Summary
Hoping to motivate Geraldine, Bazil and Joe begin to tend to the family garden. Bazil goes to the plant store, and Joe trepidatiously approaches Geraldine’s bedroom. He enters and begins talking about the garden. Geraldine notices that they have been digging outside, and she asks if they’re digging graves. This response concerns Joe, and it is clear that he is growing increasingly frustrated at his mother—he begs her to “wake up” and shed her sadness.
Joe tells Geraldine about his plans to go after her attacker. He also asks her why, on the day of the attack, she went to her office to pick up a file. Joe believes this is a missing contextual clue to discovering who committed the crime. Geraldine is made increasingly anxious by Joe’s questions—she begs Joe to mind his own business, which aggravates him further. Joe is convinced that Geraldine knows the identity of her attacker but is choosing to hide the details.
Bazil returns home from the plant store, and Joe shows him the gas tank he recovered at the bottom of the lake. Bazil begs his son to stop investigating, as he is concerned for his safety. Joe bikes to Angus’s house, and the two decide to attend mass and investigate Father Travis. At mass, Joe boldly asks Father Travis where he was on the day of the attack. He explains that he was likely officiating a service, but Joe wants to investigate him further. Joe, Cappy, and Angus make the decision to spy on Father Travis in his own home after mass. As they watch Father Travis from the window, they notice severe scarring around his genital area. The boys are eventually caught, and Father Travis explains the story behind his injury. Joe concludes that he is no longer a suspect in the crime.
Bazil and Joe realize that they should speak to Linda Lark. One afternoon, she comes over to the house to visit Geraldine. The two speak in a hushed tone in Geraldine’s room before Linda joins Joe and Bazil downstairs. Linda begins telling her life story—she speaks about how she was resuscitated after her birth, her parents' decision to not raise her, and Betty Wishkob’s adoption story. After the death of her adoptive parents, Linda was contacted by Grace Lark. When the two agree to meet, Linda realizes that Grace has set up the meeting in hopes of convincing Linda into giving her kidney to Linden—the twin brother she has never met.
When Linda travels to South Dakota to meet Linden for the first time, she is surprised to learn about his drug and alcohol abuse. He also makes a comment about how his job at the post office allows him to know the intimate details of strangers’ lives, which would make him able to “commit a perfect murder.” These details disturb Linda. Although Linden makes horrendous comments about Linda’s appearance and not wanting her kidney, they eventually both agree to the transplant. After the procedure, Linda gets sick and Linden moves back to South Dakota, where he “did things he should’ve gotten caught for.”
Joe visits Mooshum and asks him about the ghost he saw outside of his window. Mooshum explains that it is not a ghost, but rather “someone throwing their spirit at [Joe].” Mooshum then advises Joe to look for a crane, which, according to Native tradition, is Joe’s spirit animal. Mooshum explains that the crane should bring Joe good luck. Joe takes Mooshum’s advice and heads to the lake to look for cranes. While at the lake, Joe finds a plastic doll floating in the water. He unscrews its head and finds that the doll is filled with hundreds of rolled-up bills.
Joe takes the doll to the gas station and presents it to Sonja. As they unravel the bills, they realize that the doll contains nearly forty thousand dollars. Sonja takes Joe to several banks around town and opens multiple savings accounts on his behalf. Sonja makes Joe swear to secrecy—if the authorities or other people find out about the doll, they could be in legal or personal trouble. Joe arrives home to find his father sitting with Soren Bjerke, an FBI agent assigned to the case. Joe tells Soren about finding the gas canister in the lake. He also tells him that his mother went to the office to find a file on the day of the attack. Soren and Bazil press for more information, and Joe, feeling guilty about withholding the story about the doll, tells Soren that his friends drank the beers near the roundhouse. Joe worries about ratting out his friends, but ultimately he takes the blame and is given a citation for underage drinking.
Analysis
Once Joe realizes that Geraldine was attacked at the round house, he interprets this violence as a greater attack on Native American spiritual tradition. For this reason, Joe grows particularly suspicious of Father Travis, a priest that has recently arrived on the reservation. Joe’s inklings of Father Travis’s culpability speak to the theme of native spirituality versus Catholicism. Joe sees Father Travis as a threat to his community, and thus he associates him with the recent crime against his mother. In this way, Father Travis is a metonymic representation of the Catholic Church.
As the story continues, it is clear that Joe is forced to cope with the enduring effects of Geraldine’s attack. The reader notices how many of the men in Geraldine’s life, inclusive of Bazil and Joe, desperately urge Geraldine to “emerge” from her sadness. This action is, in itself, traumatic and insensitive to the horrendous event that Geraldine lived through. It is significant that Linda Lark, one of the only other female characters in the novel, is the sole figure whop can “break through” to Geraldine. This demonstrates how, in her recovery process, Geraldine feels isolated from the men in her life.
In the novel, Erdrich separates Linda’s story from the remainder of the narrative by titling and italicizing it. This is important, as it demonstrates that Joe is not the one to speak about Linda’s life. As the reader learns about Linda’s birth and childhood, it is clear that she has endured a substantial amount of trauma and tragedy. In this way, it is important that Linda is the first-person narrator–she is able to own her story. Erdrich’s stylistic decisions contribute to the theme of storytelling. Erdrich asserts that stories have the power to address events in which the writer has previously felt powerless or silenced.
Linda’s trip to visit her twin brother is riddled with sadness and tragedy. Although she has been instructed by her biological mother to approach Linden and offer him her own kidney, he rejects and insults her. Linda is faced with a moral decision—should she inflict pain upon herself in order to save her selfish and destructive brother, who she doesn't know? Or should she remove herself from the situation? This dilemma parallels Joe’s own inner monologue as he contemplates murdering Linden later in the novel. In both of these instances, the reader is prompted to think about forgiveness versus unforgiveness.
In the final part of this section, we learn about Joe’s discovery of the doll. Although the doll is initially perceived to be a sign of good fortune amidst dark times, it later takes on a more ironic significance. Once again, Joe is faced with a moral dilemma. Should he turn in the doll to the police, or reap the benefits of his discovery himself? The various moral decisions that Joe must face reflect how this novel is a bildungsroman. Joe's journey to finding and avenging Linden Lark is filled with events that alter his naive understanding of the world. As a result of these experiences, Joe matures significantly.
