Summary
Chapter 22 returns to the present. Frank asks Eldon, “Where did you go?” Eldon tells Frank that he and Angie followed the work, just like they said they would. Frank asks Eldon if he drank during that time. Eldon replies, “Not for the longest time. I made a promise.” Eldon says that Angie was a wonder, and that he held to his promise for her. Eldon coughs a racking cough that shakes his body. Frank looks at him and feels only rage. Frank yells, telling Eldon that he had a right to know the stories about Angie before now. Eldon agrees with Frank. Eldon says that he was scared of telling Frank for fear of falling “back into the hurt of it all over again.” Frank tells Eldon, “You don’t get to say things like that and just die. You don’t get off that easy.”
Eldon’s face is drenched in sweat and his hands are shaking. Eldon says he “knows what’s owed,” but that he can’t give Frank the years they lost together. Eldon tells Frank that Angie would’ve been proud to know Frank as her son. The words hang in the air and Eldon and Frank gaze across the open valley. Eldon breaks the silence by saying “I want years. Every single wasted, drunken one.” Eldon says that all he has left now is the story of Angie. Eldon looks into the night sky and begins telling the story once more.
Eldon begins work at a sawmill, and Angie becomes a camp cook. They find themselves an old trapper’s cabin by a lake, and Angie begins fixing it up. During all those months with Angie, Eldon never thinks to drink. Eldon and Angie sit on the porch together every night and watch the sun set. Making their house a home never seems like work. It seems natural, like breathing. Eldon feels that for the first time, he can stand this life. Eldon feels that returning to the past, to other people and places like his mother, is a possibility now. Eldon still cannot tell Angie about his past, though, because he is ashamed. Angie becomes pregnant in the fall, and Eldon feels humbled. Eldon feels like he is a part of Angie, too, like he and the baby are the same because they both need Angie to live. That thought scares Eldon more than he has ever been scared before. Eldon is scared he can never be what he never was, and he is deeply ashamed of himself, of his past.
Eldon begins drinking again during the pregnancy. Angie tells Eldon she needs him with her, saying, “Don’t let that stuff take you away.” By the time Angie is due, Eldon is drinking in secret. He is at a tavern one night, during a downpour, too drunk. He comes home to find Angie on the floor, her hands clutched to her stomach. Eldon rushes her to the hospital, but when they perform an emergency C-section, Angie passes away. The doctor tells a drunk Eldon that “she had a chance if she made it here in time.”
Chapter 23 returns to the present. Eldon tells Frank he never got a chance to say goodbye to Angie. Frank has no words and there is a deep, angry ache in his belly. Frank stands up quickly, goes into the forest and kicks at a tree, throws a handful of stones, and leans over with his hands on his knees. When he returns Eldon is as he left him, with an odor coming off of him like his body is beginning to decay. There is a scrim of indigo in the eastern sky as the sun rises, and Frank attempts to give Eldon medicine, not speaking. Frank then says “You might as well just tell me who the old man is then,” and Eldon replies “He’s Bunky.” Frank asks how he came to be with the old man, since the old man hated Eldon so much.
Eldon brought Frank to the old man when Frank was a week old. Eldon tells Frank that every time he looked at him as a newborn baby, he saw Angie. Eldon says “I thought me lovin’ her killed her. Looking at you reminded me of that.” Bunky loved Angie, and so he agreed to care for her son. Eldon begins the story of bringing Frank to the old man, Bunky. Eldon drives up to the farmhouse but leaves the baby in the car. When he sees Bunky, Eldon begins to explain. When Bunky begins to blame Eldon for Angie’s death, Eldon does not deny it. Bunky says that when Angie needed Eldon most, he was drunk. The old man tells Eldon he’ll try to teach Frank “Indian things even though he wasn’t no Indian himself,” that he’d love Frank like his own child. Eldon watches Bunky feed Frank a bottle, and feels sore and ragged inside. All Eldon can do was walk away.
In the present, Frank looks at his father. All he can see is a shivering, dying man, full of woe. As Eldon sleeps, Frank thinks about all that Eldon has told him. Frank considers how time works on a person. He expected Eldon’s stories to fill him, but all he feels is emptiness. When he thinks of Eldon Starlight there is only pity, and Frank thinks of a life that only ever set out boundaries of pain and loss. When Eldon wakes up, he asks Frank to bring him to the edge of the cliff, overlooking the valley. Eldon softly repeats “I’m sorry” to Frank.
Frank and Eldon make their way back to the fire at the beginning of Chapter 24. Eldon’s condition has worsened, and Frank hold him as he vomits, and continues to hold him as he drifts off to sleep. Frank sleeps, too, and dreams of a man and a woman seated on a blanket, on the porch of a house Frank doesn’t recognize, watching the sun set. The sky is alive with color. The woman stands in a field, waving, and Frank sees Eldon running towards her. When Frank awakens in the night, he feels his father leave his body. There is a huff of breath, a short jolt, and then Eldon is gone. Frank traces the lines of Eldon’s face with his fingers, repeating “Shh. Hush.” Like a benediction.
Chapter 25 depicts Frank digging Eldon’s grave. It takes Frank all morning, and the ground he digs is stony and hard. Frank thinks of his father digging ten acres a day at the farm, where he grew up, where Eldon met Angie. When the grave is dug, Frank leans over Eldon, and shouts “I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing.” Frank cries then, and feels a new hurt within himself. Frank lines the bottom of the grave with boughs and moss, sprinkles tobacco in the grave. It is the only ritual he knows, an act of honoring. Frank buries his father and feels an anguish within himself that he has never felt before. Frank curses the world, curses his own sorry history, and curses himself for caring. When Frank is finished burying his father he says “War’s over, Eldon,” and that he hopes Angie is standing there, waiting for Eldon.
Chapter 26 is the final chapter of the novel. Frank travels back to the farm, which takes him two days. He goes to the barn when he arrives and helps the old man nail posts, both of them unspeaking. Without looking up Frank tells Bunky that Eldon is gone. They eat together, and Frank tells the old man about Eldon’s stories. Frank doesn’t know if Eldon got what he wanted in the end. Bunky asks Frank what Eldon wanted, and Frank replies that he doesn’t know. Maybe Frank was supposed to forgive Eldon. The old man asks Frank if he does forgive Eldon, and Frank says he doesn’t know. Frank tells the old man that he, Bunky, has been Frank’s father for all these years. The old man replies, eyes shining, that he hoped he would be. Frank brings out a stone from Eldon’s grave, figuring that Bunky might’ve lost something in Eldon’s death, too. Bunky thanks him, and they gaze silently at each other. Frank goes out onto the land, watching the sun set across the valley, closing his eyes. When he opens them, he sees the ghostly shape of people riding horses through the trees, of women gathering herbs and berries. Frank raises his hand to the idea of his mother and father and a line of people he’s never known. He then rides back to the farmhouse, where the old man is waiting.
Analysis
Chapter 22 begins with Frank voicing his anger towards Eldon. Frank’s pain connects to the larger theme of intergenerational trauma throughout the novel. Frank has dealt with Eldon’s alcoholism—and, by extension, Eldon’s pain—for all his life. Intergenerational trauma describes the passing down of trauma through families and generations. Eldon has passed down his trauma to Frank because Eldon’s behavior as result of his traumatic past has directly impacted, and traumatized, Frank. This doesn’t mean that Frank has or is living through the trauma that Eldon had; rather, Eldon acts out and reacts to his trauma in a way that affects Frank in many ways.
Eldon’s reluctance to share his story and past hinders his relationship with Angie. Eldon’s continuous burden of shame, which colored his life and actions, is what pushed him to begin drinking again during Angie’s pregnancy; Eldon says earlier in the book that “love and shame don’t mix.” Having been ashamed of who he was from the outset of their relationship, Eldon could never disclose his past self to Angie. Eldon’s inability to tell his story to anyone is a large part of his pain throughout the novel, because he carries the burden of his pain all by himself. Eldon being able to share his stories with Frank at the end of his life, having never shared them before, is a testament to the act of Eldon’s storytelling. Frank is the first, and only, witness to Eldon’s pain. When Eldon dies, Frank reflects on his father’s life as one that “only ever set out boundaries of pain and loss.”
Right before Eldon passes away, Frank dreams of a man and a woman watching the sun set on the porch of a cabin. Frank then dreams of Eldon running to Angie in a field. Frank awakens in the night to find Eldon taking his last breath; Wagamese creates a kind of connection between the dream-world and reality. Frank senses his father’s leaving before it actually happens; Frank’s sensing Eldon’s passing is, in a way, made possible through the stories Eldon told Frank, because Frank’s dream mimics Eldon’s story. There is therefore a direct textual parallelism to an earlier moment in the novel, when Eldon and Angie are sitting on their porch at their cabin.
There is also a repetition of Angie and the land being thematically connected, especially as Angie waits for Eldon in a field during Frank’s dream. Wagamese thematizes the land throughout the novel, and so the connection Frank’s mother has to the land makes the novel’s connection to the land more complex. Frank has always loved the land, and knows the land because of Bunky’s teachings. Angie knows the land just as she knows storytelling. Angie knows where she comes from and what this means; in the context of Indigeneity, place and knowledge are intricately tied. Knowledge is held in places.
This is not an example of the “mother earth” trope; rather, the connection between mother and son is brokered through the land, despite the time and space that keep Angie and Frank apart. When Frank digs Eldon’s grave, there is a parallel between the hard, unrelenting land Frank digs and the land Eldon dug when he built the fence for Bunky. In the very last pages of the novel, Frank also comes to know his ancestors through the land. The final chapters of Medicine Walk return to and reiterate the thematic importance of land within the novel, as the land connects Frank to generational knowledge and to his family.
