Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in 55 Miles to the Gas Pump, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Isolation and Rural Life
Violence, Pleasure, and Desire
Good, Evil, and Morality
Summary
Analysis
Rancher Croom is unshaven, wearing “handmade boots” and a “filthy hat.” He’s a “warm-handed,” “quick-foot” dancer who brews his own “strange beer,” which “burst[s] out in garlands of foam.”
Proulx introduces Rancher Croom with language that suggests isolation (he’s unkempt and has to make his own goods), but that also suggests warmth and fun: she uses words the evoke a party, such as “garlands” and dancing and beer. While this description might prepare readers to like this character, Proulx is deliberately setting up a surprising reversal.
Themes
In this moment, Rancher Croom is on his horse, “galloping drunk” through the “dark plain,” and he stops when he arrives at the “canyon brink.” There, he dismounts, “looks down on tumbled rock, waits,” and then steps off the edge of the canyon, “parting the air with his last roar.” As he falls, his sleeves are “surging up,” his arms move like a “windmill,” and “before he hits,” Rancher Croom “rises again … like a cork in a bucket of milk.”
While Proulx introduced Rancher Croom cheerfully, here he suddenly dies by suicide and readers never learn if there’s a reason. Since he dies by falling on the rocks, the isolated landscape becomes a weapon, which perhaps suggests that rural isolation had something to do with his suicide. Proulx’s description of his death is particularly notable for its positivity: she uses words and phrases (“surging up,” “windmill,” “rises again”) that evoke lightness and triumph. This disorients the reader by being at odds with how one likely imagines a suicide. Furthermore, the final image of Rancher Croom “rising again” evokes Christ’s resurrection, again setting readers up to think that Croom might be a good person.
Themes
Mrs. Croom, Rancher Croom’s wife, is cutting a hole into the roof of their home with a saw, trying to get into the attic. She has not been in the attic for twelve years because of Rancher Croom’s “padlocks and warnings,” which are “whets to her desire.” Sweating profusely, she works at the roof with a saw, a hammer, and a chisel, until she frees a “ragged slab peak” which allows her to see inside.
Like the heroine of the folktale “Bluebeard,” Mrs. Croom was forbidden to enter a room of her house—and here, Proulx suggests that her “desire” was stoked by this prohibition. Proulx leaves the specific meaning of this ambiguous: it might simply be that Mrs. Croom became more curious about the attic because she was banned from it (therefore the “padlocks and warnings” increased her desire to know what was in there), but it might also be that Mrs. Croom’s desire is stoked by something beyond secrecy. After all, the story reveals immediately after this that Mrs. Croom essentially knew that there were bodies in the attic—so perhaps her husband’s violence excites her. Regardless, the word choice of “whets to her desire” is clearly sexual, so Proulx is likely trying to set a mood that will make the discovery of the corpses all the more jarring.
Themes
What Mrs. Croom sees in the attic is “just as she thought”: “the corpses of Mr. Croom’s paramours,” whom Mrs. Croom recognizes from seeing their pictures in the newspaper when they went missing. Some of these corpses are “desiccated as jerky,” others are moldy, and some are covered in “bright blue” paint that was “used on the shutters years ago.” All of the corpses, however, are “used hard”: they’re “covered” with “tarry handprints” and the “marks of boot heels.” One of them is “wrapped in newspaper, nipple to knee.”
Proulx doesn’t spell this out explicitly, but the implication of the handprints and the phrase “used hard” is that Mr. Croom has been engaged in necrophilia with the corpses of the women he murdered. While this is likely shocking to the reader, Mrs. Croom seems to have suspected it all along. Given the age of some of the corpses, it seems likely she’s known about the killings for quite some time and never interfered—perhaps this is because she feared that her husband would kill her, too, but Proulx suggests that her motive might have been more monstrous, since the sensuality of her description of the corpses (she describes them with delightful and surprising language that evokes all of the senses) suggests that she takes some pleasure in looking at them, rather than being horrified.
Themes
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The narrator concludes with one sentence: “When you live a long way out you make your own fun.”
The implication of this “moral” to the story is that isolation makes people seek fun in violence, just as the Crooms have done. Throughout the story, Proulx has blended violence and pleasure (through the buoyant description of Mr. Croom’s suicide, or the sensuous description of the corpses, for example). Because of this—even though the reader is likely shocked to see such a horrifying sentiment articulated—Proulx has set readers up to understand it on some level: after all, the reader has likely taken pleasure in Proulx’s beautiful descriptions of monstrous things, therefore finding fun in violence themselves. Since Proulx uses “you” in this sentence, it’s clear that she means to implicate the reader. The Crooms are not anomalies for turning to violence for pleasure—anyone, Proulx suggests, would do the same in their shoes.
Themes
