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 4, Chapters 38-42Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 4
Part 4, Chapter 38 Summary
The narrator brings a bottle of wine to visit Yellow Calf. As they share the wine, the narrator tells Yellow Calf that the old woman has died. Yellow Calf does not seem to be listening. The narrator wonders what he and First Raise talked about when they visited all those years ago. He asks if Yellow Calf knew the old woman, but Yellow Calf demurs, saying that she was a young woman and he a youth. The narrator begins to understand that Yellow Calf is not of the Gros Ventre nation, as he’d thought, but one of the Blackfeet that the old woman had joined when she married Standing Bear.
Yellow Calf tells the narrator that the old woman had been very beautiful, but that the tribe had turned on her after Standing Bear’s death. While they’d previously been proud of her beauty, in the wake of their chief’s death they began to associate her arrival two or three months prior with the bad luck they’d been experiencing the arrival of the white men, the need to flee their winter camp, the starvation, and then Standing Bear’s death. Though she was a young widow, she was ostracized by the tribe and had to fend for herself. The narrator realizes that Yellow Calf is the hunter who had brought his grandmother food; he further realizes that this means Yellow Calf is likely Teresa’s biological father. Yellow Calf does not confirm either of these theories, but the narrator feels they share the secret even in the silence. He leaves the bottle of wine with Yellow Calf, who tells him to hurry home before the storm comes in.
Part 4, Chapter 39 Summary
The narrator rides home thinking about these revelations. Though they have not been confirmed, he deeply believes that he is right. He wonders what kept Yellow Calf and the old woman apart, since they only lived a few miles from each other. He doesn’t remember much from the time his father took him to visit Yellow Calf, but he remembers feeling at the time that it was an “event.”
Part 4, Chapter 40 Summary
As the narrator reaches their road, he sees a car pull onto it. It turns out to be Ferdinand Horn and his wife, who are stopping by to offer their condolences. The narrator is confused for a moment, having forgotten that the old woman died. Ferdinand offers the narrator a cold beer, which he takes. The narrator says that Ferdinand and his wife could come to the burial the next day. He also tells them he was visiting Yellow Calf; Ferdinand says he thought the man was already dead. Ferdinand’s wife is more interested in whether the narrator had found Agnes, and he tells her he saw Agnes in Havre. The wife hints that Agnes is the kind of girl who is almost never alone because of the attention of men and asks if the narrator brought her back. The narrator lies and says yes, then asks if they’d like to come to the house to see her. The wife sounds disappointed, but Ferdinand wants to come to the house to say hello. The wife insists that they are already late enough for their evening plans.
Part 4, Chapter 41 Summary
As they return to the ranch, the narrator hears the calf crying. He assumes this is because it is nearly feeding time, but Bird seems tense and runs towards the corral. When they arrive, they find the calf’s mother lying stuck in the mud, suffering. The narrator wants to leave her to her fate. He becomes aware of his own hatred and reveals that she was the wild-eyed spinster cow who would not go through the gates on the night Mose had died. When the cow seems to give up struggling for her life, the narrator runs to the shed and gets a rope to try to save her. He ties one end of the rope to the saddle horn to keep Bird nearby and tries to loop the other end around the cow’s head or horns to help pull her out. When this doesn’t work, he wades into the mud and manages to get the rope around her head. Bird tries to pull the cow out of the sucking mud, but the resistance is too strong and the saddle begins to slide forward.
The narrator’s injured knee is numb and will not move, so he has to pull himself hand-over-hand along the rope to escape the mud. Exhausted, he tries to get Bird to come to him, but the horse will not move. The narrator lies there, cursing himself and his mother, cursing Ferdinand Horn and his wife, and cursing Lame Bull, until he has the energy to move and remount Bird. The cow finally stands up; Bird tries to help by backing up, but the saddle continues to move so the narrator turns him for a new angle. He realizes that it’s raining hard. Too late, the narrator sees the signs that Bird is going to fall in the mud. It is, the narrator sees, “only the weight of the cow on the end of the rope that kept him from falling over backwards on top of me” (135). The horse falls and it is quiet.
Part 4, Chapter 42 Summary
The narrator lies on the ground without moving. He feels a stiffness but does not mind it because it gives him an excuse not to give up. He thinks mournfully of Mose and First Raise and how they were “the only ones [he] really loved…the only ones who were good to be with” (135). Finally, he muses that it is pleasant to be “distant” in the rain (135).
Epilogue Summary
They bury the old woman the next day. The priest does not attend, so it is only Teresa, Lame Bull, the narrator, and the grandmother. The grave is too short, so Lame Bull climbs into it and jumps up and down on the coffin until it is in deep enough. Despite the funeral director demanding payment up front to “fix up” the grandmother, the coffin is sealed shut already, so they do not get to see what, if anything, was done for her appearance.
Lame Bull wears a stylish new suit. The narrator wears one of his father’s old suits, and Teresa wears a dress. Lame Bull says that he, as head of the family, will say a few words. He begins a somewhat blithe eulogy that includes calling the old woman “Not the best mother in the world but a good mother notwithstanding” and someone “who could take it and dish it out” (137). Teresa moans and falls to her knees at the side of the grave. The narrator thinks about his knee and how the doctor will want him to have it operated on; he intends to tell the doctor that he cannot get the surgery because it would require him to be in bed for a year to recover. He worries that if he wastes a year recovering, Agnes will have forgotten him. He thinks that he will “do it right” next time by buying her favorite drinks and proposing marriage. He throws the old woman’s tobacco pouch into her grave.
Part 4 and Epilogue Analysis
The novel’s dramatic ending in some ways returns the narrator to the night of his brother’s death. Though Mose is gone, the narrator, the horse he’d been riding that night, and the cow who had balked and caused the tragedy are all there, struggling to save each other in the sucking mud. Despite his hatred for the cow, the narrator is spurred by her surrender and works to pull her from the mud. In the process, the narrator loses feeling and function in his knee, which he had injured that fateful night. There is a degree of irony in the way the rescue ends; though the narrator had blamed the cow for balking and the horse for bolting, it is the cow’s anchoring weight that keeps the horse from falling onto the narrator and crushing him. This time, it is the horse who does not survive the encounter.
The old woman’s funeral is a bit of a mess, attended only by the immediate family and affecting only Teresa. Lame Bull, who the narrator had described to himself in Chapter 42 as “a joke, a joker playing a joke on you?” (133), delivers a eulogy that is far more perfunctory and performative than sincere. Only Teresa seems to be grieving the old woman, whose coffin and grave Lame Bull treats with disrespect. The narrator is more focused on the pain in his knee and his plan to win back Agnes, about whom, by the end of the novel, he has never said anything loving or complimentary that would explain his motivation. As the novel closes and the narrator returns the old woman’s tobacco pouch to her, his mind is on anything but his grandmother.
As an ending, the last chapter and the epilogue provide little closure or resolution for the main character. The narrator remains in a mental state that is rooted in the past and squinting at the future, but which does not ground itself in the present. Having decided on a thing to do, the narrator is consumed by how to accomplish it, but his focus is not on his motivations or intervening steps—he attends only to the moment he will encounter Agnes again and attempt to persuade her to go along with his plan. In this way, the narrator seems to have modeled himself after First Raise, who focused so intensely on his future plans that he was never able to mobilize in the present. Despite the dramatic events that happen over the course of the novel and his emotional breakthrough just before the epilogue, the narrator ultimately remains apathetic and detached, unmoved by his grandmother’s death and his mother’s palpable grief.
