Folks called the Killburns witchy people. Some said that the Killburn women could put themselves in trances and cast out the devil.
The title character is best friends with one of the Killburns, the young boy Ben. This friendship and the trek through its evolution forms the backbone to the narrative. By “folks” the narrator mainly means the Higgins family which looks upon the Killburn clan through a crooked eye. Not least because Ben—like others in the family—were born with a rather useful deformity: a sixth finger and sixth toe on each hand and foot.
His prize was a pole. It was forty feet of glistening, cold steel, the best kind of ride.
M.C. gazed up at its sparkling height. There was a bicycle seat fixed at the top. He had put it there himself and had attached pedals and two tricycle wheels below it on either side.
The pole exists on a literal level, but its significance is really deeper on its symbolic level. It is the place M.C. goes to think. It is an object with which he tests his strength. It tests his sense of balance and control. It gives him height with which to see things which others can’t. It is a symbol that is pervasive and essential to the story.
Horror, outrage stunned him. He had taken for granted the one thing he should have asked her. For the want of a question, the tunnel would be a grave for both of them.
The tunnel is also an important symbol in the novel as well as, of course, having considerable meaning on a literal level. Actually, the tunnel itself is not so significant as is the ability to successfully traverse its underwater passage. Any time there is a literal passage which must be crossed over or through by a young character in a story, it is worth putting a big bet that the passage is also symbolic of getting from one point to another in the passage toward maturity. What is most keenly significant in this particular passage, however, is the realization by M.C. that his self-assurance at knowing his own capabilities blinded him to the one question that needed to be asked of his companion on the swim through the tunnel.
Two years ago bulldozers had come to make a cut at the top of Sarah’s Mountain. They began uprooting trees and pushing subsoil in a huge pile to get at the coal. As the pile grew enormous, so had M.C.’s fear of it.
Ultimately, this is a novel about the illusion of control, the fear of losing control and what having control actually means. Alongside the story’s coming-of-age thematic strain is a larger one of the impact of strip mining on the people who call the mountains being stripped their home and have for generations. The arrival of the bulldozers marks a turning point in the history of the land, not just the people living there and the novel reveals the connection. When the place one knows as home and expects to think of as home in the same sense for perhaps the rest of their lives comes under purposefully inflicted damage for the interests of outsiders, the consequences are of a magnitude which usually fails to make the cost-benefit analysis ratios guiding the outsiders to their path of destruction.
