63 pages • 2 hours read
James WelchWinter In The Blood
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1974A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 3, Chapters 32-37Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 3
Part 3, Chapter 32 Summary
The narrator gets a ride in an Oldsmobile with a family: a man, his wife, and their daughter. The narrator rides in the backseat with the daughter, who is frail, and tunes out of the parents’ conversation, despite the man’s attempts to include him. He falls asleep and wakes up when the car pulls suddenly off the road. The girl runs out of the car to vomit behind some bushes. The parents explain that she is in poor health and neglects to take her medication. The narrator says they’re only five miles from the ranch and that he could walk, but the man says it’s too far in this heat. The water in the reservoir is low and the plants around it are drooping. The man asks if there are any fish in the water; the narrator says there are turtles. When the daughter returns, the family drives the narrator to the entrance of the ranch; they give him a fresh peach and take a photo of him, with his permission.
Part 3, Chapter 33 Summary
This chapter begins with an ambiguous timeline, similar to the way Chapter 25 began. The narrator throws clods of heavy clay (called “gumbo”) into a rosebush until the bird hiding in it emerges and flies away. Not too far away is an old cottonwood where the narrator had once shot a hawk. He notes, “even Mose had had to admit it was a good shot” and the narrative jumps back in time (99), to the story of having shot the hawk. The narrator and his brother go to retrieve the hawk and find it injured but still alive. The hawk opens his mouth, revealing his tongue, which unsettles the boys. They stand and watch it die, the joy from the kill gone.
Back in the present, the narrator throws the peach’s purple paper wrapping into a bush and eats the peach. He walks to the house and finds it empty; not even the old woman is in the living room. The rocking chair is still and silent. The stacks of movie magazines are gone. He thinks that without her there, he is finally able to look around without feeling like he is violating the old woman’s privacy, but now that he looks he sees that very little of the room actually belonged to her. The bedding on the cot is neatly folded and stacked, and the narrator realizes that the old woman must have died. He turns on the kitchen radio and begins heating water on the stove for the tub, remembering that he and Mose used to bathe in the tub on Sunday nights. He cannot squat in the tub because of his bad knee, but he bathes and rinses himself. He retrieves clean clothing from Teresa’s ironing, empties the tub, mops the floor, and goes out to feed the calf.
Part 3, Chapter 34 Summary
Teresa and Lame Bull return with groceries and confirm that the old woman died. Lame Bull questions the narrator about his nose. Teresa tells the narrator that the old woman is in Harlem, where the morticians will “fix her up” and the priest will “say a few words over her” (106). The narrator, still resentful that the priest will not bury Indigenous Americans on their own land, keeps asking why they won’t just bury her there. Teresa tells him that they will bury her at home, but that she is in town for now. The narrator pushes about whether or not the priest will come, but Teresa makes excuses for him, saying he’s busy and being sent to a new parish. The narrator goes on about how no one he knows will miss the priest, but Teresa does not respond to his jabs.
Lame Bull opens a bottle of wine for them, but Teresa silently closes herself into the bedroom. Lame Bull is surprised but says it was probably the combination of “that fool priest and then that bloodsucker down at the funeral parlor” (107), which reminds the reader that Teresa is in the process of grieving her mother and arranging funeral details. Lame Bull opens some Fritos, and he and the narrator drink together. Lame Bull says they’ll have to dig a grave tomorrow.
Part 3, Chapter 35 Summary
Lame Bull and the narrator dig a grave for the old woman. The narrator reflects on how easy it is, compared to how difficult it had been to dig a grave for First Raise in the frozen depths of winter. After they dig the grave, the narrator notices that his father’s grave had sunk about a foot. Teresa waves a scarf at them from the shed, calling them back to the house. Lame Bull complains that the funeral home will not bring the old woman home to be buried, and the narrator explains that the man at the funeral home demands payment in advance or he will not work on and release the deceased’s body. He says that they had to borrow money to get First Raise’s body back, $200 or $300 worth. Lame Bull is shocked at the price for a coffin, but the narrator explains that the cost includes making the deceased presentable with makeup and clothing.
Lame Bull goes back to the house, leaving the narrator behind. The narrator thinks that it will be hot again tomorrow, with little chance of rain. It is a dry season, different and maybe better than fall, “when the cold walks with you and beds down with you at night, never leaving you except for those couple of hours in the evening when the oil stove hums it out of your bones.” (110). Thinking about the change of seasons propels the narrator back into memories of his brother, and his regret that they’d run the herd back to the ranch the night Mose died.
Part 3, Chapter 36 Summary
The narrative jumps back 20 years, to the day when the narrator and Mose were driving the herd across the highway to the ranch. They “ran” the herd, racing towards the valley while the brothers stuck close behind them, shouting to keep the cows moving. Mose opens the gate for them and tries on an authoritative voice as he tells the narrator that they needed to keep the herd moving. It is dusk, “that time of day the light plays tricks on you” and your perception becomes confused” (110).
At first, things seem to be going well, though the work is difficult and it is uncomfortably cold. The herd is spooked by the sensation of walking on the asphalt and the situation is tense. Then the “spinster” at the front of the herd bolts and the others follow her; at the gate, however, the spinster stops and refuses to go through. A calf breaks from the herd. Bird, who the narrator is riding, leaps forward to chase the calf and the narrator, at 12 years old, is not strong enough to deter the horse from its path. A car that they hadn’t seen coming collides with Mose’s horse. The narrator sees a “smaller figure flying slowly over the top of the car to land with the hush of a stuffed doll” (112). Startled by the sound, the calf stops running; Bird jolts and the narrator falls from his back, hitting his knee on a rock when he lands.
Part 3, Chapter 37 Summary
In the present, Teresa and Lame Bull drive past the narrator on their way to town. There is one grave that the narrator has not looked at but can describe in detail without seeing it: Mose’s. The narrator puts away the tools and returns to the house to saddle up Bird. They ride and the narrator reflects on the world from Bird’s perspective, trying to imagine and empathize with the process of being “broken” from a wild animal into a cow horse. The narrator becomes emotional about this, and about Bird’s old age. He cries as he remembers standing over his brother’s broken body, feeling guilt and immense grief, as the man who had been driving the car tried to pull him away.
Part 3 Analysis
The blurring of timelines continues in Part 3, with the narrative shifting between the present and detailed recollections of the past. The old woman’s death sparks more memories for the narrator, particularly that of his brother’s death. Though the narrator is resolute that the old woman should be buried at home, the other graves in the family cemetery are described as washed out and neglected. Though Lame Bull and the narrator work efficiently and discuss the logistics with apparent unmoved pragmatism, the narrator remembers that when they had dug his father’s grave—a miserable battle against the frozen ground—he had “felt only relief that we had finally gotten the hole dug. The sorrow, what there was of it, came later” (108). This idea of displaced sorrow resonates with the narrator’s apathy. The narrator refuses to look at Mose’s grave in the cemetery but remembers the way it looks, down to the smallest detail. Even the memory of the grave forces the narrator to relive his brother’s death, and the narrative moves fluidly between events in the present and the past.
The novel draws a parallel between Teresa and the old woman in this section. The narrator’s callous criticisms of Teresa’s funeral planning are driven by his own resentments and feelings, and do not acknowledge or make space for the grief Teresa feels about her mother dying. The narrator notes that there is “something different about her face,” a darkness and solemnity that makes him notice “how much she had come to resemble the old lady” (107). Further, when Teresa retreats to her bedroom, the narrator notes the sound of her bedsprings, which echoes his previous observations about the old woman’s chair creaking in the living room.
The narrator, who has spent much of the novel avoiding his emotions and denying any strong feelings, is finally overcome by grief when he takes Bird out for a ride. Through a long reflection on Bird’s birth as a wild creature and an attempt to empathize with the confusion and frustration of being “broken” for service by a man, the narrator is able to express a deep understanding of being frightened, manipulated, and forced into a form that meets the needs of a world, against which you have no defense. He forgives Bird for acting on his instincts that day 20 years ago, when Mose died. In absolving the horse, he is really trying to relieve his own feelings of guilt and responsibility for the tragedy. His mask of apathy falls away and he feels returned to himself as a child, immersed in the moment of seeing that his beloved brother was dead.
