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Chapter 11
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Medicine Walk, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Fathers and Sons
Nature and the Land
Identity and Heritage
Memory and Story
Love, Loss, and Grief
Summary
Analysis
The kid asks his father if he ever went back, and he says no. Eldon is trembling. His face looks more shadowed and lined. He explains that he and Jimmy were too proud to return; they found whatever work they could, traveling, enjoying money and the company of men. Becka asks if Eldon ever wanted to find out how his mother fared, and Eldon looks at the kid with a woeful, vulnerable look that embarrasses him. Finally, Eldon says he never knew how to try. His anger cooled off, but then he was overcome by guilt for leaving his mother with Jenks. To cope with the shame, he drank.
Telling this story is costly for Eldon. He’s giving Frank a key to understanding his family’s past, but the act of telling weakens him physically at the same time as it unburdens him emotionally. There’s a sense that withholding the truth over so many years has sickened Eldon beyond the point of healing. In part, this happened because Eldon coped with his guilt by drinking, establishing a lifelong pattern for dealing with loss and grief.
Themes
The kid can’t meet his father’s eyes, and Eldon says that love and shame don’t mix; one always dominates the other. The kid accuses Eldon of cheating him out of a grandmother with his cowardice. Eldon protests that he never got to be a kid—his life was hard. At least the kid had someone to take care of him. The kid stirs the fire and then says there’s more to it than being taken care of. He was always picked on for not knowing who he was, mocked for being Indian. Eldon says that’s just like him, but the kid replies that he’s nothing like Eldon—for one thing, he’s not a coward.
While Eldon explains that his shame prevented him from trying to reconcile with his mother, Frank just sees that Eldon’s cowardly choices have failed him. Father and son each see something in the other’s life that they lacked: Eldon sees that Frank at least got to grow up being cared for instead of having to fend for himself, but Frank sees that Eldon at least had the chance to know his Indian family—a chance he threw away and denied to the kid, too.
Themes
After a while, the kid acknowledges that he understands that his father was scared to go to jail. He’s about to cry; he never got to have a mother. His father stares at him for a while and finally says that, if he’d stayed, Jenks’s friends would’ve half killed him. The kid says that would have been better than being half alive.
While fear of retaliation seems to have been a factor for Eldon, Frank doesn’t fully see Eldon’s side of things, either—that Eldon felt rejected in his role as man of the house. He sees Eldon the way he’s long thought of him—as simply cowardly and selfish.
Themes
That night the kid sleeps close to the fire, listening to the rain and his father’s breathing. When he sees Eldon shaking, he puts his own blanket over him. Becka sits down with him and they watch Eldon sleep. Becka says his father was brave to tell him that story—most people would just try to forget.
Despite his conflicted feelings about Eldon, Frank feels protective of him, too. Becka encourages Frank to reconsider his view of Eldon. Telling stories is a courageous act, she suggests, that not just anyone would do.
Themes
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Becka asks if those who raised him ever told him anything about his mother. But the kid says Eldon was always too drunk to tell him, and the old man didn’t say anything either. As they sip tea together, the kid says his father doesn’t seem like much of a warrior to him. But to Becka, the truth of a person lies where it can’t be seen. When the kid says his father just talks in stories, Becka replies that our stories are all we are.
Even though the old man knew that Eldon might not tell Frank the truth for a long time, if ever, he steadfastly refuses to tell Frank about his mother, believing the story isn’t his to tell—withholding it is more ethical for him than telling it. Becka encourages Frank with the idea that by telling Frank his stories, Eldon is doing something generous—he’s offering Frank himself.
Themes
In the morning, Becka gives them porridge with berries and Eldon fidgets with his food. The kid tends to the horse and gathers their supplies. Eldon looks yellower and shakes as Becka walks him out of the house. It takes both of them to hoist the feverish man onto the horse. They tie his hands and feet to the stirrups and pommel, then Becka gives the kid a bundle containing a soothing medicine—it helped her own father near the end. She warns him that when Eldon becomes too sick to drink booze, he’ll get sicker. It will be ugly, but the medicine will help. She waves off the kid’s thanks and invites him to stop in on his way home. He nods, then leads the mare, bearing the slumped figure of his father, off into the chill morning.
Eldon’s and Frank’s stay with Becka is an important stop in their “medicine walk.” Becka literally provides them with medicine to help Eldon in his final days, but she also provides Frank with sympathy and perspective—helping him reconsider the value of his father’s stories. This prepares Frank to care for his father better and receive what he has to say in their last days together. Becka’s knowledge of native ways, integrated into her daily life, also models a way of life that neither Frank nor Eldon has fully experienced.
Themes
