August 6

August 6 is the day the long siege of the Bowden family finally breaks open in violence. It is the date on which Sam Bowden, after days of watching his wife Carol dissolve into fear and his own resolve harden into something alien, kills Max Cady on the hillside behind their house. The day is the culmination of a week of mounting terror, a single golden morning that gives way to a snarling, bestial frenzy and a gunshot that rattles the windows. It is the moment the family's passive endurance ends and Sam's moral crisis resolves into action, and its aftermath leaves him hollowed out, unable to celebrate the defeat of the enemy he had wanted to dance around and chant over.

The Morning of August 6

The day begins as a reprieve. Tuesday, the sixth of August, is described as a golden day, a phrase that carries the weight of everything that has come before. The Bowdens have spent the previous days in a state of heightened vigilance, moving quickly between house and barn, checking the buzzer system, and locking themselves into their own room at night with a gun under the pillow and a Rube Goldberg trap of pans and string blocking both stairways. On this morning, after breakfast, Sam checks the buzzer system again, and Carol goes with him when he drives down to get batteries. Before they leave, he checks the station wagon over carefully, a habit born of the knowledge that Cady has already loosened the wheel lugs once. Each time they cross between house and barn, they move very quickly, and each time Sam glances up at the hill, becoming more and more convinced that Cady is up there, watching, waiting. The golden quality of the day is not peace; it is the stillness before the storm, the deceptive calm that precedes the eruption.

The Climax: The Attack and the Killing

The violence comes without warning. Sam hears a sound that must have come from a man's throat but is utterly unlike any human sound he has ever heard, a snarling, roaring sound full of anger and madness and bestial frenzy. There is the deep, resonant bang of a weapon heavier than the Woodsman pistol, a sound that rattles the windows, followed by an enormous crashing and clanging and thudding of something running or falling down the front stairs, bringing Carol's alarm system of pots and pans and string with it. Before Sam can move, the locked front door bursts open and a half-seen figure, wide and hard and stocky and incredibly quick, comes plunging out and smashes into him, driving him back. Sam sails backward over the steps and lands flat on his back on the wet grass, the wind knocked out of him, but he has managed to hold on to his revolver. He rolls up onto his knees, gagging for breath, and fires three times at the running figure, snap shooting with no aim. He gets up, wobbles to the corner of the house, and hears something moving with frantic haste, crashing up through the brush on the hillside behind the house. He fires twice at the sound and listens as it recedes, becomes fainter, and disappears. When he turns back, his ankle folds again and he falls against the side of the house, hitting his head. He crawls on his hands and knees up the steps and through the open front door, finds the light switch in the lower hall, and turns it on.

The Aftermath: The Body on the Hill

The killing is confirmed by the state police. Ricardo, the officer who arrives, tells Sam that they started finding blood halfway up the hill, a lot of it. One of Sam's last two shots must have hit Cady, tearing his right arm on the inside just below the armpit, tearing an artery open. Cady climbed another three hundred feet before he ran out of blood. Sam looks at the body as they roll it back onto the stretcher, and sees a blade of grass pasted to the lips. Ricardo says he will get the body off the place as soon as he can and asks Sam to stop by the barracks the next day to sign the red tape. Sam nods and turns and walks back to the house, stops after ten feet, turns and looks at them, looks at the body as they pick it up, and says tonelessly, "Thanks." The word is flat, emptied of feeling, a mechanical acknowledgment of a service rendered rather than an expression of gratitude or relief.

The Hollow Victory

Sam's reaction to the killing is not triumph but emptiness. He had intended to go upstairs, but a sudden weakness turns him toward a chair and he sits down listlessly. He can hear Jerry Jacks talking over the phone, and he knows he should be annoyed at Jacks for sneaking into the house, but it doesn't seem important. Jacks is saying, "... that's right. Dead. And it was Bowden did it." The phrase echoes in Sam's mind: It was Bowden did it. Sam Bowden, who had wanted to throw his head back and yell at the sky, who had wanted to dance around the body and chant of the defeat of the enemy. Instead, he sits in a chair, drained, unable to summon the energy for even the smallest irritation. The victory he had imagined, the cathartic release of violence, has not come. What remains is the weight of what he has done, the knowledge that he, Sam Bowden, a lawyer who had once objected to the vagueness of the law, has killed a man.

The Cost of the Day

The emotional toll of August 6 is not confined to Sam. Carol, who has been the primary target of Cady's campaign of terror, has already reached her breaking point in the days leading up to the climax. She has told Sam about a memory from her childhood, a carnival merry-go-round where her father lifted her onto a big white horse, and the ride went on and on until the faces blurred and the music grew louder and she felt she was going to be hurled off. She has said, "I want it to stop, Sam. I want it to stop going around and around. I want to stop being scared." The merry-go-round is her metaphor for the siege itself, the endless, accelerating cycle of fear that she cannot escape. August 6 is the day the ride finally stops, but the stopping is not gentle. It is a violent halt, a crash that leaves everyone shaken. In the aftermath, Carol takes Sam's hand and holds it hard, telling him what she has learned: that all over the world, people are dying or their hearts are breaking, and while it is happening they have a feeling of complete incredulity. "This can't be happening to me. This isn't the way it was meant to be." She says she thinks maybe she is stronger and braver now, because she knows that everything they have is balanced on such a delicate web of incidence and coincidence. The day has cost them their innocence, their belief in the stability of their world, but it has also, in Carol's words, made her stronger and braver. The golden day of August 6 is the day the Bowdens learn the true price of survival.