Essay Questions

What moves the narrator closer toward being fully convinced that his school bully has been killed by a dead man?

The narrator, Craig, is finally beaten up by a school bully after having several conflicts with him previously. At first, he is proud of the fact that at least he got in one good shot in addition to the pummeling he received. The more he considers the potential consequences of this one moment of glory, however, the less it becomes a pure thrill. The one thing you do not want is for your lucky punch to give a bully a black eye that becomes the topic of those willing to mercilessly tease a bully. The idea that finally getting the beating he’s always wanted to hand out might not satisfy the bully’s bloodlust begins to eat away at him and spurs a host of conflicting emotions. This emotional turmoil leads Craig to dial up the phone number of Mr. Harrigan even though the phone is buried in the grave of the dead man. A day or two later, the bully turns up dead under such mysterious circumstances that the town is left to devise wild rumor after wild rumor about the precise details of the unexpected demise of a kid. Although Craig suspects a correlation between the phone call and his bully’s death based simply on the timeline, it is not until he later learns that half of the hair on the boy had turned white in coincidence with his suicide by autoerotic asphyxiation that he moves closer to accepting there was causation. After all, it takes a shock of some magnitude for a person’s hair to turn white, even if it is just half of it.

What is the underlying motivation that causes Craig to call Mr. Harrigan again about Dean Whitmore?

By the time a drunk Dean Whitmore crosses the center dividing line on Route 2 and drives his vehicle into a head-on collision with a motorcycle, Craig is already fairly certain that the dead man bears some responsibility in some way for the death of his school bully. The motorcycle in question was carrying none on than the teacher who saved Craig from the bully’s first attempt at beating him up and treated his injuries when he finally succeeded. She and her husband are both killed and since she was Craig’s first crush, that would likely be more than enough to stimulate another call to the grave. But it is not merely that Dean Whitmore took his favorite teacher away that moves him to indulge in such an extreme temptation. Craig gives every indication that if the law had taken its proper course and punished Dean to the fullest extent possible for what was clearly at least an example of vehicle homicide that would have been the end of it. It is not the killing of Ms. Hargensen that drives him to the depths of vengeance, but the unfairness of the aftermath. Because Dean’s father is wealthy and has political connections, the premature deaths of two young people beloved by the community are deemed worthy of no worse punishment than a four-year sentence that would be suspended on the condition that he attend a rehab clinic and under urine testing. It is therefore not the random unfairness of fate that motivates Craig to seek revenge by proxy, but the predictable unfairness of privilege.

What is contained in Dean Whitmore’s suicide note that firmly convinces Craig that the dead man in the grave was involved?

As with his bully, Dean Whitmore’s official cause of death is determined to be suicide. As with the bully, the means of suicide is not a typical one: ingesting shampoo. Unlike the bully, however, shampoo is the only link between the two suicides and it is a tenuous one at best. Also unlike the bully, Dean had the foresight to leave a note behind. Having paid off an employee working in the rehab clinic where Dean dies with a bottle of whiskey in exchange for information, Craig learns of the suicide note and that its content included what the employee mischaracterizes as something sweet, like a prayer: “Keep giving all the love you can,” Dean had written. Craig immediately knows this was no prayer or anything like it. In fact, it has nothing at all to do with the thoughts of Dean Whitmore. What was written in the suicide note is all the proof that Craig needs to be convinced something much more sinister than a mere suicide took place shortly after it was written. For that line is a lyric that is immediately followed by the last line of a song “Stand by your man.” Craig knows something that nobody else who will ever see that suicide note knows. Every time a call comes through to the number associated with the iPhone accompanying Mr. Harrigan in his coffin buried six feet underground, the ringtone plays the old man’s favorite song, Tammy Wynette’s country-and-western standard, “Stand by Your Man.”