-in-law who clearly thinks that everything—including Norma Jean’s pregnancy and Randy’s death—is about her.

In this passage, as Mabel mocks Leroy’s effeminate new hobbies, Leroy tries repeatedly to assert his masculinity. He does this first by claiming (not very credibly) that famous football players needlepoint, too, which is an attempt to associate his hobby with icons of American masculinity. When this fails, Leroy tries to make himself seem masculine and useful by claiming that he’s going to build them a house. This frames him as a good provider who is physically capable of building something, but Norma Jean immediately shuts him down by pointing out that he’s out of work, which further undercuts his masculinity. This passage makes clear that Leroy is struggling with his new role in life, and also that Mabel has very clear ideas about what women should do and what men should do.

This passage introduces one of the story’s major symbols: the Civil War battlefield in Shiloh, Tennessee. Over the course of the story, Shiloh will develop as a symbol of the dangers of looking toward the past without reckoning with its traumas. Mabel notably does this in how she sees Shiloh—she treats it as a vacation spot that reflects pride and glory in her Southern heritage, but actually it’s the site of a horrific battle that the Confederate army lost. In this way, Mabel is seeing history through rose-colored glasses. The association between Shiloh and Mabel’s honeymoon also ties the battlefield to the family’s personal history, suggesting that Mabel sees Shiloh the way that Leroy sees high school: an embodiment of happier times. But neither Mabel nor Leroy grapples fully with everything that has happened since. 

In this passage, Norma Jean further emasculates Leroy. Listing potential jobs calls attention to his unemployment (which already makes him feel insecure), and the types of jobs she lists (ones that are too physical for him to do) calls attention to his disability, making him seem weak. Adding insult to injury, Norma Jean is doing leg exercises while she reads this list of jobs, further drawing a contrast between her physical strength and Leroy’s injured leg. Clearly, she is the dominant one in their relationship now. It’s also noteworthy that Norma Jean comments on the strength of her feet compared to her own parents; she is literally talking about her ability to stand all day, but she’s speaking figuratively about how she has grown strong and independent without having a role model—she did it herself.

Leroy sees his ability to build a log cabin for Norma Jean as the only way forward. He believes it will prove him to be a capable provider and a strong man, and that it will give them a place where they can start their marriage fresh. The log cabin (being a conspicuously antiquated building) symbolizes Leroy’s nostalgia for the past, and it’s significant that Norma Jean is completely uninterested in the log cabin—symbolically, this gets at her lack of interest in revisiting the time, years ago, when they were happily married. Leroy then tries to frame the cabin in terms that might appeal to Norma Jean—that lifting logs will be like lifting weights—but Norma Jean continues doing her exercises on her own and doesn’t answer, showing that she doesn’t need Leroy’s help to create the future that she wants.

In this passage, Leroy reflects on the profound changes he’s noticed within his marriage since being home. Before his accident, when his visits home were rare and short, Norma Jean catered to his every whim. Now, however, she is more concerned with her own life than with making Leroy feel happy and cared for. She can’t even look at him when they are in bed together. Leroy gets the sense that his presence in the house is unwelcome and he’s not sure what to do. He has become so estranged from his wife through their failure to ever discuss anything of consequence that they have become total strangers to each other.

The more Leroy drives around town, the more he sees that he has been away so long and has neglected so much of his life that nothing is familiar to him anymore. On the road, Leroy was focused on living in the moment, and now he’s looking toward the future—but he’s spent so long away that life has begun to pass him by. This culminates in his recognition that a log cabin makes no sense among the grand new houses around his town; his vision of creating the future by revisiting the past can’t work, which bodes ill for his ability to make his house feel like home again. His marriage is in shambles, his sense of stability is gone, and building a simple log cabin is not enough to fix this.

Norma Jean’s intense emotional reaction to her mother catching her smoking is strange. After all, she’s a grown woman in her own home, but her reaction is what one might expect of a teen—someone whose mother’s opinion has real power over their life. Here, it’s clear that anything that makes Norma Jean feel like a teenager again (such as her mom catching her smoking) triggers intense emotions, likely because she went through so much pain at that age when her son died. Norma Jean has no interest in being the person she once was, and anytime Leroy or her mother treats her like a teenager, she is unable to handle her emotions.

Leroy senses Norma Jean’s anger and anxiety, but rather than soothing her by asking her about her feelings, he encourages her to play the piano. This is probably the opposite of what Norma Jean needs, since piano is a hobby she had as a teenager and she’s upset because she doesn’t want to feel like a teen anymore. Leroy, too, retreats into thoughts of the past here in order to avoid having a real conversation with Norma Jean. His admiration of Virgil may have to do with his apparent masculinity; he’s out busting drug dealers while Leroy sits at home smoking weed. Leroy’s fantasy about Virgil breaking into the house and busting him for drugs seems to suggest that Leroy feels some guilt and embarrassment about his shiftlessness or how marijuana use makes him a more detached husband.

Here, Leroy wants to connect with Norma Jean on a serious topic—the state of their marriage—but they’re so estranged that he finds this impossible to bring up. It’s noteworthy, though, that he was able to tell his story to strangers, at least for a while. This shows that something about his relationship with Norma Jean makes him feel particularly uncomfortable talking about his grief—perhaps it’s his guilt that he wasn’t around to help her through her own grief, or perhaps he worries that his emotions would get out of control. After all, even talking to strangers made him feel overly emotional (“whiny,” he says), so it stands to reason that talking to Norma Jean about Randy would make him even more emotional, something he’s clearly not comfortable with. Nonetheless, the fact that he was compulsively telling this story over and over again to strangers shows how deeply his grief has affected him and how poorly he has processed it. And his inability to talk to Norma Jean about their marriage, even though he desperately wants to, shows the same thing. Instead of bringing up the state of their marriage, he asks Norma Jean “Well, what do you think?” This is the same phrase he would use at the end of telling his story to hitchhikers, so when he uses it with Norma Jean, he seems to be hoping that they can skip to the end of the conversation, or that they can talk about their marriage without him first telling the story of his grief. Of course, this isn’t possible—he needs to be emotionally honest with Norma Jean if they’re going to repair their marriage.

Leroy is high, so his thoughts are circular and disconnected here. He seems to wish that Norma Jean were a stranger so that he could talk with her about his life, which subtly points out that it’s their shared history that’s keeping him silent. But in the same moment, he admits that they are effectively strangers to each other anyway—they barely know each other now since it’s been so many years since they talked about anything important or spent meaningful time together. Leroy clearly wants to connect with Norma Jean, but he’s still kidding himself about how to do it. When he imagines connecting with her as a stranger, he’s trying to erase the history between them rather than grappling honestly with their shared pain. Until he can talk honestly about what they have been through, nothing is going to get better between them.

When Mabel places her coffee cup on top of Leroy’s precious blueprints for his dream house, it signals that she—like Norma Jean—has no interest in any of Leroy’s plans or ideas. Mabel didn’t take Leroy’s effeminate new hobbies seriously, so he tried to use the promise of building a log house to convince her to see that he was still useful to Norma Jean and invested in their marriage. Mabel, however, still sees building the log cabin as a silly, worthless pursuit. The story seems to be suggesting that if someone as wrapped up in a false version of the past as Mabel thinks Leroy’s tactic for restarting his marriage is useless, it must really be a ridiculous idea. 

When Mabel brings up a news story about a baby who died, the elephant in the room is clearly Randy. Either Mabel is unimaginably oblivious to this—or, more likely, she means the story to be pointed, an attempt to invoke Randy without directly bringing him up. This is significant because it shows a third character intruding on Norma Jean and Leroy’s unspoken agreement to never discuss the death of their child. Since Mabel is bringing up Randy indirectly, it seems that she knows he’s a taboo subject. But she’s likely tired of the silence surrounding his death; she seems to want to let Leroy and Norma Jean know that even if they’re still refusing to discuss Randy’s death, she herself is not going to forget it. It’s understandable that Mabel would want to be able to talk about Randy, but she’s being very inconsiderate in her approach.

Here, it becomes clear the lengths to which Leroy and Norma Jean will go to not talk about Randy. Admittedly, Mabel’s clumsy (and even cruel) story about a dog eating a baby alive isn’t a good opening for a hard conversation, but in response, Norma Jean literally covers her ears so that she can’t hear what her mother is saying, Leroy tries to shut her up, and then Norma Jean starts the vacuum, presumably to drown out her mother’s words. In this moment, it’s clear to each character that Randy is at the heart of this bizarre interaction, but still nobody mentions him outright, showing the strength of the taboo they have established. When Leroy looks at the window at his idle rig, it seems related to his desire to escape. He used to avoid talking or thinking about Randy by trucking and being away from home, but without that, he’s forced to remain in this uncomfortable situation, unable to shut Mabel up and equally unable to diffuse the situation by naming what it is they’re not talking about.

This is the moment in the story when Norma Jean and Leroy come closest to discussing the death of their son. Norma Jean doesn’t name the subject outright, but it's perfectly clear that she’s upset because she thinks that Mabel’s story was an implicit accusation that Norma Jean and Leroy might have been responsible for Randy’s death. Clearly, in this moment, Norma Jean is hurting and wants to talk openly with Leroy, but he rebuffs her. This is a stark example of why their marriage is failing: Norma Jean needs Leroy’s love and support—she’s practically asking him to comfort her and talk through this with her—and he's too uncomfortable to help. This passage also shows Leroy’s extreme denial. He pretends not to know what Norma Jean is talking about, even though he clearly does, and then he suggests that Mabel didn’t mean what Norma Jean thinks, even though Mabel has been cruel throughout the story and there’s no reason to think that she was oblivious to the effect of her words. Leroy’s denial here is striking, since he recently tried and failed to bring up their marriage, making clear that he wants to have the conversation that Norma Jean is attempting to start. But now, when he’s presented with the opportunity, he seems too cowardly to meet the moment and allow himself to be emotionally vulnerable with his wife.

Even after Norma Jean’s bodybuilding class ends, she continues to do her exercises with purpose and dedication, illustrating her commitment to building her strength, power, and autonomy. Bodybuilding isn’t just a hobby for her—it’s become a way of taking control of her life. Moreover, in signing up for a composition class, Norma Jean is showing that she wants to develop the skill of investigating and articulating her own thoughts, which is just as much a part of becoming her own person as developing her physical strength. When Leroy asks her about her interests, she insists that she’s just trying to keep busy—but it’s clear even to Leroy that Norma Jean isn’t just passing time with these new interests. Sensing no emotional, physical, or financial support coming from her husband, she is finally seeking to live her life on her own terms—she wants to be able to take care of herself completely.

Leroy knows that Norma Jean is slipping away from him, and he has no idea how to connect with her in order to get her back. Rather than embracing her new hobbies and habits, Leroy feels nervous about his wife’s transformation and tries to ignore it as much as possible. However, sometimes he can’t ignore what’s happening, and this passage is one of those moments. When Leroy and Norma Jean sit together at the table, it’s emblematic of what’s happening in their relationship. Norma Jean is doing her homework, focusing intently on improving herself and her life. Meanwhile, Leroy is tinkering with Lincoln Logs—a child’s toy—showing how directionless he is. Of course, Leroy seems to believe that what he’s doing with the Lincoln Logs is preparing to build a full-scale log cabin, but if tinkering with toys at the kitchen table seems to him like preparing for the future, it’s no wonder that he and Norma Jean—who is truly future-oriented—are so ill-matched. It’s delusional that Leroy could build them a log house, just like it’s delusional that he imagines that he and Norma Jean are “sharing something” when they sit together. In fact, he’s correct in his brief moment of lucidity; in this moment, he is losing his wife.

In this passage, Leroy (a person who’s in denial about the past) is seeking advice from Mabel (another person who is adept at denying unpleasant realities). And of course, instead of acknowledging the obvious reality that Leroy and Norma Jean are growing apart irrevocably, Mabel gives a non-response implying that Norma Jean just needs to get used to Leroy being home, suggesting that he can continue to passively wait for their marriage to improve. This is, of course, not great advice, although it fits neatly with both characters’ tendencies towards denial.

Leroy’s half-baked plan to build Norma Jean a log cabin is pretty much his only notion of the future, and here Mabel calls attention to how silly it is. When she tells Leroy that growing up in a log cabin wasn’t easy, she’s symbolically calling attention to the fact that the past isn’t as idyllic as Leroy likes to imagine. Leroy’s plan to build a log cabin parallels his delusion that he and Norma Jean can return to the time fifteen years ago when they were happy newlyweds without ever dealing with all the pain and grief that have happened since.

Since Mabel honeymooned at Shiloh, she sees it as a joyous place suitable for a day trip to restore Norma Jean and Leroy’s marriage. Of course, Shiloh is actually a historic site commemorating a bloody Civil War battle—quite an odd place to recommend in this context, particularly because of the clashing symbolism of trying to restore a union (their marriage) at the site where another union (the United States) further unraveled. This passage helps to develop the story’s tangled sense of history. Mabel is conflating her personal history (that Shiloh is a happy place for her) with Norma Jean and Leroy’s future, assuming that Shiloh will mean the same thing to them, despite the wildly different context. Leroy seems to think that this is plausible; when he notices the resemblance between Mabel and Norma Jean, perhaps he’s hoping that his wife, like her mother, will find Shiloh happy and restorative. This is more evidence of his persistent denial. Norma Jean and her mother are nothing alike. (Although Mabel is a bit like Leroy in the sense that she wishes she could recreate the simplest, sunniest parts of her past without acknowledging what simmered beneath them all along.)

Mabel continues to suggest that a visit to Shiloh would be a “second honeymoon” for Norma Jean and Leroy. This appeals to Leroy because all he wants is to return to being newlyweds—a period of newness and bliss. Norma Jean, however, violently rejects the idea of going on any kind of honeymoon with Leroy. This suggests that she does not want to return to the past at all, even for a short time. Instead of even entertaining the idea of recreating the early days of her marriage, Norma Jean tells Leroy and Mabel that they haven’t seen anything yet—implying that she’s only going to continue growing, changing, and looking toward the future rather than the past.

Mabel’s remarks here are somewhat comical because they’re so divorced from reality; she says that she loves Shiloh for being full of history, but she seems completely unaware of what that history is. Instead of treating Shiloh as a site honoring tens of thousands of dead soldiers, she sees it as a pleasant place for a honeymoon, and instead of acknowledging that it was the site of a devastating Confederate defeat, she sees Shiloh as a symbol of Southern pride. So when she says that she loves Shiloh for being full of history, it’s possible that she actually means that it’s full of her own history, which is the only history that seems to matter to her. Perhaps even more absurdly, she tries to entice Leroy to go to Shiloh by bringing up a historic log cabin there. Until now, Mabel has been completely dismissive of his desire to build Norma Jean a log cabin, which symbolizes his desire to return to a happier time in the past. It’s fitting, then, that Mabel brings up log cabins in the context of Shiloh—this whole passage is about her delusional notion that by simply visiting Shiloh, Norma Jean and Leroy might be able to repair their marriage. This is similar to Leroy’s simplistic desire to fix his marriage by building the log cabin. Both delusions are equally silly and rest on a similar false sense of the past.

While Leroy is desperate to return to their newlywed days by visiting Shiloh, Norma Jean has a much more levelheaded relationship to the past, shown by her lack of interest in taking this nostalgic trip and her commitment to reading her history book. This passage also shows the shift in power in their relationship. When she tells Leroy that his name means “king,” Leroy has to ask whether he’s still the king of the house (the more powerful partner). By flexing her biceps in response, Norma Jean shows that she is now the strong, powerful one. Norma Jean doesn’t say any of this outright, but she doesn’t have to; she’s clearly the one with the upper hand in this interaction. It seems that the weaker Leroy feels, the stronger Norma Jean feels.

When Norma Jean explains the meaning of her own name, she shows how much their roles have changed, particularly in terms of gender. At first, she tells Leroy that Norma Jean was Marilyn Monroe’s real name, suggesting that the name Norma Jean signifies a woman who is traditionally feminine. But then Norma Jean turns the tables and states that her name actually derives from the Norman invaders—a ruthless band of conquerors. Norma Jean wants to remind Leroy of how powerful she is, showing that while his name might mean “king,” she is the conqueror who wins in the end. When she at last agrees to go to Shiloh with Leroy, she says that she’ll only do it if he stops looking at her. In this moment, she’s once again asserting her intellectual and physical power over Leroy—and she’s reminding him that she isn’t concerned with coddling him anymore. 

When Leroy says that he feels like a hitchhiker, he’s invoking something he mentioned earlier in the story: that he used to tell his life story to hitchhikers back when he was driving long hauls. In this situation, Leroy is now in the role of the hitchhiker, and so he seems to expect that the car ride might cause Norma Jean to open up to him. But no matter what Leroy says to her or asks her about, Norma Jean’s answers are terse and perfunctory. She has no interest in sharing herself with Leroy the way he used to share his stories with hitchhikers. Leroy’s implicit belief that maybe all it would take to be close again is him riding in a car with Norma Jean shows how passive and delusional he is. To fix his marriage, he needs to take more active steps than trying to make conversation in the car.

The landscape at Shiloh gives no clues about the violence that happened there during the Civil War—instead, it looks sort of like a normal park. This mirrors the way that Leroy thinks about his own past: he glosses over anything difficult or traumatic. The exchange about the log cabin is particularly significant, because Leroy seems to be realizing for the first time how silly his dreams for the future were. When he planned to fix their marriage by building them a log house, he seemed not to understand that such houses are relics of the past that would be uncomfortable to live in and out of place in contemporary life. But now that he’s seeing an actual log cabin in person—a literal historical relic—he seems embarrassed and apologetic, trying to assure Norma Jean that this isn’t what he meant. Metaphorically, the cabin encapsulates Leroy’s ridiculous notion that if they could return to the time when they were newlyweds, everything would be okay. But in this moment, looking at this artifact of history surrounded by tourists searching for bullet holes, it seems clear that the past can’t simply be brought into the present with all its trauma erased.

Leroy and Norma Jean’s tour of the battleground does not include learning about or acknowledging its history. The clearest example of this is when they buy a Confederate flag souvenir—as though Shiloh were a site of Southern pride—and walk right past the informational film that would have informed them that the Confederacy lost the battle. This is reminiscent of their marriage, in which they’ve spent 15 years avoiding any discussion of the traumas of their past, chief among them the loss of their son. Leroy believes that they’re having a nice time together at Shiloh, even if it’s a little awkward, but just as he isn’t looking at the real history of the place, he’s refusing to see the reality of the situation he’s in with Norma Jean. Her awkwardness here isn’t normal; it’s a sign that she’s about to leave him.

It's ironic that, in this moment, when Leroy thinks they’re on a date trying to save their marriage, he brings up the past. In fact, what he needed to do all along to save his marriage was to be open to discussing the past—but not the history of a battlefield. He needed to bring up their personal history. Here, he’s just deflecting. Norma Jean is perhaps trying to steer him towards a more meaningful topic when she associates Corinth with her parents’ marriage, but her subsequent silence makes it seem like she’s not trying to spark conversation at all—maybe marriage and the past are just what are on her mind.

It is fitting that Norma Jean and Leroy’s marriage ends at Shiloh, a site marked by the rupture of another Union: the United States. Leroy’s stunned reaction, though, points to how thorough his denial has been throughout the story. For Norma Jean to leave him is completely unsurprising—even he has anticipated it in a few brief moments of clarity. But he still seems shocked and, even worse, he still seems to believe that he has a chance to change her mind merely by arguing with her. It’s clear that Leroy has no understanding of who Norma Jean has become and how his behavior has sealed the fate of their marriage.

Norma Jean wants someone who “wanders”—she doesn’t want anyone to be too close to her or to impede the journey she’s on. Leroy, on the other hand, is so incapable of understanding Norma Jean’s thoughts or decisions that he writes them off as “crazy,” not acknowledging that this is something she's clearly thought through rigorously. When Norma Jean says that they’ve already tried starting over, it suggests that she did perhaps see Leroy’s homecoming after his injury as a chance to fix their marriage. But as Norma Jean actually tried to make a fresh start by trying new things and attempting to engage with Leroy about the death of their son, Leroy wasted all his time building models, smoking pot, and questioning Norma Jean’s every move. Norma Jean wanted a real fresh start, whereas Leroy only wanted to waste his time dreaming of a magical reset to their marriage. Now, there’s nothing left for Norma Jean to do but move on.

In this passage, Leroy’s joking remark about Norma Jean only wanting to leave him because of “women’s lib” is meant to undermine her. In fact, it is the changing times and the widespread acceptance of women’s liberation that have allowed Norma Jean to claim ownership of her own life in a new way. But she has put months of hard work into learning about herself and building a new, independent future, and Leroy’s desire to reduce that to a political slogan shows that he’s still unable to take her choices and needs seriously.  Leroy wants to keep Norma Jean as his wife and remind her of who she was in the past. He doesn’t care about the woman Norma Jean is becoming—he’s just desperate to hold onto the woman she once was, or the woman he thought she was.

Here, Norma Jean tries to explain why their marriage can’t work: Leroy is making her feel 18 again, and she can’t handle that emotionally. Of course, she and Leroy lost their son when she was 18, so it seems that Leroy’s presence and his constant pressure on her to relive the glory days of their marriage before they lost their son is backfiring; rather than reminding her of how much she used to love him, it’s an incessant reminder of everything she’s lost since, making her feel like she’s stuck in a devastating part of her life. Mabel’s behavior has also contributed to this—scolding Norma Jean for smoking probably had such a huge emotional effect because that’s the kind of a thing that a mother would do to her teenager, not to another adult. And with Norma Jean’s quest to become more powerful and independent, every reminder of a time when she felt powerless grates on her. She’s sick of Leroy trying to pretend that things between them are fine and insisting that they revisit the past; she’s ready for the future instead.

Here, Leroy has difficulty absorbing what’s happening to him. Instead of thinking about his marriage ending, he tries to make himself imagine the dead at Shiloh, but he can’t even do that. He struggles to comprehend this loss of life, just as he’s struggling to understand the reality of his lost marriage. His thought process is scattered and illogical here, which is partly a result of being stoned and partly because he’s still reeling from Norma Jean ending their marriage. But even so, his denial is noteworthy; instead of thinking about the end of their marriage, he tries to think about the dead, which leads him into a tangent about a board game and a local drug bust. Being inside Leroy’s head in this moment shows how intense emotional pain makes him sort of dissociate. Just as the death of his son left him unable to recognize Norma Jean while they were at the hospital, here he's unable to recognize what’s happening to him.

Leroy sees Shiloh, perhaps, as a place where unions are made: General Grant notched a victory at Shiloh in his fight to keep the country together, and Mabel and her husband honeymooned there, cementing their marriage. Leroy seemed to hope that bringing Norma Jean here would solidify their own union. But General Grant fought hard to win his battle—it lasted two days and cost him thousands of soldiers—while Leroy has barely fought for his marriage at all. It’s also noteworthy that he’s listing the defining events of his and Norma Jean’s life, ending on this day that they're spending at Shiloh. This seems to be a subtle acknowledgement that this day is incredibly consequential, which implies that he’s starting to grapple with the fact that their marriage just ended, even though he won’t say it outright.

Leroy’s thoughts on history and marriage are a moment of clarity for him—one in which he recognizes a major thing he’s gotten wrong. When he realizes that history was always “names and dates” for him, he’s recognizing that history can't be reduced merely to a sequence of significant events—what matters is the “insides of history,” or everything that happens in between. This is also true of his own life and marriage. In the previous passage, he listed a series of significant life events (Mabel’s marriage, Norma Jean’s birth, their own marriage, etc.), as though all of that would add up to the story of his life. But it doesn’t—and here he’s realizing that by focusing on these defining events, he has foolishly missed what really counts: day-to-day life with his wife. In this light, building the log cabin is a misguided way to try to fix their marriage: it’s adding a new milestone (moving into a new house) to his sequence of significant events, but it doesn’t address the root of the problem between them, which is that on a day-to-day basis he has failed for 15 years to be there for Norma Jean. But this moment of clarity is fleeting, since his next thought is that instead of building the cabin he'll have to think of a new gesture—he can't puncture his delusion and accept that she's gone. 

Norma Jean leaving the picnic while Leroy’s eyes were closed is an encapsulation of the past few months of their marriage: Norma Jean has been drifting away from him, but he has refused to see it. Here, Norma Jean has finally taken control of her own future. She is both emotionally and physically abandoning Leroy here, walking away from her marriage because it no longer serves her needs. Leroy’s physical inability to catch up with Norma Jean echoes how he’s failed to emotionally keep pace with her throughout the story—and, indeed, throughout most of their relationship.

As the story draws to a close, its final images suggest that Norma Jean and Leroy’s marriage is truly over. Leroy’s inability to tell what she’s doing with her arms suggests that he’s still not seeing her for who she is. Since Norma Jean just ended their marriage, she’s probably not gesturing for him to follow her—she’s probably doing her chest exercises. But Leroy still can’t accept that she’s become someone new and that she doesn’t need him anymore, so his confusion here seems more like denial. Furthermore, it’s significant that the story’s final line mentions the dust ruffle. When Mabel made them the dust ruffle, Leroy joked that now they could hide things under the bed—but he was figuratively gesturing towards his tendency to hide painful emotions away rather than processing them. In this way, the dust ruffle appearing in the story’s final moments probably signifies that Leroy hasn’t changed. He’s been hurt, but he’ll probably hide that pain away and not deal with it, just like he’s done before.