Summary
Chapter 17 moves back into the present, with Eldon and Frank sitting around the fire. Eldon tells Frank that their last name, Starlight, is a teacher’s name. Jimmy told Eldon that. Jimmy said “a man oughta know why he’s called what he is.” Jimmy said “Starlight” was the name given to people that got their teachings from the Star People, long ago. That Starlights were meant to be teachers and storytellers. Eldon says that teachings were meant to be passed down on a night such as the one he and Frank have, much in the manner he is telling stories now. With that, Eldon delves into the story of him killing a man once more.
The story catapults back into the Korean War, where Jimmy and Eldon sit in the trenches. Jimmy says to Eldon “we’re warriors now, right?” Eldon replies that they’re just soldiers. Jimmy tells Eldon that Ojibways used to bury their warriors upright, facing east where the sun rose. That way when the warriors were ready, they could follow the sun across the sky into the Happy Hunting Grounds, where they would once again be warriors. Jimmy tells Eldon this is how he wants to be buried. Jimmy says that if he gets killed in Korea, Eldon needs to take Jimmy’s body out into the bush and bury him just like that. Jimmy makes Eldon swear he will. In the darkness, Jimmy slashes a line across his palm and daubs curvy lines of blood on Eldon’s cheeks. “Now you do me the same way,” Jimmy tells Eldon.
Later on, the lieutenant approaches Jimmy and Eldon and tells them he needs volunteers for an advance reconnaissance. The lieutenant needs both the number and location of the enemy, and sends just Jimmy and Eldon out. They put boot-black on their faces and crawl out of the trench, and Eldon feels the fear in him “like ice in his gut.” The night is motionless around them. The first thing they hear are voices, and then the hushing of voices. Jimmy and Eldon don’t breathe. The first shell hits the earth. Jimmy leaps to his feet, and they begin to fight. It seems as though the entire Chinese and North Korean armies are advancing towards them. When Jimmy kills a Chinese solider with his knife, Jimmy and Eldon run.
Jimmy soon slams into the ground and Eldon stops his tracks, his feet in a dark pond of Jimmy’s blood. Jimmy has been shot through the chest. Eldon pulls Jimmy close to him in the purple mud, holding Jimmy to his chest. Jimmy begins to scream, threatening to give their position away. Eldon covers Jimmy’s mouth with his hand and pins Jimmy’s chest with his knee. Eldon takes Jimmy’s knife and holds it under Jimmy’s rib cage. They both stare at each other in silence. Jimmy closes his eyes, stills his body, then opens them again and nods at Eldon. The knife goes in almost on its own, and Eldon twists it like he was trained to do. Eldon leans forward, cheek to cheek with Jimmy, and witnesses Jimmy’s last breath. Eldon runs, screaming and weeping, from Jimmy’s body and the gunfire into his own private war.
Back in the present, Eldon tells Frank that he took to drinking after that. Eldon says he drank so much that the army kicked him out quickly, and he never told anyone about his killing Jimmy. Frank can see the stars in the purple sky above, and the night is calm. Frank stokes the fire, bringing it to light once more, and in the darkness he sees the gaunt shape of his father. Frank tells Eldon that it must’ve been hard “carrying Jimmy all this time.” Eldon struggles to speak, finally forming the words “the stars are in us.” Eldon is trembling, and his time is near. The stars arrange themselves into shapes and suggestions above Frank, but when Frank tries to feel the stars within himself he feels only emptiness. Frank and Eldon get into an argument, during which Eldon says “You never been in a war, Frank” and Frank replies that he is living in the war Eldon never finished. Eldon falls asleep, and Frank says “War’s nearly over.”
Chapter 18 begins at dawn. Frank asks Eldon if he needs medicine or hooch. Eldon replies some of both, but he is shaking violently, and struggles to swallow both liquids. Frank journeys to the stream and spears two trout, skewers some mushrooms he finds in the woods, and comes back to find Eldon shaking violently and sweating. Eldon cannot drink any more of the alcohol, but he does choke some medicine down. Eldon stops convulsing and his breathing soon normalizes. He tells Frank “there’s one more thing,” to which Frank replies “my mother.” Eldon is silent for some time, and Frank asks his father how he’ll know Eldon’s not lying. Eldon tells Frank he couldn’t lie about her, although he figured he might drink her away over all these years. Then Eldon begins the story of Frank’s mother.
Eldon’s story begins with the notion that “time was a thing he carried,” but it took Eldon long after the Korean War to figure that out. Eldon wanders for years after the war, seeking a place that carried no reminders of his past, that was “barren of memory and recollection.” But then Eldon realized that he occupied, and belonged, nowhere. Every place was the same. He settled back down in Parson’s Gap, near the logging camp where he had left his mother; the camp was long deserted. It was around this time that he became a regular at the bar called Charlie’s, and Eldon began working hard to pay for his drinking binges.
One day at Charlie’s he sees a beautiful, tall, lean woman dancing, with dark hair and light feet. An older man approaches Eldon’s table and asks if he can sit, introducing himself as Bunky. Bunky explains he got the name as a kid because his hair went every which way. Bunky says of the woman “she’s a peach, don’t ya think?” and tells Eldon she’s Native like Eldon is. Eldon says “You figure?” and Bunky says “Oh yeah,” even though Bunky is white. Bunky breaks up a bar fight, and the woman comes to sit with them telling Bunky that “was the kindest and bravest thing” she ever saw. The woman introduces herself as Angie Pratt. She is beautiful, with her attention mostly focused on Bunky. Eldon leaves them.
Analysis
Chapter 17 reveals the reason Eldon wants to be buried the warrior way: Eldon promised to bury Jimmy in the warrior way, but never got the chance given the nature of Jimmy’s death. In this way, readers might begin to think of Eldon’s burial as a tribute to Jimmy, rather than Eldon necessarily seeing himself as a warrior. During the scene where Jimmy marks Eldon’s face with blood, there is a distinct parallelism to the old man marking Frank’s face with blood when he kills his first deer. The motions of the old man and Jimmy are almost identical, where both form squiggly marks on the forehead and either cheek of Eldon and Frank, respectively. The only difference is that the act between Jimmy and Eldon is reciprocal: Eldon marks Jimmy just as Jimmy marks him.
By contrast, the old man marks Frank, but not vice versa—after the old man puts the marks on Frank’s face, Frank says “Cuz I’m Indian” and the old man replies “Cuz I’m not.” Both instances of face-marking are made with a promise: Eldon promises to bury Jimmy in the warrior way, and the old man promises to teach Eldon to be a good man. Both instances of marking also follow relaying knowledge. The old man teaches Frank that he must give thanks to the animal he killed, and Jimmy teaches Eldon about Ojibway funerary practices. There is a kind of intimacy in touching another’s face, especially when marking it with blood. The parallelism in these acts of marking speaks to the sanctity of knowledge and promises through their display of intimacy.
Eldon killing Jimmy is an example of situational irony. When Eldon says that he killed a man, the audience does not assume this man is Jimmy. Jimmy has been Eldon’s best friend, and all Eldon has, for most of Eldon’s life. Eldon killing Jimmy is an example of situational irony because the audience expects that Eldon’s killing a man would have been violent, or motivated by Eldon’s drinking. The audience expects Eldon to have wanted to kill the man he killed. Contrary to audience expectation, Eldon does not want to kill Jimmy, nor does Eldon want Jimmy dead. Eldon is forced to kill Jimmy because Jimmy risks giving up their position, and because Jimmy would’ve died a slower, more painful death otherwise.
When Jimmy is shot, color becomes an important literary device once more. The mud around Jimmy’s body becomes purple, evocative of the purple heart given to soldiers who are wounded or killed. The purple mud around Jimmy also echoes the purple sky above Frank in Chapter 18. After the story about Jimmy and the meaning of “Starlight,” the purple sky above parallels the mud in Jimmy’s death as if his story, too, is painted in the stars. Starlights receive their stories from the Star People, and Frank receives the story of Jimmy under a purple night sky. The purple of the sky is especially poignant because its description immediately follows the story of Jimmy’s death, and so the repetition of the color purple creates an echo of the past in the present.
The story of Frank’s mother, Angie Pratt, is the last and longest story Eldon recounts to Frank. After Jimmy’s death, Eldon searches for a place where he is not reminded of his pain. Eldon realizes that there is no place “barren of memory,” and that he belongs nowhere. That there is no place where Eldon is not reminded of his pain alludes to Eldon actually carrying that pain inside of himself. “Time was a thing he carried” means that Eldon carries the passage of time, and so carries the pain of the events that he has endured during that time. The discovery of this pain inside himself, of this carrying of time, becomes a motivation to drink. Many alcoholics drink so as not to feel anything. When Eldon first meets Angie and Bunky, he is doing just that: drinking so as not to feel his pain.
