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Ten-year-old Jas fears her pet rabbit will be slaughtered for Christmas dinner, so she prays that God take her brother Matthies instead. That day Matthies falls through the ice while skating and drowns. From then on Jas believes her prayer killed him, and she carries that private guilt through the rest of the novel.
When grieving parents withdraw into silence and stop touching, eating together, or explaining, children do not stop needing a causal story. They build one themselves out of bargains, rituals, and secret experiments, such as Jas keeping toads in the hope they will mate and bring her parents back together. The less the adults say, the stranger and more dangerous these homemade explanations become.
Grief that cannot be spoken shows up as physical withholding. Jas refuses to take off her red coat, and she holds in her bowels to the point of illness, as if keeping everything inside could stop further loss. Reading a child's compulsive holding-on as mourning, not misbehaviour, changes what the symptom means.
A child raised on strict Reformed doctrine reads real disasters through the Bible's own template. The foot-and-mouth cull that wipes out the family's herd becomes, for Jas, one of the plagues of Egypt, and so it confirms that God is punishing them. A faith that frames every event as divine intention offers no neutral account of bad luck, which leaves guilt with nowhere to drain.