Debra B. asked Brian Kindall:

This question contains spoilers… (view spoiler)

Brian Kindall Hi Debra,

Thanks so much for reading my novel, and for your thought-provoking question.

So, why is it that everyone Didier Rain sleeps with ends up dead?

I deliberately left the answer to that vague in order to put the reader in the same mindset as Didier Rain. Is it just a coincidence, or is he being punished by God? As with all matters concerning faith and religion, in my experience at least, there’s no way to know for sure. Rain is so haunted by his own Oedipal guilt and deficiencies as a human being that his every setback and disappointment feels to him like a curse inflicted from above. The very first line of the novel even implies that Rain suspects he’s being pranked by the invisible gods so ironically manipulating his destiny, which pretty much dictates his attitude throughout his whole journey. Also, there is the “thou shalt not” issued by Brother Benjamin at the beginning that warns of punishment if Rain partakes of carnal pleasures. That has to be in the back of Rain’s mind as he wakes to find both the no-name goat and Turtle Dove mysteriously dead after intercourse. But whereas the interaction with the goat was clearly taboo, his love for Turtle Dove was genuine, if naïve, and misguided. So, if love is as holy as Rain believes it to be, and if what he felt for the Indian maiden was true love, why was the result the same with both his sacred and his profane acts of love? I realize I’m only answering your question with a question, but that’s sort of my point - the ways of the gods are mysterious and nonsensical, driven by a logic that is beyond what a fallible, mortal man like Didier Rain can ever understand. In fact, maybe the gods are not involved at all. Readers are in the same boat with Rain - we can’t know what’s behind these mysterious coincidences.

One other thing that occurs to me is the symbolism. Rain is an everyman white European. The West was crawling with them in the 1800s, all of them driven by their hungers for land, wealth, and religious freedom, and all of them justifying their selfish actions with their belief in Manifest Destiny - their God-given right as virtuous Anglos to take what they wanted, even if it meant killing the natives and destroying the land. Turtle Dove is symbolic of the natural world of the American West. After the white man came and pillaged the land, that natural world was left largely dead. Rain’s rape of Turtle Dove is that same drama played out in miniature.

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