New Year's Eve 1969 and New Year's Day 1970

New Year's Eve 1969 and New Year's Day 1970 form a hinge in the Birdsey family’s winter: Thomas Birdsey turns twenty amid signs of acute distress, and a private disclosure from Dessa changes what Dominick Birdsey understands about Thomas. The birthday gathering begins as a small attempt at celebration and ends with the family watching Thomas extinguish his candles one by one.

A birthday before the new year

A week after Christmas, Ma made a cake for Thomas’s birthday. Because Dessa and Dominick were going out on New Year’s Eve, they sang to him early with Ma. Ray remained in front of the television; he had not spoken to anyone during the preceding week. Thomas stood fidgeting before twenty candles, while the others tried to hold the occasion together as an ordinary family celebration.

The candles and Ma’s performance of normality

When the singing stopped, Thomas did not blow out the candles. He picked them up individually and pressed their lit ends into the frosting. Ma, Dessa, and Dominick watched in silence as he put out the last one; smoke and the smell of burnt sugar filled the room. Ma then began singing For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow, as though the family’s usual order could be restored by carrying on. The gesture echoed her habit of calling things hunky-dory even when they plainly were not.

Dessa’s disclosure and the turn into 1970

That night, Dessa told Dominick about Thomas and her sister, connecting him with the book Lives of the Martyred Saints and its depictions of torn and burned flesh. Her account gave the birthday’s unsettling scene a more disturbing context: Thomas’s attention to suffering was not, in her description, merely an abstract interest in martyrdom. The recollection presents the disclosure as a turning point in what Dominick knows, even as the family moves into the new decade with the strained cheer of a holiday greeting.

The immediate aftermath

In mid-January, Dominick returned to school while Thomas stayed home. Ma said Thomas was up until the early hours and then slept through the day, keeping a reversed schedule like Ray’s. She was trying to prevent Ray from losing his temper, but Ray was becoming fed up. The birthday scene thus sits between Thomas’s conspicuous withdrawal from the family celebration and his continued retreat from ordinary daily life.