Summary
Even at Lillian’s funeral reception, Maggie is approached by people who have ideas for what to do with the land. It exhausts her, and she has more sympathy for her late husband who had to deal with these issues every hour of the day (and night).
Maggie’s oldest sister, Diane, wonders if their younger brother Wayne is coming. It is not uncommon for Wayne to be gone for weeks or months at a time. He is seen as somewhat of a mystic, and lives out on his solitary island and rarely interacts with the family.
Virgil asks to go home early, and she lets him, telling him she’ll cook him a proper meal later.
Instead of going home, though, Virgil goes to his usual spot north of town to watch trains. He often skips school to do this, and his dream in life is to buy a train ticket someday. But in his regular train-watching spot, he finds the stranger braiding sweetgrass. The stranger calls himself John Tanner, and he says his time of late has been filled with boredom and alienation. He tells Virgil he knew his grandmother and had made her two promises, both involving Virgil. Virgil is perplexed and asks what they are, but the train passes as John tells him. The final words Virgil catches are about his not getting in the way, and “tikwamshin.”
John departs, leaving seven braids of sweetgrass behind. Virgil is very confused.
Two days later, Maggie is struggling with land acquisition complications. She knows she is a good chief but the whole process of the land acquisition is very tedious. Driving home on a remote road that borders the acquired land, she gets a flat tire and is soon approached by the stranger on his impressive motorcycle. He introduces himself as John Richardson, and she finds him incredibly attractive. He helps with her tire, but her spare is deflated, so he drives her through town on the motorcycle. This causes a stir among the community and it bothers Virgil, but Dakota thinks it is really cool of his mom.
Afterward, John reflects that the day went well, though next time he has to make a flat tire, he’ll be sure to cut deeper into the rubber to speed things up. He’s arrived on the newly purchased land, where he encounters a group of raccoons—for reasons long since lost to time and memory, raccoons hate him, and he hates raccoons—but today, their ceasefire holds, and the raccoons return to the woods.
Over a home-cooked dinner that night, Virgil listens to his mom talk about John. He’s tempted to tell her about John making out with his grandma before she died, but he’s not sure how. Maggie shares that she invited John over for dinner tomorrow as thanks for saving her, and Virgil is troubled.
John breaks into the town church late that night. He observes this man named Jesus, wondering why so many people flock to him nowadays, staring at the crucifix for many hours. He doesn’t realize how much they have in common—both born to human mothers of “less-than-corporeal" (97) fathers—though he does reflect that at least he got to beat his own dad up. When he leaves the church, he signs the guest book as John Prestor.
Maggie wakes up at 4 a.m. thinking of John. She hasn’t had a date since Clifford died three years ago, and this upcoming dinner isn’t a date, but she makes a pot of coffee and starts looking through dusty cookbooks for dinner recipes. She thinks John is “young, incredibly good-looking, muscular, and had that incredible machine” (98). Feeling a bit foolish, she tells herself it is just dinner and she is not a teenager.
John watches her house from outside for a while, then returns to his motorcycle, knowing the raccoons are watching—they’re gathering, and that can’t be good.
On his usual rock by the train tracks, Virgil observes some petroglyphs made recently of a man riding something, a woman, and a sun, as well as the word tikwamshin. He guesses that John made these carvings and that they indicate John’s interest in Maggie and his desire to take her away somewhere.
Meanwhile, John is hungry; he tries to run over a raccoon, who avoids him and now carries a grudge. He finds Dakota walking along the road, and he introduces himself as John Clayton. She leads him to Betty Lou’s Take-Out, the only restaurant in town, where he introduces himself as John From and is too disgusted by the fried food to eat it.
That evening, as Maggie preps chicken cacciatore for dinner, Virgil is upset—she’s never put this much effort into making him dinner. John arrives with wine, though he doesn’t drink anymore, and he claims to be lactose intolerant and nearly diabetic (Maggie jokes, “Sure you’re not Native?” [114]). Virgil asks John his full name—John covers, saying he’s John Richardson Tanner—and then Virgil asks Maggie what tikwamshin means, but she doesn’t know, and she goes to the kitchen to look for non-sugar sweetener for John’s coffee, leaving the men alone. John kicks Virgil under the table, and the two have a whispered conversation: Virgil says to leave his mother alone, and John says Maggie will be his. When Maggie returns, Virgil kicks John’s knee, making him spill coffee on the white tablecloth Maggie laid out for the occasion. In the living room after dinner, Virgil notes that Maggie says John’s eyes are green, but Dakota was gushing about John’s blue eyes. John evades questions about his background, telling them that he knew Lillian a long time ago. He tells Maggie that her mother wasn’t disappointed in her, she just wished her daughter had a bit more Anishnawbe magic in her life. When Virgil asks, John says he’s staying with Sam Aandeg. Maggie and Virgil tell him Sam’s crazy, and John agrees, saying he likes people like that. However, Maggie and Virgil know that Sam Aandeg only speaks Anishnawbe, so this white man shouldn’t understand a word he’s saying. When they mention this, John makes a hasty exit. In his rush, he doesn’t notice the dozens of raccoons watching him from the bushes.
The next day, Maggie gets the new land surveyed, hears progressively worse ideas about what to do with that land, and talks to Virgil’s teacher, Ms. Weatherford, about how Virgil isn’t applying himself. She gets a migraine and lies down for an hour.
Her older sister Marie invites her out for drinks with friends so they can get the gossip about John, and Virgil loves that idea, hoping that the women will make fun of John, as women so often do about men.
Twenty minutes after she leaves, Virgil hears some intriguing traditional-but-not music playing, and he leaves the house to investigate. He finds John whatever-his-last-name-is by the lake, dancing alone in a bizarre, entrancing, traditional-yet-contemporary way in the moonlight, in a way that reminds Virgil of… something he can’t quite recall. He runs home and decides to stop whatever John’s plan is—and to stop a strange man, he’ll need the help of another strange man. He’ll need to see his Uncle Wayne.
Virgil wasn’t the only one watching, though. Across the lake, Dakota watches John through her binoculars dance then strip naked and go for a swim. From his island, Wayne hears the music and is intrigued. He hopes whatever hooligan is playing it gets arrested. He needs his rest—you never know what tomorrow might bring.
Analysis
One of Taylor’s successes in the novel is his ability to heighten our suspense about just who John actually is.
From the onset of the book we know he’s not a normal person, as he can dive under water for long periods of time, for example, and we know that he is out of commission for a while and then wakes up when Lillian “calls” him out of his stupor. We know it’s absurd that he is a 25-year-old white man with a motorcycle, and certainly register Lillian’s shock when he reveals himself as her former lover. The third-person narrator informs us of the issues with the raccoons, which is certainly strange. And we know that his behavior, mostly seen through Virgil’s eyes, is most definitely odd: the dancing, the multiple names, the changing eyes, the petroglyphs, the ambiguous comments.
Taylor keeps the reader guessing about John’s true identity for just enough time to keep it interesting. In the next section Wayne will reveal who he is, and dramatic irony will then infuse the text because we, and some characters, know who John is but others do not.
The character through whose eyes we view John more objectively, albeit not entirely, is Virgil. Virgil is a rather bland character with no real defining characteristics, but that does not seem to be an accident, oversight, or indication of bad writing on Taylor’s part. Rather, Virgil is an average teenage boy and that’s it. He is not full of angst or rage, nor is he a saint. He doesn’t like the idea of his mother dating John but is smart enough to interrogate himself about whether or not it’s because his mother is dating at all. He recognizes his mother’s workload is onerous and wishes she was around more, but does not give her extreme grief over it.
One of the more cliche things about Virgil is his desire for something else, to be away from his home and experience the world in a new way. This is articulated through his frequent skipping of school to go to the rocks where he can watch the trains rush by and lose himself in wonderings about where they are going. He’s never been on a train and his dream is to “book himself a ride when he got older” (73). Off in his special place he feels like it is okay to “ponder the mysteries of the universe, or just think about absolutely nothing” (74). He realizes he has been more solitary these days, and even wonders if he is a cliche because he is turning into “a moody teenager” (74). But regardless of his moodiness, he is able to keenly observe John and his odd traits.
Maggie is certainly less able to view John objectively. She is immediately attracted to him, noticing his handsome features, his body, and his gleaming motorcycle. She has not dated for three years since her husband died, and given the fact that their relationship was strained, she had probably yearned for someone like John for a while. She is written in a very relatable way, as she does not want to embarrass herself falling all over a younger man and does not want to alienate her son, but does want to be desired. Given her particular situation, it is near impossible to imagine that she would be able to see John for who he really is.
