Log Cabins and Bullet Holes

This story is very engaging, particularly the parts where Leroy talks about the log cabin, and its symbolism. The log cabin obviously represents their marriage. After Leroy gets home from his accident, spends all his time at home, no longer working, he begins to feel the rift between him and Norma Jean. Feeling them fall farther and farther apart, he decides that he should build her a log cabin, a real house where she can live, because they’ve never had one. But this cabin is somewhat symbolic of their marriage. It is not an accident that Norma was conceived in Shiloh, and that Shiloh is the only location of a real log cabin in the story. The log cabin in Shiloh represents the state of their lives together, and they are both riddled with bullet holes. For Leroy and Norma Jean, those holes come primarily from the loss of their baby. The cabin of their marriage started to erode even then, but it hasn’t stopped. So for Leroy to offer to Norma Jean a log cabin, to get a “clean slate” for their marriage is exactly not what she wants, because even though the slate may be clean, it is is still a slate, and not a sheet of paper, like what all the people are using no days (the new houses and subdivisions, where a log cabin would feel out of place.). Leroy finally realizes this, however he is too late. It happens at the very end of the story, and he knows that to keep her around, he must instead build something spectacular, something incredible. And he must come up with what that is quickly. Because after what happened to their first log-cabin-marriage, Norma Jean wont settle for another one. She has already put herself on the path to differentiate herself from the log cabins. She’s becoming a fitness guru, educated, and all in all current with the times, while Leroy is stuck in the past with his log cabins. If he wants to keep her, his house had better be a modern one, and not some outdated junk made from log. Even Mable said: “You couldn’t get me to live in a log cabin. I grew up in one, and they are NOT comfortable.”