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Cork and his daughters care for Romeo and Juliet, a pair of recuperating Canadian geese. What significance might this storyline hold, allegorical or otherwise?
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I think caring for the geese enables Cork to have a serious conversation with his daughter Jenny about his pending divorce and to show her that he is trying to heal what is broken. Feeding the geese gives Cork at least some sense of purpose that his efforts make a difference and a connection with his family. He’s cut off from his family and desperately wants to get back together with them but he doesn’t know how to do that. The geese provide him a way to connect with his family. When they disappear is when things look the bleakest for Cork in being able to heal his family. But they come back at the very end of the book giving Cork (and us) hope.
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I found myself rooting for Cork and his efforts to reunite his family. We get some hints about what he was like to live with after the shootings; even he admits he was not really present to his family then. But I think his heart is in the right place.
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The geese need outside support to survive the harsh winter. I think the allegory is that we all need family and a wider community to survive. A loving and supporting family (and community at large) is important to get us through difficult times. I also think the birds represent Cork and his relationship with his family in some way. Romeo has a hurt wing and can’t fly away, and his mate stays behind. This demonstrates loyalty. But they are in danger of starving to death and are trapped by circumstances beyond their control and bad luck. Cork is trapped by his own guilt of not protecting his friend Sam and killing a man. This guilt and trauma eventually destroy his marriage and family. His caring for the geese helps him heal in a small way and helps bridge the gap with his daughter. That the geese return at the end of the book shows that Romeo’s wing has healed and perhaps Cork is healing too.
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Romeo and Juliet, so named by Annie, represent an example of fidelity to one another even in adversity. In some ways that is a striking contrast to the relationship between Jo and Cork but I think WKK uses them to integrate the O’Connor’s relationship into the story and to give us a window into how Cork, Jenny and Annie view their family. Annie prays for both the geese and for her parents to get back together. Jenny, who meets them when she reluctantly goes to Sam’s Place with Cork, sees the irony of a pair of geese who appear more faithful to one another than her parents. “Some geese are like that. They mate for life.” “I’m glad somebody does.” This becomes an opening for Cork to talk about their marriage and family with Jenny who both wishes to see the family reunited and is unable to say that. When Cork returns to Sam’s Place after being given the evidence of Jo’s infidelity, Romeo and Juliet remain on the waters of the lake, refusing to come to feed when Cork is present. Then, they are gone and the corn uneaten and Cork looks again at the photos of Jo and Sandy Parrant, ostensibly for clues to Paul and Joe John’s disappearance, but can only see “that Jo didn’t love him and hadn’t for longer than he cared to consider.” We learn that Romeo and Juliet have returned, like two old friends, when a grieving Cork talks to Molly after her death. Jenny changes her reading at the holiday gathering to “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” Cork’s favorite. Both of these conveyed to me a measure of hope for the O’Connor family, at least that they will hold together in some way.
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This is what I thought too, but you write it much more eloquently.
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I think the geese represent fidelity and trust which is obviously not present in Cork and Jo, although as already mentioned, Cork wants to have his family back and seems to want to do whatever it takes to accomplish that. While looking at the pictures of Jo’s unfaithfulness, Cork thinks about the “ridiculous nature of the trust people place in one another . . . the bottom line being that people who leaned too heavily on someone else were setting themselves up for a terrible fall, and they had no one to blame in the end but themselves for the hurt they suffered.” I think at this time, he is so hurt that he skews the real meaning of trust as shown by the geese–being there for each other in hope of improvement.
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