Labor Day

Labor Day stands as the novel's final temporal landmark, the day on which the Bowden family takes its traditional last trip of the year to the island aboard the Sweet Sioux. It is a warm day with a fresh wind across the lake, and the family is joined by Tommy Kent as a special guest. The outing is a deliberate return to the ritual that opened the book, when the Bowdens made their first expedition of the year to the same island, a ridiculously small dot of land twelve miles out into the lake, northwest of New Essex, too small to have a name and meriting only a single chart marking and a warning of shoal waters. The symmetry is exact: the year began with the family's first trip and ends with its last, the island serving as the fixed point around which the family's threatened life revolves.

The Ritual and Its Setting

The island itself is a place of deliberate simplicity and escape. It has a hill and a beach and reasonably deep water just off the beach, and the Bowdens have made three or four trips to it every year since 1950, the year before Bucky was born, when they found it. The Labor Day trip is the capstone of that annual rhythm, the last excursion before the summer closes. On this final day, the family eats at noon, and at two o'clock the kids are swimming. Sam sits on a blanket in his swimming trunks, arms resting on his upraised knees, a can of beer and cigarette in hand, while Carol lies on her back beside him, her arm across her eyes. The scene is one of almost aggressive normalcy, a tableau of the domestic peace that Cady's campaign has threatened throughout the novel.

Carol's Confession of Change

The quiet surface of the day breaks when Carol, lying beside Sam, tells him there is a change in her. She confesses that she is no longer such an idiot about herself and her tight little world. She had thought it was her absolute right, her unalterable heritage, to be happy and raise her kids and eventually shoo them out of the nest and spend a dignified old age with Sam. She had imagined herself dying as a little old lady, white-haired and smelling of lavender, in her bed with her grandchildren around her, and Sam lingering on a few years to give himself a good chance to miss her before joining her. That, she says, was what was in her mind: an enormous and infantile trust that this world was made for her to be happy in. Sam asks if it isn't, and she answers that it is only with luck, only with the greatest of good fortune, because there are black things loose in the world. Cady was one of them, but so is a patch of ice on a curve, so is a germ. The confession is the culmination of the psychological arc that began with her breakdown, when she told Sam of the childhood memory of the merry-go-round.

The Merry-Go-Round and the Breaking of the Charm

The merry-go-round memory, which Carol recounts in the depths of her fear, is the emotional key to her transformation. She was about seven years old, her mother still alive, at a carnival where her father lifted her onto a big white horse. It was wonderful for a while; she held the brass pole and the horse went up and down. She did not know until later that her father had paid the man to make it a long, long ride. After a while the faces of the people began to blur and the music seemed to get louder. When she looked out all she could see was streaks. She wanted it to stop. When she shut her eyes she felt she was going to fall off. Nobody could hear her yell, and she had the feeling it was going faster and faster, the music getting louder and louder, and she was going to be hurled off. The image of the uncontrollable, accelerating ride is her metaphor for the siege itself, the sense of being trapped on a machine that will not stop. Her plea to Sam, that she wants it to stop going around and around, that she wants to stop being scared, is the rawest expression of her terror in the novel. On Labor Day, she completes the thought: she has learned that all over the world, right now, people are dying, or their hearts are breaking, or their bodies are being broken, and while it is happening they feel complete incredulity, thinking this cannot be happening to them, that this is not the way it was meant to be. She tells Sam 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 Siege and the Shattered Fool's Paradise

The Labor Day confession is the final statement of a theme that runs through the entire novel: the fragility of the Bowdens' world. At the start, Sam had counted his blessings with a lawyer's precision. The marriage was of the very best variety, everybody was healthy, he had been a partner in the law firm since 1948, and their house just outside the village of Harper, thirteen miles from New Essex, was more house than he should have purchased, though he could console himself with the constantly increasing value of the ten acres of land. They had no savings to speak of, a very few shares of pale blue-chip stocks, but his hefty insurance program gave him a feeling of security. The farmhouse itself, found in 1950 after a long search, sat on ten acres of farm land, all that was left of the original acreage, with elms and oaks and a line of poplars, and all the front windows overlooked a far vista of gentle hills. It was a world Sam had believed was under control. Carol's phrase for it, spoken after the first attack, was a fool's paradise, and she mourned that the charm was not working any more, that something had come in out of the darkness and struck one of them down. The untouchables, she called them, and now they were touched.

The Family's Response and the Return

The Labor Day outing also marks the family's collective decision to resume its life. Earlier, in the depths of the crisis, the family had been dispersed and guarded. Nancy had been very grave and conscientious about her responsibility to the younger ones, and she had tried to tell her parents that she did not think it was very smart to go back and get the police to make a greater effort to pick Cady up, and that she thought it unwise to try to stay at home. She had suggested they stay at a hotel in New Essex, and she wished both of them would not leave, but if that was the way they wanted to do it, she could certainly take care of Jamie and Bucky and keep them out of trouble. The children, Sam had realized, were within the orbit of the problem; this was not something that would affect only him and Carol. The decision to take the traditional last trip of the year, with Tommy Kent as a special guest, is therefore a deliberate act of reclamation, a statement that the family will not be driven from its rituals. The presence of Tommy Kent, Nancy's boyfriend, signals the family's return to ordinary life and its forward movement.

The Delicate Web and the New Worldview

The novel ends not with triumph but with a sobered acceptance. Carol's final words on Labor Day, that everything they have is balanced on a delicate web of incidence and coincidence, is the philosophical summation of the entire book. Sam's response, that he knows, is the acknowledgment of a shared understanding. The siege has stripped away the illusion of safety, the enormous and infantile trust that the world was made for the Bowdens to be happy in. What remains is a more precarious, more honest vision of life, one that knows that black things are loose in the world, that a patch of ice on a curve or a germ can be as destructive as a man like Cady. The Labor Day trip is thus both a return to normalcy and a farewell to innocence. The family eats at noon, the kids swim at two, Sam sits with his beer and cigarette, Carol lies with her arm across her eyes, and the world is exactly as it was at the start of the year, and entirely different. The island, too small to have a name, has witnessed the beginning and the end of the family's ordeal, and the last trip of the year closes the circle.