Norma Jean and Leroy have not had an easy marriage. They wed when Norma Jean was 18 and pregnant, and their son Randy died months after he was born. Rather than grieving together, they retreated into themselves; Leroy went out on the road as a trucker while Norma Jean stayed home alone. But now Leroy realizes that he and Norma Jean have grown apart and he’s determined to revive their marriage. Instead of working through their years of estrangement, though, he wants to start fresh, returning to how things were before everything went wrong. Of course, Leroy can never erase the history between them—and as the story progresses, “Shiloh” suggests that one cannot move towards the future by trying to recreate an idyllic past.
To fix his struggling marriage, Leroy tries to return to the past. He wants to “start afresh” and “become reacquainted” with Norma Jean, which implies his desire to re-create their idyllic courtship period before their son was born. He even suggests that they “start all over again […] right back at the beginning,” as though they could simply ignore everything that has happened since they were eighteen and pick back up before they lost their son. To encourage this return to their teenaged years, Leroy buys Norma Jean an electric organ, since she loved to play the piano in high school. In addition, he treats all her new interests with skepticism. Clearly, he wants her to remain who she was when they met and doesn’t want to acknowledge how much she has changed.
The biggest indication of Leroy’s desire to return to the past is his obsession with building Norma Jean a log cabin. This is an attempt to fulfill a promise he’s been making since they got married: to build her a home. But the fact that he wants to build a log cabin—an antiquated building that would be out-of-place in their town—emphasizes how silly he’s being. 15 years have passed since he promised Norma Jean a home, and fulfilling his promise now is meaningless; he can’t rewind the clock to when they were newlyweds. Just as a log cabin is a relic of the past with no place in the present, the early period of their marriage is just a memory—Norma Jean doesn’t want the cabin now, she wants to move on to something new.
Norma Jean rejects Leroy’s attempt to return to the past, presumably because his vision of the past is false: there’s too much history that he refuses to acknowledge. The most obvious example of this is Leroy’s silence about losing their child. He and Norma Jean “never speak about their memories of Randy,” and Leroy never brings him up—even when he thinks it might ease the awkwardness between them. In fact, the one time that Norma Jean references losing Randy, Leroy initially pretends not to know what she is talking about. This moment estranges Norma Jean, plunging her into silence and making her feel like they have nothing in common—not even the past. In addition, Leroy tries to ignore the fact that he was out on the road for the past 15 years. Instead of trying to heal the distance this created, he tries to push aside his feeling that something is wrong in their marriage. It’s revealing when he jokes that their new dust ruffle from Mabel will allow them to “hide things under the bed.” This calls attention to his method of coping with difficulty: pushing aside anything uncomfortable and pretending that it doesn’t exist.
Leroy’s false vision of the past comes crashing down around him on his and Norma Jean’s trip to Shiloh, a trip that embodies Leroy’s doomed attempt to save his marriage by returning to the past. By going on a date to a historic site, they’re traveling figuratively to the past—and, on top of that, Leroy is thinking of this trip as a “second honeymoon,” emphasizing his desire to pretend that he and Norma Jean are newlyweds again. Shiloh, however, is a place that glorifies a false vision of the past. The site of a bloody battle, Shiloh has since been beautified and turned into a tourist attraction, obscuring the tragedy that occurred there. Furthermore, the tourists are remembering the wrong narrative; people go there to celebrate the Confederacy (even Norma Jean and Leroy buy a Confederate flag as a souvenir in the gift shop), but Shiloh was the site of a devastating Confederate defeat. Just as Leroy wants to imagine a version of his past without the loss of his son and the grief and estrangement that followed, the historic site promotes a sanitized version of the past that bears no resemblance to the reality of what happened.
At a picnic on the grounds of Shiloh, Norma Jean tells Leroy that she’s leaving him. She explains that she’s been feeling “eighteen again” ever since he returned home, and that she refuses to “face that all over again.” She means that being 18 was traumatic for her the first time around and it’s not something she wants to revisit. This shows how misguided Leroy has been in trying to save his marriage by re-creating their past; he remembers their early years as idyllic because he’s repressed the loss of their son, but Norma Jean is more honest with herself about what happened between them. For her, returning to the past would rekindle a grief that she cannot continue to face.
Related Themes from Other Texts
History and the Past ThemeTracker
History and the Past 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.
Norma Jean is often startled to find Leroy at home, and he thinks she seems a little disappointed about it. Perhaps he reminds her too much of the early days of their marriage, before he went on the road. They had a child who died as an infant, years ago. They never speak about their memories of Randy, which have almost faded, but now that Leroy is home all the time, they sometimes feel awkward around each other, and Leroy wonders if one of them should mention the child. He has the feeling that they are waking up out of a dream together—that they must create a new marriage, start afresh.
Leroy remembers Norma Jean standing catatonically beside him in the hospital and himself thinking: Who is this strange girl? He had forgotten who she was.
Mabel is talking about Shiloh, Tennessee. For the past few years, she has been urging Leroy and Norma Jean to visit the Civil War battleground there. Mabel went there on her honeymoon—the only real trip she ever took. Her husband died of a perforated ulcer when Norma Jean was ten, but Mabel, who was accepted into the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1975, is still preoccupied with going back to Shiloh.
Leroy used to tell hitchhikers his whole life story—about his travels, his hometown, the baby. […] In time, he had the feeling that he’d been telling the same story over and over to the same hitchhikers. He quit talking to hitch hikers when he realized how his voice sounded—whining and self-pitying… […] Now Leroy has the sudden impulse to tell Norma Jean about himself, as if he had just met her. They have known each other so long they have forgotten a lot about each other. They could become reacquainted.
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.”
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.
“She won’t leave me alone—you won’t leave me alone.” Norma Jean seems to be crying, but she is looking away from him. “I feel eighteen again. I can’t face that all over again.” She starts walking away.
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.
Leroy gets up to follow his wife, but his good leg is asleep and his bad leg still hurts him. Norma Jean is far away, walking rapidly toward the bluff by the river, and he tries to hobble toward her. Some children run past him, screaming noisily. Norma Jean has reached the bluff, and she is looking out over the Tennessee River. Now she turns toward Leroy and waves her arms. Is she beckoning to him? She seems to be doing an exercise for her chest muscles. The sky is unusually pale—the color of the dust ruffle Mabel made for their bed.
