Summary
Chapter 14 takes place in the past. The first time Frank remembers going into town to see his father, he was nine. Eldon sends a letter to Frank in the mail, asking to see him. When Frank and the old man arrive in town, they go to Eldon’s boarding house. They find Eldon in his room drunk, dancing with a woman. Eldon is surprised to see Frank and the old man, saying he didn’t expect their visit to be today; Eldon says he had plans like picnicking or buying Frank something nice. Frank stares at him, and tells Eldon “You’re supposed to try to get to know me like a father knows a son.” Frank says that Eldon lied, and when Eldon pleadingly says to Frank “I’m your dad” Frank replies with “Ain’t got one. Never had one.”
The old man and Frank leave, and the old man apologizes to Frank for bringing him to see Eldon. The old man says that it’s important for a parent to see kids when they’re clean, not slopped-out drunk. Frank comments that he and Eldon are in the same position, with Eldon not knowing anything about being a father and Frank not knowing anything about being a son. The old man leans down, puts both his hands on Frank’s shoulders, and tells Frank that Frank knows everything there is to know about being a son. Frank doesn’t return to see Eldon until the following year, when Eldon writes Frank asking to see Frank on Frank's tenth birthday. In Frank’s memory, Eldon has become “like a photograph left in the light too long,” but Frank still feels a connection to Eldon. Eldon promises to be sober in his letter, and so Frank goes.
Frank arrives at a very nice boarding house, with flowers and deep wooden deck chairs. Eldon has shaved, his nails and hair are trimmed, and he wears a white shirt and jeans. Eldon brings out a long, skinny package, a birthday gift for Frank. It is a fly-fishing rod, and the two head out in a truck belonging to Eldon’s landlady, with a picnic lunch packed. Eldon promises not to drink. Eldon spends the day teaching Frank to fly-fish, and then later on begins sipping from a thermos. When Eldon loses his balance in the river because of the large fish he’s caught, Frank realizes his father is drunk. Frank tosses the picnic contents in the bed of the truck and drives Eldon home. Two men haul a drunken Eldon upstairs, and Frank leaves Eldon a note that reads "You lied to me!"
Frank doesn’t see his father again until he is 12. Frank journeys into town alone this time, and when he arrives his father is with a woman. Eldon is not drunk yet, but he is drinking. After Frank, Eldon, and the woman have supper Eldon leaves Frank in the boarding room to go to a bar with the woman. Frank falls asleep in the rocking chair and awakens to moaning and cursing, and he sees the woman and his father naked in bed. Eldon flips on the light after he and the woman finish having sex, whiskey in hand. The woman and Eldon look at Frank in surprise. The woman says of Frank watching “I kinda like it” and Eldon says “Well, I kinda like that ya like it,” and Eldon and the woman proceed to have sex again. Frank leaves and rides out of the town in darkness. It was supposed to be a camping trip. Eldon writes Frank the following fall about spending Christmas together, and promises to arrive by bus on Christmas day. Frank waits for him at the bus stop, but on each successive bus there is no Eldon.
Chapter 15 is back in the present. It is pre-dawn, and Frank feels his father’s head to find it hot. Frank warms up the beans, bannock, and bacon that Becka gave them. Frank rolls him and his father cigarettes. Eldon says that he’s always held words better in his head than speaking them aloud, that he’s always been a good listener wherever he went in life. Eldon tells Frank something Eldon’s mother told him, that “stories get told one word at a time.” Eldon and Frank continue on their journey, and Eldon becomes unconscious. When Eldon awakens, Frank finds Eldon soaked through his clothes with sweat. Eldon says it’s a harder fight to stay alive now. Eldon tells Frank he’s a good man, and asks if the old man know that Frank’s a good man, if the old man knows how good Frank is at being alone on the land. Frank tells Eldon that the old man knows.
They make it to the valley, their final destination. Frank sets his father on a log and gives Eldon some medicine. When Frank is sure Eldon is asleep, he ventures out to hunt. Frank kills three grouse with stones, then cooks them in the light of the setting sun. Eldon shivers the length of his body, and is hot and clammy to the touch. When Eldon awakens Frank tries to feed him some grouse, and then gives him more medicine. Eldon begins to speak, saying that “Jimmy used to say we’re a Great Mystery,” and that everything their ancestors did was about learning to live with that mystery. Eldon tells Frank that he’s never felt he belonged anywhere, but when he found out he was dying, he remembered the valley and the ridge and figured he might belong there. Later on, Eldon tells Frank that he killed a man.
Chapter 16 begins the story of Eldon killing a man, which takes place in the past. It is 1951, and the Korean War is going on. Neither Eldon nor Jimmy had ever heard of Korea, but they decided to sign up. Eldon and Jimmy figured if they signed up they could come back and earn big money, maybe go to school or be engineers. They were eighteen when they left, oblivious to danger. They trained hard and were good soldiers. Jimmy was the best shot anyone had ever seen, and Eldon and Jimmy became point men when sent to Korea. It was a war fought in the trenches, with random artillery bursts. It was a grueling war, fought in twilight and darkness.
The men would gather in platoons, and breach the safety of the trenches crawling and scurrying. Gunshots and flares “sent the skeleton landscape into paroxysms of dizzying red” and white and blooms of yellow. Bodies sailed through the air, mutilated. And then there would be darkness, and the sides would meet each other head-on, hand-to-hand combat with knives and strangling. The men fought like that for months.
Analysis
Chapter 14 paints a painful portrait of Eldon and Frank’s relationship during Frank’s childhood, where the relationship is largely comprised of alcoholic dysfunction and adolescent disappointment. Throughout the three episodes that Frank recalls, alcohol keeps Eldon from ever being truly present in Frank’s life. Simultaneously expressed in these episodes is a mutual desire for Eldon and Frank to know one another; Eldon often reaches out, making promises to be better and expressing a desire to know his son. Frank, despite himself and his knowledge of his father, often wants to believe that Eldon will live up to his word. Frank shows up when Eldon asks him to, even though Eldon never does. It is alcohol and alcoholism that blocks the connection between father and son, and it should here be noted that alcoholism is a disease.
Eldon sipping from the thermos on Frank’s tenth birthday can be understood as a painful instance of dramatic irony. Frank does not know that Eldon is drunk until Eldon falls into the river, losing his balance because of his drunkenness. The reader, however, knows Eldon as a character in the present; Eldon is dying of liver disease from alcoholism in the present, and so the reader presumes that when Wagamese describes Eldon drinking from a thermos, it is probably alcohol. This is an example of dramatic irony because the audience understands that Eldon is drunk before Frank comes to this realization. Readers know not to trust Eldon when he promises sobriety, whereas 10-year-old Frank does not. Wagamese’s use of dramatic irony elicits an emotional response from the audience, because the reader sympathizes with Frank once he discovers what we, as audience members, already know.
There is also a perversity to Eldon’s behavior, especially when considering the scene where Frank is in Eldon’s room while Eldon is having sex. These recollections demonstrate what immense wrongdoing and neglect Eldon has forced Frank to endure, and help readers to understand the depth of the anger Frank has towards his father. Storytelling then becomes a mechanism by which Eldon attempts to make amends with his son during Eldon’s final days. Frank has always desired to know his father, and desired to know more about himself and where he comes from through his father. Eldon’s stories, while not a remedy to the years of alcoholism and attendant neglect, remedy the father-son relationship “one word at a time” in letting Frank know who Eldon is.
Eldon’s body weakens significantly in Chapter 15, accelerating the pace at which Eldon tells Frank stories. It is, as Becka said, all Eldon has left as he is dying. Although death is rampant throughout the book, Eldon’s life is made vibrant through the stories and painful truths he recounts when his time is short. The value of Eldon’s stories, of the one-word-at-a-time doctrine, is made more powerful when it is all the storyteller has left to give. It is, in effect, Eldon ensuring a part of himself lives on despite the expiration of his body.
The immediacy of Eldon’s death is also what compels him to disclose one of his most painful truths, his killing of a man. Chapter 16 begins the story of Jimmy and Eldon in the Korean War; while this is only part of the story of Eldon and Jimmy being in war, it sets up the gruesome nature of the Korean War’s trench warfare. Wagamese uses color as a literary device in chapter 16, where the stark colors of warfare contrast against the “skeleton” landscape, illustrating the erratic panic of war. The red is “dizzying,” and the blooms of white and yellow mimic the blasts of guns and flares. While Eldon never actually says “PTSD,” nor mentions how he might carry the trauma of warfare in the present day, he does narrate the horrors of war. Color becomes a literary device by which the horrors of war are made more graphic and vivid.
