The log cabin represents the absurdity of Leroy’s belief that he can build a future by returning to the past. As Leroy and Norma Jean’s marriage deteriorates, Leroy hopes to salvage it by re-creating the idyllic period when they were 18-year-old newlyweds. But he struggles to acknowledge that 15 years have gone by and everything has changed. The log cabin embodies this contradiction. Leroy wants to build a new home where he and Norma Jean can start fresh, but he chooses a log cabin—a building that’s conspicuously old. In this way, he mistakes moving backwards with progressing towards the future, just as he’s doing in his marriage.
The story repeatedly suggests that this won’t work. Norma Jean, for one, outright rejects the log cabin, saying that she’d rather live in a house. Her implication is that a cabin would be too old and rustic compared to the modern comfort of one of the new suburban homes around town. Furthermore, when Leroy drives around these new subdivisions, he himself acknowledges that a log cabin would be “inappropriate” there. Then, when Leroy and Norma Jean visit Shiloh, he encounters a real log cabin for the first time. The cabin is literally a historical relic; preserved from the Civil War era, it’s surrounded by gawking tourists. Leroy seems to finally understand that a log cabin has no place in contemporary life, and he reacts with embarrassment, clarifying that this isn’t what he had in mind.
The log cabin at Shiloh is a visual representation of the silliness of re-creating the past in the present. Rather than being grand and romantic, it’s underwhelming. Furthermore, it’s riddled with bullet holes, showing that the past is not the idyllic place that Leroy imagines (his marriage, too, is full of unacknowledged trauma that returning to their teen years can’t erase). And when they look at the cabin, Leroy and Norma Jean feel no emotion at all, because it has no connection to their present-day lives. This runs parallel to Norma Jean’s attitude towards the era when they got married; it’s long gone and has no bearing on the present. Focusing on who she was at 18 cannot save her marriage at 34, despite what Leroy may think.
The Log Cabin Quotes in Shiloh
At first the kits were diversions, something to kill time, but now he is thinking about building a full-scale log house from a kit. It would be considerably cheaper than building a regular house, and besides, Leroy has grown to appreciate how things are put together. He has begun to realize that in all the years he was on the road he never took time to examine anything. He was always flying past scenery.
“They won’t let you build a log cabin in any of the new subdivisions,” Norma Jean tells him.
“They will if I tell them it’s for you,” he says, teasing her. Ever since they were married, he has promised Norma Jean he would build her a new home one day. They have always rented, and the house they live in is small and nondescript. It does not even feel like a home, Leroy realizes now.
Later, she says to Leroy, “She just said that about the baby because she caught me smoking. She’s trying to pay me back.”
“What are you talking about?” Leroy says, nervously shuffling blueprints.
“You know good and well,” Norma Jean says. She is sitting in a kitchen chair with her feet up and her arms wrapped around her knees. She looks small and helpless. She says, “The very idea, her bringing up a subject like that! Saying it was neglect.”
She sits at the kitchen table, concentrating on her outlines, while Leroy plays with his log house plans, practicing with a set of Lincoln Logs. The thought of getting a truckload of notched, numbered logs scares him, and he wants to be prepared. As he and Norma Jean work together at the kitchen table, Leroy has the hopeful thought that they are sharing something, but he knows he is a fool to think this. Norma Jean is miles away. He knows he is going to lose her. Like Mabel, he is just waiting for time to pass.
At Shiloh, she drives aimlessly through the park, past bluffs and trails and steep ravines. Shiloh is an immense place, and Leroy cannot see it as a battleground. It is not what he expected. He thought it would look like a golf course. Monuments are everywhere, showing through the thick clusters of trees. Norma Jean passes the log cabin Mabel mentioned. It is surrounded by tourists looking for bullet holes.
“That’s not the kind of log house I’ve got in mind,” says Leroy apologetically.
General Grant, drunk and furious, shoved the Southerners back to Corinth, where Mabel and Jet Beasley were married years later, when Mabel was still thin and good-looking. The next day, Mabel and Jet visited the battleground, and then Norma Jean was born, and then she married Leroy and they had a baby, which they lost, and now Leroy and Norma Jean are here at the same battleground. Leroy knows he is leaving out a lot. He is leaving out the insides of history. History was always just names and dates to him. It occurs to him that building a house out of logs is similarly empty—too simple. And the real inner workings of a marriage, like most of history, have escaped him.
The Log Cabin Symbol Timeline in Shiloh
