Summary
When Sal and her grandparents leave Wisconsin, Sal presses on in her story about Phoebe. Mysterious, unmarked letters continued to show up on the Winterbottoms' porch. The next one to arrive says, "Everyone has his own agenda" (60). On the way to their classmate Mary Lou Finney's house, Sal and Phoebe discuss what the message might mean, but arrive at no conclusion. They assume the messages are for Mr. Winterbottom. At the Finneys' house, Mary Lou suggests that maybe Mr. Winterbottom has an organizational problem, and his boss is suggesting he get his agenda in order. Phoebe is always very defensive of her father, and she rejects the idea that the messages could be valid criticisms of his character.
Then Sal, Phoebe, Mary Lou, Mary Lou's cousin Ben (who is in the same grade as the girls), and Mary Lou's little brothers walk to the drugstore to get snacks. Phoebe is put off by the disarray and chaos of the Finney household. On the walk to the drugstore, she's disturbed by how rowdy Mary Lou's brothers act, but Mary Lou just shrugs it off and says "my brothers are always doing beef-brained things" (62). When one of the younger Finneys, Tommy, crashes into Sal, she stumbles backward, and Ben Finney catches her. But instead of simply catching her and letting go, his hands linger on her waist a few moments too long. She tells him to take his hands away, but he doesn't, so she has to snap at him. Then, Ben asks whether the people in the Hiddle household touch each other, because he says Sal flinches every time someone tries to touch her.
Sal really internalizes what Ben says about her flinching away from human touch. It concerns her because she sees Phoebe's family as stiff, touchless people, and she's worried that since her mom left, she's been becoming more like a Winterbottom than a Hiddle. In the drugstore, she and Phoebe spot the so-called "lunatic," but by the time they alert the other kids, he's gone. Ben walks Sal and Phoebe home, where they fill him in on the lunatic, and Ben suggests they shouldn't use that word, but he clams up when Phoebe asks him why. Ben asks about Sal's mother, and she tells him she's in Lewiston, Idaho. Sal fails to ask about Ben's mother, whose absence is the reason he's staying at his aunt and uncle's. When they arrive at Sal and Phoebe's street, Mrs. Cadaver is carrying something into her house, and Ben offers to help her against Phoebe's dire warnings. When Sal gets home, she asks her dad if the fact that she flinches when people try to touch her means she's becoming too stiff. When he turns around, she sees he's been crying. He gives her a big hug.
As the Hiddles drive through Minnesota, Sal recalls the story of her Gram and Gramps's marriage bed. Every night of their trip, Gramps pats the bed of whatever motel room they're staying in and says, "Well, this ain't our marriage bed, but it will do" (79). Gram and Gramps met in Bybanks, Kentucky when Gramps was seventeen. Sal's gram was in town visiting family, and Gramps "followed her like a sick, old dog for twenty-two days, and on the twenty-third day, he marched up to her father and asked if he could marry her" (76). Both Gram and her father agreed to the marriage. Then, on the night of their wedding, Gramps's brothers and father disappeared for a short time after the ceremony. Gramps thought they were going to kidnap him and take him to the woods to share a bottle of whiskey, but they didn't. Instead, when Gramps and Gram arrived at their little house Gramps and his brothers built in the weeks leading up to the wedding, Gramps found his parents' bed set up inside, as a gift. It was the bed he and his brothers were born in. Gramps says, "That bed has been around my whole entire life, and I'm going to die in that bed, and then that bed will know everything there is to know about me" (79).
Sal briefly describes her English teacher in Euclid, Mr. Birkway, as "one of those energetic teachers who loved his subject half to death and leaped about the room dramatically, waving his arms and clutching his chest and whomping people on the back" (80). He had assigned everyone summer journals, which he collects at the beginning of the year. Sal, of course, doesn't have one, because she just moved to Euclid, but Mr. Birkway assures her that he'll find her something to make up for it.
One day after school, Sal and Phoebe spot Mr. Birkway at Margaret Cadaver's house. They are both digging in her backyard, and of course Phoebe assumes they are up to something nefarious. Inside at the Winterbottoms', Phoebe's mom is in the kitchen, surrounded by groceries and looking glum. Sal and Phoebe blow right past her to Phoebe's room. Sal feels badly that they didn't help put the groceries away, but Phoebe says that her mom "likes to do all that by herself" (87). When Phoebe's sister Prudence gets home, Mrs. Winterbottom asks her if she thinks she, Mrs. Winterbottom, "leads a tiny life" (88). Prudence glosses over the question inattentively and asks her mother to fix the hem of her skirt. When Sal asks Phoebe why Prudence doesn't fix the hem herself, since she knows how to sew, Phoebe accuses Sal of "becoming very critical" (89).
When Sal gets home that night, her father gives her a present from Margaret, a blue sweater. Sal rejects the gift, saying that she doesn't want it. Her father just wants to tell her about how he knows Margaret, but Sal refuses to hear him and then realizes that she's sounding an awful lot like Phoebe lately.
On the road, Gramps pulls off in Sioux Falls so they can all cool off and wade in a lake. While they're wading, a young man who looks around sixteen walks up to them holding a bowie knife. The young man tells them that they're on private property. He starts rifling through Gramps's pants and wallet, which are on the ground at the edge of the lake. Gramps puts himself between the boy and Sal and Gram. As Gramps is talking to the boy, trying to reason with him, Gram is bitten by a water moccasin. Gramps carries her out of the lake and uses the young man's bowie knife to make an incision at the site of the bite. Then the young man sucks from the bite all the way to the hospital to try to get the venom out. Sal, Gramps, and the boy, who tells Sal his name is Tom Fleet, stay at the hospital all night. In the morning, Gram seems to be doing better. She insists on leaving the hospital, even though the doctors recommend she stay longer. Tom gives Sal his address in case she ever feels like writing him a letter.
One afternoon, Sal and Phoebe arrive at the Winterbottoms' house to find Mrs. Winterbottom staring at a tray of burnt brownies. Mrs. Winterbottom offers Phoebe a brownie and Phoebe snaps at her that they are burnt, and even if they weren't she is too fat to be eating brownies. Mrs. Winterbottom assures her that she is not fat, but Phoebe storms out of the room repeating that she is fat. Then Phoebe's sister Prudence bursts into the house inconsolable because she feels that she performed poorly during her cheerleading tryouts. When Mrs. Winterbottom attempts to comfort her, Prudence lashes out at her mother. Another message arrives on the porch; this one says, "In the course of a lifetime, what does it matter?" (105).
Sal then explains one of her hypotheses about why her mother might have left. She thinks her dad is too good of a man, and the pressure of his goodness made her mother feel inadequate. He is the last Hiddle boy alive; his three brothers all died in accidents. One was killed by an overturned tractor, another skied into a tree, and another died while pulling his friend out of a frozen lake. So Sal's dad is her Gram and Gramps only surviving son, and he's the most thoughtful man any of them know. Her mother, Chanhassen, felt rotten by comparison. Sal says she had to leave "to learn about what she was" (110). Chanhassen's trip to Idaho was one of self-discovery. She never intended to leave permanently. But it was a trip she had to take alone. When John and Sal learned that she wasn't coming back, John had to leave the farm in Bybanks, because he felt Chanhassen's presence everywhere, and he was too absorbed by his grief to function.
Analysis
In these chapters, Creech distills two of her major themes, cultural identity and domesticity. Sal identifies strongly with her Seneca heritage on her mother's side. Sal's Seneca ancestry is matrilineal—her great-grandmother on the Pickford side of her family was Seneca. Sal's mother said that her own mother Gayfeather Pickford's "one act of defiance in her whole life as a Pickford was in naming her" (15). Gayfeather named Sal's mother Chanhassen, Iroquoian for maple sugar. Sal's parents named her Salamanca as a misremembrance of Seneca. The notion that naming Sal's mother Chanhassen would be considered an "act of defiance" intertwines these themes of cultural identity and particular elements of domesticity like problematic gender roles and expectations. By labeling Gayfeather's naming of Chanhassen an act of defiance, Creech recognizes the oppressive cultural forces that work to erase Native heritage and normalize colonialism to the extent that a mother naming her daughter in her own cultural tradition would be seen as an aberration.
In Wisconsin Dells, the Hiddles encounter a group of Native Americans performing a traditional dance, and Sal discusses her conflicted feelings around the word Indian versus the term Native American. She recalls something her mother used to say: "My great-grandmother was a Seneca Indian, and I'm proud of it. She wasn't a Seneca Native American. Indian sounds much more brave and elegant" (56-57). But then Sal points out that "in school, our teacher told us we had to say Native American" (57). Ultimately Sal agrees with her mother, that she likes the sound of the word Indian better than Native American. This discussion of language, political correctness, and the reclamation of language returns in the Dakotas, when the Hiddles stop by Pipestone National Monument. Sal says, "[we] saw Indians thunking away at the stone in the quarry. I asked one if he was a Native American, but he said, 'No. I'm a person.' I said, 'But are you a Native American person?' He said, 'No, I'm an American Indian person.' I said, 'So am I. In my blood'" (73). Sal then notices the different nomenclature around town used to name Native Americans. The motel they stay in is named "Injun Joe's Peace Palace Motel" (74). "In our room," writes Sal, "the 'Injun Joe's' embroidered on the towels had been changed with black marker to 'Indian Joe's.' I wished everybody would just make up their minds" (75).
Sal's internal debate over these issues is as nuanced as one might expect for a thirteen-year-old working through the issues for herself. Some major points elude her rhetoric; Sal doesn't discuss the genocide of indigenous people in America, or the colonial origins of the designation of Indian, so the idea that the word could be reclaimed by American Indians who prefer the word Indian over the phrase Native American is not fully explored in the text. If anything, Creech seems to try to emphasize and prioritize a universal personhood and acceptance over a critical discussion of the political correctness of language and labels. Conflicting instructions for how Sal should refer to people of her own heritage ultimately leads her to a place of exhaustion, where she finds herself "wish[ing] everybody would just make up their minds" (75).
On the subject of marriage and domesticity, Creech offers Gram and Gramps as a distinctly "old-fashioned" model of a marriage, but one characterized by their "free-spiritedness." Gram and Gramps are by no means prudish in their recognition that married people sometimes stray from one another. In fact, Gram openly discusses a time when she "stayed with the egg man for three days and three nights until Gramps came to get her and promised he wouldn't swear anymore" (152). Gramps's swearing is an obvious feint away from a far more complex domestic issue; when Sal asks her grandmother if she really left Gramps because of his swearing, Gram says, "Salamanca, I don't even remember why I did that. Sometimes you know in your heart you love someone, but you have to go away before your head can figure it out" (152-153). Gram's point speaks to one of the major questions of the novel, and of Salamanca, which is why Chanhassen left in the first place. Gram and Gramp's marriage is shown to be a relationship open to adaptation, fluid in its definitions of each of their respective spousal roles. Gram's "running off with the egg man" is not a point of shame for either party; it is instead appropriated as part of their shared story that strengthens their bond.
Creech presents the Winterbottoms' marriage as a model for a rigid domestic situation that is not open to adaptation, and Mrs. Winterbottom suffers because of this rigidity. Mrs. Winterbottom asks her oldest daughter, Prudence, "Do you think I lead a tiny life?" (88), and Prudence steamrolls right over the question. Prudence, Phoebe, and Mr. Winterbottom expect Mrs. Winterbottom to cater to their needs, but they're ignorant to how their expectations and demands end up defining Mrs. Winterbottom's life. When Sal suggests helping Mrs. Winterbottom put away groceries, Phoebe claims that "she likes to do all that by herself" (87). Sal also wonders why Prudence asks Mrs. Winterbottom to sew her skirt when Prudence could do it herself. Mrs. Winterbottom feels trapped in her role of homemaker, and Creech surrounds the story of Mrs. Winterbottom with stories of other women, including Chanhassen and Gram, who have to escape the rigidity of their domestic situation in order to better understand what they want out of life. These stories seem to foreshadow what Phoebe's mother might do if her family continues to disregard her status as a person with hopes and dreams of her own.
