ATDTDA (8): Mother and children, 217

[Paul Nightingale]

Mayva appears to confirm Reef as head of the family,
offering him "Webb's old twelve-shot Confederate
Colt". Reef hands it to Frank; the role doesn't 
require the prop (he has dynamite, after all). They
bicker as children, provoking Mayva's "motherly 
despair": perhaps one final attempt, for Mayva's
benefit, to deny that Webb is no longer there: the
repetition of childish behaviour is juxtaposed to 
the repetitiveness of dynamiting earlier (214).

Lake is excluded from this scene, one in which mother
and sons rehearse their traditional roles. She
reappears at the end of the passage when she hears
Mayva's shots. This moment ("a couple of months
later") fast-forwards the action, as did the earlier
scene with mother and daughter (192), not to mention
the final lines of the preceding section just up the
page (217). When first she appears (90-91) Lake
confounds her brothers' expectations, is already
refusing to conform; subsequently, she makes her
father supicious when she enjoys financial
independence (189-190). Following their estrangement
she returns to the cabin to find it "echo[ing] with
desertion" (191); at this time, she fantasises about
killing him. How seriously, one cannot say. And then,
at what might well be the last time she sees him,
"Webb was standing in the middle of the place, lines
of his face set like stone" (192). Cf. her appearance,
to Reef, at the burial, "her face behind the veil just
a marble mask" (216).