The first image in the book is the sound of Marie coughing. She is sick and having trouble breathing. She may have pneumonia. Later on she is murdered, perhaps by being smothered by a pillow.

When she feels stressed, David’s mother longs for the wind that sweeps across the plains of her native North Dakota. It is the thought of the air and the air in motion that helps her to let go of the tension she is feeling.

The clearest use of the symbols of air and breathing are in relation to David himself: “As I had so often been advised by my parents, I never believed any of my grandmother’s supernatural stories. Until the day Marie died. That night I lay in bed and couldn’t breathe. The room felt close, full, as though someone else was getting the oxygen I needed” (Chapter 2, p. 87). Marie’s death literally takes his breath away.

At the climax of the book, David’s mother fires a shotgun, and the shot symbolically changes the atmosphere: “The air seemed instantly altered, turned foul, the stuff of rank, black chemical smoke and not he sweet, clean oxygen we daily breathed” (Chapter 3, p. 130).

The author plays on the reader’s expectation that the air in the open spaces of Montana will be clean and clear.