Violate Lacey’s relationship with her son Robert

Violate Lacey’s bond with her only son, Robert Lacey, continues after his death through a daily ritual at his grave. She brings flowers, leaves a lantern for the child who feared the dark, and speaks to him as though he remains present. The tenderness of these acts is inseparable from her belief that her own sin caused his, a guilt that surfaces again when she connects the chapel staircase to his ability to rest in peace.

Mother and only child

Violate identifies Robert as her son, not her husband, and emphasizes that he was her only child. He died at sixteen after running away to become a drummer boy during the war, despite her not wanting him to fight. His body was shipped to her in Santa Fe, where she mourned him. The narrative gives no further account of his military service or the circumstances of his death; what it does establish is the decisive fact of their separation and the enduring place he occupies in her life.

That loss is set beside the death of Violate’s first husband, also during the war. She later says that her second husband died as well, but Robert remains the loss around which her daily practice is organized: she comes to his grave every day. The account does not describe the intervening years in detail. Instead, it shows how her repeated visits make remembrance part of ordinary life, rather than a grief confined to the moment she received his body.

The grave and the lantern

Lizzy Enders encounters Violate kneeling before Robert’s leaning gravestone, wrapped in a Navajo blanket. Beside the grave, a small shelter of stones holds a lantern. Violate explains that Robert was afraid of the dark as a child, so she leaves the light for him at night. She also brings flowers and sometimes takes food from the kitchen to the grave. Each offering addresses a particular need as she remembers it: the flowers mark her continuing attention, while the lantern preserves a gesture of care from his childhood.

On the night before Lizzy finds her, Violate fell asleep at the grave and remained there until morning, something she says had never happened before. She apologizes to Robert that she must go because the nuns will be looking for her, and takes comfort in the thought that he was not alone during the night. The episode places her maternal attachment in a strikingly literal form: she is physically beside his grave, keeping watch, even as she understands that she must return to the convent. The lantern, intended to ease Robert’s fear of darkness, also makes visible the care she continues to offer him in death.

Grief, memory, and care

Violate’s account of Robert comes through acts and recollections rather than a full history of their life together. She remembers his childhood fear, his decision to run away, and his death at sixteen. Her repeated visits keep those memories active. When Lizzy sees Violate’s warm, candlelike smile, she thinks of the kind of old age her own mother, Mama, might have reached. That comparison connects Violate’s tenderness toward her son with Lizzy’s own bereavement, without making their losses identical: Violate is a mother visiting her dead child, while Lizzy recognizes in her a maternal warmth associated with the future her mother never had.

The bond is also shaped by Violate’s periods of illness and confusion. She says that she sometimes does not feel right in the head and that, during those times, she is happiest. The narrative does not diagnose her or explain how her condition affects her recollections of Robert. It does show her speaking to him at his grave and treating the visit as a familiar obligation. Her altered sense of time and her habitual remembrance coexist; she can say that she has been at the convent forever while still naming the precise daily practices through which she honors her son.

Guilt and the promise of rest

Later, Violate responds with joy when a carpenter is finally available to build the chapel staircase, telling Lizzy that the child was sent for a reason and that Robert will now rest in peace. When Lizzy asks why he would not have rested before, Violate answers that the obstacle is her sins. She says Robert’s sin was caused by her and promises to explain it another time. The story therefore makes her grief more than longing: she understands herself as implicated in a wrong that reaches beyond her own life and affects her son’s peace.

The precise sin remains undisclosed in this conversation, as does the full reason Violate links the staircase to Robert’s rest. The connection is presented through her conviction, not explained as an objective mechanism. That distinction preserves the tension between what she believes and what Lizzy can know. The staircase’s construction gives Violate hope, while her confession leaves the history behind that hope unresolved. Her relationship with Robert is thus held between two persistent acts: tending his grave as a mother who still cares for him, and seeking release from a guilt she believes has bound their fates.