Summary
Thomas is in the middle of his night watch working on the flyer for the boxing match between Joe Wobble and Wood Mountain, which he calls the “Battle Royale Benefit.” To better understand his adversary, Arthur V. Watkins, who is Mormon, Thomas begins reading The Book of Mormon, which depresses him because their God appears puritanical, hateful of adornment in women, and lacking any sense of humor. Drawing upon the book, he infers Watkins is likely a righteous and severe man and realizes that, to fight the righteous, he needs to present an argument that would convince the audience that it is the only righteous thing to do.
Vera is walking alone on a road. She feels herself to be a ghost, dead inside and outside, but keeps walking westward.
The day of the Battle Royal Benefit has arrived. Patrice and Valentine come early and seat themselves near the ring to see Wood Mountain fight Joe Wobble. The mood is friendly, given that the event is a fundraiser, and the match starts off sharply with both fighters moving with skill and intelligence. The more stolid Joe chases the slick Wood Mountain, whose strategy is to wear Joe down. However, it begins to change and by the sixth round, Joe lands a solid punch on Wood’s face that shifts his nose. Their fight turns into a slugfest, brutal, ugly, and punishing. Patrice looks away. When the gong sounds signaling the end of the match, people cry out in relief. Wood Mountain wins on points, but winning is beside the point as their bodies are broken. This is the last match that either of them ever fight.
Patrice is angry that Valentine got promoted over her in the jewel bearing factory despite, in her opinion, doing better work. During the lunch break, Valentine boasts about her new position and raise. She turns to Patrice and asks her to share her thoughts. The conversation turns to romance, and Doris reveals that she is going to the movies with Barnes. Patrice congratulates her. Bettye, noticing the rivalry, tells Patrice that she is thankful that she has her steady boyfriend, Norbert. When Patrice asks her if she thinks that they’ll marry, she replies that if she gets pregnant, they would elope, an answer that shocks and intrigues Patrice.
Thomas is visiting Zhaanat when Patrice returns home from work and tells them that Vera was spotted alive in Duluth. They tell him about their dreams of her, which have stopped. Thomas tells them that they’re enlisting an academic, Millie Cloud, the daughter of their friend Louis who went to college and is pursuing graduate school, to provide her tribal study as testimony for Congress. Patrice thinks about Millie and how she would also like to go to college and do a study, but can’t because she is her family’s breadwinner. Despite having next to nothing, Patrice gives Thomas four out of the five dollars that they have saved for his trip to Washington.
The next day, while working, Patrice asks Betty if she could explain the details of sex between a man and woman. Betty is surprised that she’s never done it before and agrees to explain it over coffee somewhere. They meet that Saturday at a cafe. In fact, Patrice is already familiar with sex from hearing about it from her mother in Chippewa, but she wants to know the words for it in English. She seeks out Betty to explain sex in English so that she might prepare and negotiate the act when it happens to her. She gets flustered as Betty begins explaining but becomes upset when Betty mentions that men sometimes pay for sex and that women in the Cities are sold for sex.
Vera is picked up by a retired army medic who spots her sleeping by the side of the highway just after dawn. He cradles her and carries her home, knowing that the hospital would likely treat her like a drunk and then throw her out on the street. He brings her home, where his smart dog, Edith, understands the situation and welcomes Vera into their household. Harry feeds her soup and bread. Later, he draws a bath for her and the sensation of bathing is so intensely cleansing that she feels like a new baby. She is now under the care of this kind stranger and his dog.
Millie leaves the Twin Cities for the reservation during a snowy winter night carrying her study in a suitcase and wearing, to her chagrin, an unattractive tweed coat that nonetheless keeps her warm. She meets her father with Thomas, whom she asks him to bring along because she trusts that he will take care of her study.
They are snowed in at the train station and sleep over for the night. The next morning, they grab breakfast and Thomas reads over her study. He learns both good and bad news: they are poor enough to require the government to keep funding them, but they are still, essentially, plain poor. The report makes the case that the reservation still desperately needs government support and services, which is both good and bad news.
After listening to Betty explain sex, Patrice has decided to “experiment” and try it out with Wood Mountain, deeming him less “sticky” than Barnes. While driving to work with Doris and Valentine one day, Patrice fantasizes about her and Wood Mountain making their way to an old abandoned cabin and making love there. She thinks that perhaps Wood Mountain is actually a little “sticky” anyway, given how often he comes over to see the baby, but dismisses any possible affection he might have for her. She then goes on a walk in the snow to the old cabin that Vera had built. Along the way, she slips and falls into a leaf-filled depression that, based on the smell, harbors a bear. She knows that she should be afraid, but is not, and instead is lulled into sleep by the gentle fall of snow. When she wakes up, she feels much better and feels an auspicious tingling that something good is about to happen. She returns home, no longer thinking about Wood Mountain and newly attentive to her surroundings.
Pokey and Patrice are checking out their snares in the snow when they spot a bundled figure lying on the ground in the old cabin. Pokey initially thinks that the figure is sleeping, but Patrice knows that the figure is dead. They return to the cabin and Wood Mountain, Thomas, and Patrice all go back to the cabin, leaving Pokey behind. Patrice recognizes the shoes of the dead man; they belong to her father. His body is surrounded by empty liquor bottles, more than six. She is not sad, but rather relieved and angry, thinking that his death is a final good riddance. When they break the news to Zhaanat, she turns away. Patrice knows that she doesn’t want her daughter to see the relief on her face. She feels herself lighter and realizes that her father had always been a burdensome dread in the family, and now that he is gone, so is the heaviness.
Thomas works on building the grave house at Zhaanat’s request for their father while Wood Mountain finishes making the cradle board. Patrice returns home to ruefully note that her mother has killed the bear and is drying it out on a tree. Mille is inside the house, sitting on her bed, and they awkwardly introduce themselves to each other. Patrice realizes that she is the Chippewa scholar and wishes that she had been nicer, as she had been intending to ask her about applying to colleges.
Work continues on the grave house and a sacred fire burns for three nights straight, with Patrice staying up and keeping it company. On the third night, she falls into a state of profound exhaustion and glimpses her father, pleading and hungry, beckoning her to come with him, but he disappears back into the earth when she moves. He hears his voice, figured as a kind of weapon that whips through the air and tries to pull the life out of her, but she withstands him and laughs ferociously. She is safe from her father. Her standoff with him ends with Zhaanat coming up behind her, holding her and offering a bowl of hot soup. Briefly, Patrice sees her own face in her mother’s.
The grave house is finished and the funeral begins. Bucky, who attempted to rape Patrice and now suffers from a disfiguring physical condition, is present and treated contemptuously by Zhaanat. Millie watches the funerary rites with fascination.
Analysis
The rematch between Wood Mountain and Joe Wobble, set up as a climax in the narrative after the first botched match, disappoints. In fact, it is not only disappointing in terms of style as it turns into a slugfest without strategy, but it also damages both fighters so much that this becomes the last match that they ever fight. By making the match a letdown, Erdich reveals the novel’s resistance to becoming an easy story of triumph over the white man. She refuses to satisfy desire for resolution through the clean-cut narrative of a win-lose match. Instead, by portraying the ruinous physical outcome of the match, she appears to critique the binary opposition of such stories and how insufficiently they testify to human lives and also how they might perpetuate harm.
Thomas reading The Book of Mormon to better understand Arthur V. Watkins is an interesting example of Erdrich deconstructing religion as a set of fabulous stories that can reveal insight about the heart of its believers. Religion is repurposed as a story whose plot, mood, and tone are all evaluated for a kind of psychological truth. From his reading, Thomas concludes that Watkins must be a righteous man without any sense of humor. Erdrich turns the microscope, so long used to study indigenous religions and rituals, back onto the dominant religion of Christianity to examine its emotional and cultural biases.
The growing rift between Doris and Valentine on one side and Patrice on the other makes the latter become closer friends with Betty Pye, another colleague. Betty is indifferent to the rivalry because she is in a steady, monogamous relationship with a man named Norbert. Patrice is fascinated by Betty’s revelation that she and Norbert have premarital sex and asks if she could explain the mechanics of sexual intercourse to her at a later time. While Patrice had long been resistant to the womanhood tropes of romantic love and sex, she can no longer deny her curiosity, propelled in part by her growing affair with Wood Mountain. Like with any unknown she has faced, Patrice wants to be prepared. While long independent, Patrice acknowledges her ignorance of and curiosity toward sex and thus seeks help from a more experienced friend, which is an important step for her as she figures out how to be a woman.
The discovery of the frozen corpse of Patrice’s father in the cabin is a shocking event that brings the community together. Thomas helps build the grave house, Zhaanat makes bear stew, Patrice tends to the fire, and other community members show up for the funeral and give their condolences. Patrice and Zhaanat are relieved, however, to be free from the fear and burden of him. His presence had been a life-sapping force in Patrice’s life. When he appears to her, beckoning and pulling her to his darkness, she stands her ground and ferociously laughs at him, exclaiming that he cannot get us now. Zhaanat’s appearance and offering of soup is a touching moment of mutual solidarity and comfort between a daughter and mother.
Bucky appears at the funeral; he is disfigured by a mysterious illness that renders half of his face drooping and his mouth drooling. The story of Bucky is revealed in brief nonlinear vignettes and indirect comments. Slowly, we learn that he had attempted to rape Patrice, but she had escaped him and his friends by swimming out into the lake and hoisting herself onto the boat of her uncle, Thomas, who was out boating that day. The sinister outline of the story, like most of the horror in The Night Watchman, only gradually unfolds.
