The Night Watchman: Lard on Bread Summary & Analysis

Pixie Paranteau fixes a jewel blank onto a block for drilling. Rage helps her focus, and she fumes that everyone keeps calling her Pixie when she wants them to call her by her real name, Patrice. Pixie means cute. But Patrice isn’t cute. She has a job. And she’s above the mess that happened when she accepted a ride from Bucky Duvalle and his friends when they lied about what she had done. And Patrice is above finding the brown bile from her father’s binge on the blouse she left in the kitchen. That morning she’d gotten a ride for the first time with Doris Lauder, a “white girl” new to the jewel plant. Patrice’s best friend, Valentine Blue, had been there too, but the whole time refused to use Pixie’s given name.

At the jewel plant, Mr. Walter Vold walks down the line, “lurkishly” observing the women work. Walter doesn’t allow speech on the line, though the women still talk to one another all day. He leaves his office every few hours to do his inspections. He tells Patrice she’s doing excellent work. At lunch, with the cafeteria not yet set up, Patrice realizes she’d been so rattled by her father’s outbursts that she had forgotten to cook her bread; she only has dough. At first, she tries to eat it, but then the other women pass her bits of food—a buttered bun, an oatmeal cookie, half of a bacon sandwich—for her to eat.

Doris gives Patrice and Valentine a ride home, and Pixie asks to be dropped off before the path to the house so that Doris won’t see their yard, which is filled with junk and debris. At home, her mother is boiling water for tea. Her brother, Pokey, is at boxing practice. Her sister, Vera, has gone to Minneapolis with her new husband through the Placement and Relocation Office, which gave them some money, a place to live, and training for a job. Pixie misses Vera and the way she would make fun of everything. And without Vera, there’s no one to keep her father in check, and no way to make jokes at his expense that help soften the “shame” that comes with having him as a father. In the kitchen, Patrice’s father pleads with her mother for money.

Patrice stacks wood behind the house. It would be Pokey’s job, but he’s at boxing practice. Pokey looks up to Patrice; she’s the first person in their family to have a job, not a job making a living off the woods, like trapping, hunting, or berry-gathering, but a “white-people job.” Patrice saves a bit of every paycheck so that she can eventually follow Vera, who seems to have disappeared.