“There’s blood on the moon”

“There’s blood on the moon” is Jim Gardener’s recurring expression of dread: first a warning that he should leave before something terrible happens, then a phrase he repeats as he feels disaster approaching. Its return connects his private cycle of alcohol craving, relapse, and regret with the wider danger surrounding Bobbi and Haven.

First Warning and the Relapse

On June 26, while Bobbi Anderson wanted to dig, Gard woke in Boston wanting to drink. He knew that his periods of limited drinking did not make him a partially arrested alcoholic, yet he could still tell himself that he could stop when he wished. When Ron Cummings proposed an evening of heavy drinking, Gard accepted. The warning phrase appears as he considers leaving the New England Poetry Caravan and the events ahead, telling himself to get out before something bad happens. He refuses to return to Maine, however, and stays.

The phrase gives shape to a danger Gard senses but does not act on. His fall begins in a Boston hotel room and ends eight days later on the breakwater at Arcadia Beach in New Hampshire. The ominous warning does not prevent the binge; it marks the gap between recognizing the risk and escaping it.

Repetition and Self-Conflict

The words return as an internal exchange about whether Gard can endure what is happening. He says he cannot get through it, answers himself that he can, and then insists that he feels the approaching danger. The repeated phrase is not a prediction with a clearly identified cause so much as an expression of mounting fear, sharpened by his divided self-talk and inability to settle on a course of action.

After the binge, Gard’s distress recalls the aftermath of the 1980 Thanksgiving episode, which ended his teaching career and marriage and nearly cost Nora her life. That remembered history gives the expression a personal weight: for Gard, disaster is not abstract, but bound to the consequences of his own drinking. When the depression returns, the words sit beside thoughts of self-destruction and the realization that Bobbi is in trouble. His awareness does not erase his shame or make him immediately reliable, but it begins to redirect his attention beyond himself.

From Personal Foreboding to Warning

Later, Gard’s concern takes on a more immediate object. As he tries to reach Bobbi mentally, his nose bleeds and he suspects that she is bringing people into the shed at night. He recalls that this has happened twice, around three in the morning, while Bobbi believes he is asleep. Although he has been drinking and she sees the Valium bottle diminishing, Gard has actually been flushing the tablets rather than taking them. His concealment and her mistaken assumption complicate their relationship even as his alarm grows.

In this later context, the phrase’s ominous force attaches to the danger he sees in Bobbi’s changes and in the company she keeps. Its recurrence links his earlier failure to heed his own warning with a renewed attempt to recognize a threat to someone else. The expression therefore functions both as a refrain of dread and as a measure of Gard’s unsettled agency: he can sense that something is wrong, but sensing danger and knowing how to stop it remain separate things.