Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is the temporal marker for a crucial interval in Robert Williams’s altered existence. Several weeks after the Great Peshtigo Fire, the holiday approaches while he remains concealed at Anna Williams’s home, unable to participate in ordinary human life yet increasingly entangled with Anna, her unborn child, and the memory of Charles Williams. The season therefore carries a double significance: it offers fragile domestic warmth after catastrophe, but also exposes how little Robert’s condition has healed.

Thanksgiving After the Fire

The approach of Thanksgiving is set against the devastation left by the fire. Rain finally arrives after a drought, and Robert Williams’s father explains that the drought contributed to the fire’s severity. News from Peshtigo is catastrophic: the entire town is reported gone, hundreds are dead, and bodies lie from the Sugar Bushes to the bay, where the fire raged until it reached the water.

The losses are equally concentrated in Williamsonville. More than sixty people from the settlement have died, some unidentified, while the mill, every building, and the forest in the Sugar Bushes across the bay have been destroyed. Robert Williams’s survival is described as miraculous, but Thanksgiving does not restore the world to which he might return. It arrives over a landscape in which families, workplaces, forests, and communities have been erased together.

A Holiday in Hiding

By the time Thanksgiving festivities reach Sturgeon Bay, Robert Williams has grown tired of his limited existence, although he still values afternoon walks with Anna Williams and the sight of her smiling face. He has stayed with her for several weeks without either of them telling her parents about his presence. The holiday preparations thus take place within a secret domestic arrangement: Anna prepares for her family’s feast while Robert remains at the edge of the household, present but unacknowledged.

Their conversation turns to the approaching feast when Robert notices that Anna has already prepared two pies. She explains that she does not want to be burdened during Thanksgiving week and has stored them in the cellar. His wish that he could taste them makes the ordinary food of the holiday a reminder of his exclusion. A pie can be prepared, preserved, and shared by the living; Robert can only watch and remember what participation once meant.

The Pressure of Life and Memory

Thanksgiving also intensifies Robert Williams’s unresolved relationship with Anna Williams. Charles Williams has long since fallen silent in Robert’s mind, though Robert still senses him nearby, as if Charles has merged into him and now silently observes his life. Robert wonders whether he can replace Charles in Anna’s life and whether he even wants that role. The holiday’s language of family and togetherness therefore activates a private rivalry between memory and desire.

The questions do not bring comfort. They fuel Robert’s frustration, and frustration awakens the darkness within him: the yearning in his fingers to find life and extinguish it. When his fingers briefly brush Anna’s, he feels the immense power of her life force and recoils from the contact as though burned. His former desire to hold her intimately has become inseparable from the danger that his touch may consume her.

The Unborn Child and the Coming Change

Robert Williams recognizes that the force attracting him is not Anna Williams’s alone. It is joined by the life force of her unborn child, which he understands as a continuing part of Charles Williams that he might care for and remember. Hope rises from the possibility of having a place in the child’s life and in Anna’s, but fear cuts through it: Robert cannot bear another rejection, and he cannot sustain a relationship in which even touching Anna is dangerous.

Anna tells him that the baby may arrive before Christmas, although she is not due until a week afterward. Thanksgiving consequently stands between the devastation of the fire and an imminent birth. The feast promises continuity, while Robert’s condition threatens contact with that continuity; the holiday becomes a threshold at which family remembrance, concealed supernatural danger, and the prospect of new life converge.

Seasonal Memory and the Larger Narrative

Elsewhere in the book, Thanksgiving belongs to a broader pattern in which places and seasons hold the pressure of the dead. A small cemetery on an island in Maine is described as old as its town, filled with weather-eroded stones, fishermen, war heroes, and family graves. In summer it appears cheerful beneath filtered sunlight and wildflowers; in winter, snow and ice transform it into a white, almost magical enclosure. The cemetery’s living forest surrounding the dead parallels the Thanksgiving passage, where ordinary seasonal life persists beside mass death and supernatural disturbance.

The holiday’s later recollection also connects private memory with family legend. Isabelle Lockett Forsythe spends her remaining days peacefully at her daughter’s farmhouse after finding a locket, maintaining her belief that Lavinia Lockett Sewall invented her life with Theodore Sewall while secretly longing to meet her husband again and visit the magical places from Lavinia’s stories. Thanksgiving is therefore more than a calendar date: it participates in the book’s recurring contrast between domestic ritual and impossible survivals, between what families publicly believe and what their deepest memories continue to expect.