Summary
John wakes up rested and feeling pretty good about that Jesus guy—they exchanged a few tricks of the trade. He goes out into the yard naked, where he discovers the raccoons pooped and peed all over his motorcycle in the night. He’s furious. Yelling at them, he reveals what they’re mad about—they believe he ate one of their ancestors, and that does seem to be true, though he still denies it. The elderly raccoon who spoke to him on the stump a few nights ago offers him a deal, which John listens to and accepts, hoping it will end this thing with the raccoons for good.
Maggie meets with Crystal and Kait Park in preparation for the press conference; they advise her to say something definitive about what the land will be used for, even if it’s a lie.
Virgil goes home for lunch, where Wayne tells him his plan: go to Sam Aandeg’s, confront John, and fight him if necessary to get him to leave town. Wayne starts walking to Sam’s, and Virgil goes to school, but he learns Dakota isn’t around; fearing she’s gone to find John, Virgil leaves school and catches up to Wayne.
At Sam’s house, they see John pull up on his motorcycle with multiple bags of groceries, which he tosses into the forest—toward hundreds of raccoons. Bacon, shrimp, fruits, nuts, snack foods, eggs, candy, and then, when the raccoons demand more, all the food from Sammy’s house: bread, pickles, Cheerios, Fig Newtons. He threatens to burn the forest down, but the raccoons are sated; their feud has ended. John goes inside.
Wayne cuts the headlight off John’s motorcycle, then yells for John to come outside. John now has yellow/amber eyes. Wayne accuses him of being Nanabush, which John neither confirms nor denies; the men fight in the trees, which Virgil observes with awe. Dakota comes out from a hiding spot nearby, and Virgil tells her John is Nanabush, though she doesn’t remember who that is at first. The fight ends. Wayne comes down from the treetops bloodied and delirious, and John is nowhere to be found. As Virgil and Dakota drag Wayne’s unconscious body away, Dakota asks her cousin to tell her about Nanabush.
The stranger hides on his roof, nursing a cracked rib and other injuries, but at least he has his headlight back. Battles seemed so much easier in the olden days.
The press conference is set to start soon. After everyone is gone, Sammy runs into his home and starts chugging beer—he saw the forest moving and it’s all too much for him; if the teachings of the residential school had stuck with him, he’d call it the End of Days.
At the press conference, Maggie gives a speech about Native connection to the land. A reporter looks down and finds a human leg bone, and he panics, causing a commotion and derailing the press conference. Crystal and Kait Park leave quickly; Maggie is left alone with the frenzied reporters, and John arrives on his motorcycle to rescue her. He drives to her house, where he admits that he put the bones in the ground so that the land can go untouched, like Maggie wanted. The bones are mostly Anishnawbe, but he threw in a few curveballs (caveman, Egyptian, etc.) as a little joke. Maggie knows this plan won't work with today's science and knowledge of real burial grounds. All he's made is a logistical nightmare. Maggie is furious; she punches John in the solar plexus and kicks him in the crotch, telling him to get off her reserve before she gets him arrested or killed.
After taking Wayne to a clinic and sending Dakota home, Virgil goes to his favorite train-watching rock. He finds John there, looking beaten and exhausted, next to a pile of braided sweetgrass. They talk; John asks why Virgil likes watching trains, when the people on those trains likely envy his life instead. Virgil asks if John was planning on taking his mother to the land of the dead, and John says no—the setting sun in the petroglyph just represents the Setting Sun Motel in town. “Sometimes, Virgil, a pipe is just a pipe” (325) he says, and they laugh hysterically. Virgil asks if he’s Nanabush, and John doesn’t explicitly say yes (“what’s in a name?”), but he shows Virgil some petroglyphs he carved hundreds or maybe thousands of years ago. John admits that the petroglyphs across the country were carved by him while he was bored on the road, and they don’t have any particular spiritual meaning: “Who knew people would think they were important? People crack me up” (331).
Finally, Virgil asks why John came here, and John says that he couldn’t let Lillian go without saying goodbye—he owed her that, as an old and true friend. He gives Virgil hints about the promise he made Lillian: “It was a big promise. And part of it involved you. Because she really cared for you. She thought you needed a little magic in your life. Everybody does occasionally” (332). John offers Virgil a ride home, and he accepts. John and Virgil walk to John’s motorcycle, talking about life and being Native and the value of silliness. Virgil loves the ride on the 1953 Indian Chief motorcycle.
John drops him off near the house, beside Beer Bay, and he’s no longer the white man John—he’s now a very handsome Native man, and Virgil sees the last trace of yellow/amber before his eyes are filled in with brown. The stranger confirms that he really is Nanabush, just as Virgil is Virgil. He drives toward the lake, but not before Virgil gives him one of the braids of sweetgrass Nanabush himself made, to hang on his handlebars and remind him of Otter Lake. Because there’s no word for goodbye in the Anishnawbe language, they say “Ga-waabamin,” or "I’ll be seeing you."
Virgil had planned to write about his uncle’s martial art for his essay to pass grade seven, but now thinks he’ll write about Nanabush instead. It’ll take less research, and he won’t have to use so many adverbs and adjectives.
Around two weeks later, Virgil, Maggie, Wayne, and Dakota finish dinner at Maggie’s house. Wayne is happy at Maggie’s place, slowly reentering society, though still pondering his martial art (and teaching some to Virgil). Dakota has become fascinated with Nanabush stories, especially the bawdy ones. Maggie has adopted a more Zen approach to life—the purchased land is still crawling with police and scientists, but she’s taking time to relax and spend time with Virgil. And Virgil has turned in his essay, though he still doesn’t know if he passed grade seven. His life is pretty much the same, though he goes out to watch trains less frequently, and last time he took Dakota with him. After dinner, Wayne and Maggie make plans to approve Lillian’s headstone together, and Wayne admits he’s thinking of flirting with a woman in town. Meanwhile, Virgil and Dakota practice Wayne’s martial art outside; they think they hear a motorcycle, but it’s just a boat on Beer Lake.
Seventeen years, three months, and four days later, the last surviving member of the Otter Lake Debating Society, Michael Mukwa, dies. He swore on his deathbed, as he had for so many years, that one summer day he was heading home in his fishing boat when a familiar red-and-white motorcycle starting riding the wake from his boat like a surfboard. The rider popped a wheelie, then sped away. Only three people in the village believed him.
The book ends first-person with italics, like the beginning: And that’s how it happened to a cousin of mine. I told you it was a long story. They’re the best ’cause you can wrap one around you like a nice warm blanket (345).
Analysis
In this final set of chapters, both Wayne and Maggie take on John in their own ways. Wayne engages John in an outright battle up in the trees, and though he does not win outright, he learns that the “training” he’s been working on is sufficient to take on a Trickster god. He has bumps and bruises but says excitedly to Virgil and Dakota that “You know, they always say there’s a world of difference between training and the actual thing. I think I get the point now” and “all in all, all things considered, when you take everything into consideration, under the circumstances, I feel great!” (300). It makes sense that Wayne is the one who is able to do this, as he seems the closest to his roots—he lives off the land, he speaks Anishnawbe, he was Lillian’s favorite, he trains in Native martial arts, etc.
But it’s actually Maggie who gives John the final blow. When he takes her away from her disastrous press conference at which it was discovered human bones were shallowly embedded in the land that the tribe had just gotten back, she is initially grateful. Then he reveals that he put the bones there to help her get what she wanted in terms of the land being untouched, and she goes into a rage. Taylor writes, “Maggie wasn’t responding in the manner John had been expecting. She was not thrilled. He was not happy. She was not smothering him with kisses of gratitude” (314). Eventually she is so frustrated with him that she orders him off her reserve and kicks him in the crotch, sending him sprawling to the ground. It isn’t altogether that surprising that this is the final straw for John because he never really understood women throughout the many years of his life. His assessment of women in response to Maggie’s earlier query is that “Some are good. Some are bad” (180), an irritating and simplistic assessment. It takes a bunch of raccoons, a proud Native man (Wayne), and an angry Native woman (Maggie) to send John packing.
Before he leaves, though, he has an endearing conversation with Virgil up on the rocks. He never had any real animus towards the boy, and now on his way out he offers him some useful life advice. He says kindly of the trains that Virgil always watches wistfully, “You know, there are probably people sitting on that train looking at you sitting on this rock, thinking, ‘Sure wish I could be out in the woods, watching the world go by, instead of sitting in here beside somebody who’s snoring and farting, and going somewhere I’d rather not be going” (324). And on the way to Virgil’s home, “they talked about life, about being Native, about being young and being old, about Lillian and the need to be silly occasionally” (333). It seems that John really did fulfill his promise to Lillian to bring magic into the boy’s life.
Taylor wraps up his novel in a heartwarming way. Wayne is back in the family, “safely ensconced at his sister’s, feeling oddly comfortable there” (339). He is thinking about dating, is teaching Virgil his martial art, and is officially making peace with his mother’s death. Maggie is still chief but has decided to take a more Zen approach to life. Dakota is embracing her Indigenous history more by reading all the Nanabush stories her parents never taught her. Virgil is writing his essay to pass his grade and even though not too much has changed, there are some subtle things— “He still went to his rock by the railroad tracks, though less often, and the last time he took Dakota, to show her the petroglyphs… One of the most significant changes, if it could be called that, was the knowing smile he shared with his uncle and cousin” (340). Like Wayne, Virgil was an outsider who has now embraced a more dynamic family life.
And John/Nanabush? Daniel Heath Justice writes that “He brings truth, love, and chaos in his wake, but in so doing, lays bare festering wounds, unacknowledged losses, and unhealthy secrets that must be dealt with if the community has any hope of a healthy future.” He is off somewhere new now to presumably do the same thing, or maybe lie fallow for awhile. What Taylor leaves us with is an indication that John/Nanabush has also learned something from his adventures in Otter Lake. In his dream conversation with Jesus, which takes place while he is in a weakened state (he normally doesn’t dream), he asks Jesus, “There is something you have the ability to do that I would love to master. It would sure make travelling a lot easier” (269). This is, of course, walking on water, and in the epilogue to the novel, a Native man named Michael Mukwa boating on the lake swears that he saw “A familiar, large red-and-white motorcycle… barrelling along behind him, riding the wake from his boat like a surfboard” (344). Lillian was right that the two could exist simultaneously and everything would be just fine.
