Scapegoating and blame

Scapegoating and blame describe a recurring pattern in which responsibility is displaced onto a more vulnerable person, while the person who acts—or benefits from the act—escapes scrutiny. The pattern appears both in Leo Blood’s account to the police and in the Birdsey household, where Ray Birdsey repeatedly directs punishment at Thomas Birdsey for something Dominick Birdsey did. These episodes are not identical: one is a deliberate tactic to deflect suspicion, the other a family habit sustained by fear and silence. Together, they show how an accusation can become more useful than the truth, and how the person spared immediate punishment may remain implicated in what follows.

The police account as a calculated diversion

After the incident near the bridge, Leo tells Dominick that he invented a story about Ralph Drinkwater and Dell Weeks to redirect attention from what the group had been doing. He calls it a “smoke screen”: the police, he argues, were hostile to gay people, and he had made the men sound as though they had tried to proposition the others. The accusation serves Leo’s immediate purpose by changing the focus of the questioning. It also transfers danger onto Ralph and Dell, whose sexuality becomes a tool in a story they did not control.

Leo presents the tactic as both practical and defensible. He says he told the police that Ralph had offered hash in exchange for sexual favors, then admits that he “stretched the truth a little.” His other defense is that the officers already had details they could interpret against Ralph and Dell: Thomas Birdsey had cried and pulled down his drawers, and queer magazines were present. Leo uses these circumstances to blur the difference between what the police could observe and the sexual offer he says he reported. The existence of suggestive evidence does not establish the story he supplied; it helps make the accusation sound plausible.

The exchange exposes a further contradiction. Leo insists that he did not slander Ralph or Dell because, in his view, they were queer, and he treats the group’s encounter with the police as a contest in which a convincing defense mattered more than the people it endangered. Dominick objects that the two men’s sexuality does not make such treatment acceptable. Leo, by contrast, says the police would be hostile not only to queer people but also to Black people and radical groups. He casts prejudice as the condition that makes the lie work, while also exploiting that prejudice to choose its targets.

Shared advantage and unequal exposure

Dominick later describes the police encounter in explicitly unequal terms: three white officers, he reasons, were more likely to believe two white boys than Ralph, whom he describes as a Black Indian and a radical queer. He acknowledges that Leo’s defense was effective, even calling it a brilliant one, but that retrospective recognition does not undo its cost. The account turns Ralph and Dell into convenient suspects and leaves the group’s own conduct less exposed. Dominick’s use of “we” matters: the protection was collective, even though Leo devised the story and Ralph and Dell bore its particular stigma.

The accusation also shows how scapegoating can draw force from existing social categories rather than inventing them. Leo does not need to create the police’s presumed prejudices; he relies on them, then arranges his account around them. That reliance may explain the tactic’s plausibility, but it does not make the resulting harm accidental. The defense secures cover for one group by making other men more vulnerable to suspicion. When Dominick later encounters Ralph at Hatch, the remembered advantage is no longer abstract: the person cast as the problem is present before him, and Dominick says he felt bad.

The family’s displaced punishment

The household pattern reaches back to childhood. During Mass, Dominick—not Thomas—smuggles candy. Thomas never tells Ray who was responsible, and Dominick never confesses. Ray nevertheless keeps Thomas in his “rifle sight” and directs his anger at him. The episode makes the mismatch between guilt and punishment explicit: Thomas’s silence protects Dominick from Ray’s wrath, while leaving Thomas to receive it instead.

That protection is not presented as a simple act of innocence. Thomas’s refusal to expose his brother is an expression of loyalty, but the silence allows the family’s false account to stand. Dominick later recognizes that he was the guilty one and that Thomas was the one Ray went after. His memory identifies two connected forms of displacement: Ray punishes the wrong child, and Dominick accepts the benefit of that misdirection by remaining silent. Scapegoating here is not only the aggressor’s act; it is also sustained by the silence of someone who knows better.

The childhood episode gives the later police story a family echo. In both, a vulnerable person is made to carry blame that shields someone else. The circumstances differ—Ray’s recurring violence at home is not the same as Leo’s calculated story to officers—but both episodes show how a false allocation of responsibility can be reinforced by silence, loyalty, or self-protection. Thomas’s repeated place as the one punished makes the family’s imbalance visible long before Dominick understands his own part in it.

Guilt, memory, and the failed cleansing

Dominick’s later response links scapegoating to a wider reckoning with his own actions. After swimming in Rosemark’s Pond, he thinks of the sweat and marijuana, the harm done to Ralph, and what he himself did to Dessa in the parking lot. He wonders whether he helped cause Thomas’s deterioration and asks himself what kind of person he had become. He connects the family’s behavior to a harsh rule of survival: “whack whoever’s vulnerable, show ’em who’s in charge.” The thought widens the pattern beyond a single false accusation. It describes a household logic in which vulnerability invites domination and the person with greater power avoids confronting his own conduct.

The swim does not settle that guilt. Dominick comes out of the pond feeling as dirty as before and sees his reflection in the water. The image answers the hope of cleansing with its failure: physical immersion cannot erase either the injury done to others or the memory of having let another person take the blame. His later statement, “You can’t swim away your sins,” gives that realization a concise form. The point is not that every responsibility in the family belongs to Dominick, but that recognizing Ray’s violence or Leo’s deception does not absolve him of the times he benefited from silence or joined in the defense.

Narrative significance

The theme develops through belated recognition rather than a clean correction of the record. Leo openly describes his diversion, Dominick later admits that it worked, and the childhood memory reveals that Dominick once concealed his own guilt while Thomas endured Ray’s anger. The repetitions make blame a structure of relationships: each episode asks who is protected, who is exposed, and who remains silent when the two are not the same person.

The narrative also distinguishes explanation from exoneration. Prejudice helps explain why Leo believes his account will persuade the police, and Ray’s established bullying helps explain why Thomas is an especially exposed target at home. Neither circumstance makes the displaced blame fair. Dominick’s movement from accepting the practical value of the police story to feeling bad when he sees Ralph, and from childhood concealment to adult self-accusation, gives the theme its moral pressure. Responsibility begins to return to the people who shifted it, but the people who carried the consequences cannot simply be made whole by that recognition.