Symbolism, Imagery, Allegory
Bury the hatchet. An ax to grind. Fly off the handle (the ax handle, that is). Isn't it funny how many expressions for anger and conflict involve potentially dangerous outdoor tools used to chop things up? We're pretty sure this wasn't lost on Clarke when she decided to make a failed ax-attack the core of Lonnie's conflict with his grandfather.
As the story goes, Pop went after Lonnie with an ax after Marigold told him that Lonnie was changing his career track—again. Furious, Pop "drew the ax out from behind his back and raised it. A flint of sunlight dazzled along its edge" (7.47). A college major is a pretty ridiculous thing to threaten to kill someone over, but it's just enough to drive a serious wedge between Lonnie and his grandfather.
And neither of them is willing to budge. "He didn't care if the kid got himself eaten alive," Stan thinks to himself as he recalls the incident. "He'd written him off. Lonnie was no grandson of his anymore" (30.54). Yikes. Also—just saying—but doesn't it seem like if anyone has a legit reason to be mad in the long term, it's Lonnie? He's the one who was threatened with an ax, after all.
Anyway, this conflict comes to a real (ax) head when Nan decides to throw Pop an eightieth birthday party as a way to force the two of them to make up. When neither Lonnie nor Pop is willing to move, however, Nan decides to take matters into her own hands: She takes away Pop's ability to threaten Lonnie by destroying the ax. She throws it down a gorge near their house, and its power actually seems to fade as it falls:
She saw it glint once as it went down, heard it clang against a rock […] and then there was a moment's silence until the final, faintest chung, a sound as small and harmless as a pebble flung into the stream. (25.28)
Just as the ax makes a "harmless" sound, so, too, do Lonnie and Pop finally start to let bygones be bygones, leaving their conflict in the past where it's also harmless. Both make overtures to visit each other, and Pop's encounter with Rose helps him heal the racism that would have made Lonnie's engagement to Clara a conflict. As Pop's ax illustrates, sometimes the best way to solve a conflict really is to bury the hatchet—or in this case, have your wife throw it off a cliff.