Cloudstreet: Chapter 5 Summary & Analysis

A few years have passed and Quick, now 16 years old, is still struggling in school. He continues to lag behind and doesn’t feel he has the patience to properly catch up, as he spends much of his free time out on the river or practicing shooting instead of studying. However, he tends to get along with one of his teachers, Mr. Krasnostein, who gently criticizes Quick’s essay about Japan and gives him research materials concerning the horrors of Hiroshima and the Holocaust. Krasnostein reveals that he’s Jewish himself, and he’s replaced by another teacher before Quick sees him again. Quick is haunted by the images and descriptions Krasnostein gave him, recognizing them not just as unfortunate, but as signs of true evil. He resolves to quit school altogether.

Meanwhile, Rose has also turned 16 and has begun to struggle with an eating disorder. While she still prepares meals for the family very consistently, she gets sick whenever she eats more than a very small amount of food at a time. As a result, she’s becoming thinner and gaunt, which worries both of her parents and even disturbs Quick, as her thinness reminds him of the images of starving people in concentration camps. However, Rose takes spiteful pleasure in making Dolly angry over her appearance, and she takes every opportunity to pour alcohol she finds down the drain to spite her mother.

Lester Lamb has started to work at the Anzac Club, where he plays music and tells jokes on stage for an audience of military men and veterans. Oriel also works in the club’s kitchen while her husband performs, and the two of them take pride in supporting their country and feeling patriotic. During one of these work nights, Quick shows up at the club kitchen to tell Oriel that he’s running away from home. Afraid of losing her son, Oriel discourages the idea as much as she can while she works, but the bustling job prevents her from making a scene.

Quick goes back home and then leaves Cloudstreet, running down the stairs with his bag and accidentally hitting Rose with it in his rush to get out. He hears the piano apparently pounding out noise on its own. The Lambs arrive shortly after Quick’s flight from the house, and Oriel tends to Rose’s wound from getting hit by Quick’s bag. Both of them weep on the floor, and it becomes clear that Quick has officially run away from home. Fish visits the pig in the backyard the following day, but it doesn’t seem talkative. He misses Quick and wishes Quick had told Fish he was leaving.

Trying to distract herself and refocus her efforts after losing Quick, Oriel resolves to wipe out her general store’s local competition. She visits the nearby shop owned by G. M. Clay, who advertises his military service on a sign in front of his store. Oriel finds this tactic distasteful. She imagines all the difficulties of her own life that she could list on a sign outside her own door, if she were to be so shameless. She steps inside and buys some eggs, asking Mr. Clay about his service—and realizes with some embarrassment that he isn’t just pretending to be a veteran. He asks her about her husband’s battalion, and she quickly steps out after telling him that Lester’s only service during World War II was in the band. She hears Clay’s wife laughing in the back of the shop as she furiously leaves.

Angry and emboldened more than ever, Oriel pushes Lester and her children to work harder in the shop. She reminds herself that “the good are fierce,” and she holds herself to that standard as she ramps up the shop’s productivity. She even plans to develop an original ice cream recipe that’s sure to run G. M. Clay out of business in the summer. Lester keeps up with his wife’s increasing demands, but he still has quiet moments of sorrow to himself, when he thinks about how Quick has run away and that Fish has been upset ever since. He remembers a vague memory of his own father carrying him across a creek at night, and he recalls the Bible story of the prodigal son, hoping that it'll come true in his own life and that Quick will come home someday.

Dolly feels and sees herself getting older, becoming increasingly bitter and harsh as she loses her youthful good looks. She begins to hate her daughter Rose, both because Rose is wasting away from malnutrition and because she’s still young and does much more of the housework. Dolly lets this resentment grow within her as she makes constant visits to the pub and meets new men in the city. She begins having sex with a man who turns out to be G. M. Clay from the shop down the street. They enjoy each other’s company for a while, but eventually Clay begins complaining about how Oriel is practically driving him out of business. Dolly admits she can’t evict Oriel, as the Pickles family still relies on the Lambs for rent money, but this only makes her resent Oriel more.

The basic wage goes up by a quid, but Sam still doesn’t make much money at the mint and he hasn’t been winning at the races for the past few months. He still sneaks the occasional coin or two out of work by hiding them in his mouth as he’s frisked at the door, and he considers his recent run of bad luck a down payment on his future winnings. One day, after stepping off his train, a woman confronts Sam at the station, telling him to try to control his wife. The woman is G. M. Clay’s wife, and she lets Sam know that Dolly is cheating on him. Sam brushes her off furiously as he heads home, but by the time he gets there, the anger in him has turned into a numbness. It's as if he’d always known this would happen.

Rose still finds herself attracted to Fish Lamb, despite his disability and childlike demeanor. She watches him pound grimly on the piano keys in the library one day, but she feels a dark, sick sensation wash over her as he stops playing, and she rushes out of the unsettling room. Down in the kitchen, she finds her father Sam. He brings up the subject of her malnutrition, saying that she looks like a corpse lately. The two of them argue as he tries to get her to eat everything on her plate. Sam becomes furious and Rose tries to finish the meal, but she quickly runs out to the backyard to vomit. Oriel sees her and offers to bring her to a doctor, to Rose’s embarrassment. As Oriel prepares the truck to take her to the hospital, Rose runs off, feeling pathetic.

Sam carries on miserably, sensing that everyone in his family is either judging him or against him. He starts to feel that to be a man or simply to be alive is the cruelest joke, and he curses his terrible luck. One morning, Dolly and Rose get into an argument about how Rose might need to quit school because they can no longer afford it. Rose enjoys school and has dreams of becoming well-educated and traveling the world, and she reminds Dolly that Rose herself is already the one who cooks and cleans, so it’s unfair to expect her to get a job as well. Sam enters and breaks up the argument, threatening to throw Dolly out onto the street if she lays a finger on Rose.

Lester struggles to coax Fish into going outside and becoming active again, as Fish is still upset about Quick running away. Fish tells Lester that he wants to go out on the water with Quick again, and he says that they saw the stars. Lester tells him that Quick is gone, but he tries to comfort Fish. He asks him basic questions about the family, but Fish still can’t remember Oriel. Fish says the house is sad, and that he can hear it talking. Lester takes him downstairs to the kitchen to spin the knife, asking it who will be the one to see Quick come home first. The knife points to Fish, and Lester wonders if it’s really just sheer luck that makes things happen. Maybe the knife really does never lie.

Sam sits on the edge of the bathtub with a razor in his hands, wondering if he’s too cowardly to strike back at G. M. Clay for having an affair with Dolly. But he realizes that what he’s feeling is loss, not anger. He still loves his wife, and the pain is becoming too much. Rose finds him in the bathroom, realizing that he almost made a suicide attempt. Sam sobs and opens up to her about what he’s going through, and Rose tells him she doesn’t hate him; she only feels sorry for him for still loving Dolly. Sam tells her that people are who they are, but Rose retorts that maybe people should change. Sam tells Rose that she’s going places, and she fantasizes about moving far away from Cloudstreet.

That summer, Oriel and the rest of the Lambs successfully run G. M. Clay out of business with their own original vanilla ice cream recipe. The entire neighborhood goes wild for it, and everyone is disappointed when Oriel finally discontinues the ice cream in January. Oriel heads down to Mr. Clay’s shop to offer him a settlement, but she only finds Mrs. Clay there. She angrily lets Oriel know that G. M. Clay has left the city permanently without her, all because of Oriel stealing all his business. Startled by this news, Oriel offers to let Mrs. Clay and her children stay at Cloudstreet, but Mrs. Clay furiously turns the offer down and tells Oriel to go to hell.

Feeling a wave of shame and remorse wash over her, Oriel weeps on her way home, wondering if this is what happens to a person when she loses a son. She considers it a sin to have broken the Clay family like that, and she promises herself to send food parcels to them every day. Looking outside, Rose is startled to notice Oriel crying “like a person,” and it’s hard to watch as Fish ignores his mother. Exhausted from all these emotions, Rose goes down to the kitchen and starts looking for jobs in the newspaper until Dolly shows up. Dolly had been missing last night, and now she stumbles into the house, bleeding.

Dolly quietly tends to her wounds, which G. M. Clay inflicted before he left town. Rose gives her some ice, cautiously glad that an argument hasn’t broken out between them yet. Dolly says that she wishes Rose hadn’t grown up to hate her. She also insists that people can’t always do everything they want, even if they know it’s the right thing. Rose doesn’t show much sympathy, and Dolly brushes off her daughter’s questions about whether Dolly had hated her own mother. Dolly tells Rose that hating her won’t do her any good, but Rose yells back, telling her mother that hating her is the best part of being alive.

At Lester’s insistence, the Lambs once again visit the riverside to go fishing and enjoy themselves for an afternoon. Lester intends to cheer up his wife on the trip, but Oriel remains quiet and withdrawn as she tends to the fire on the beach and watches her husband and children play in the water. She remembers how many important memories in her life, good and bad, are connected to a river. She keeps Fish tied to a tree so that he won’t wander off or drown. But a mysterious inner voice speaks to Fish, telling him that his time will come and saying that “everything will live where the river goes.”

Rose gets a job at Bairds department store, surprised at her own ability to communicate and stay sharp. Her boss, Mrs. Tisborn, assigns her to the switchboard, where she learns to take customers’ calls and connect them to the department that they’re looking for. Rose enjoys the thrill of heading into the bustling heart of the city every day, and she quickly befriends three other girls who work at the switchboard: Darleen, Merle, and Alma. They’re mischievous, crass, and love to gossip among themselves, and Rose enjoys their company despite the fact that they remind her a bit of Dolly. Rose is proud to be earning a salary, she begins to put on some weight, and she feels like she’s becoming her own woman at last.

A young man named Geoffrey Birch visits Cloudstreet to see Hattie, his girlfriend. Red is disgusted by the idea of their union, while Elaine is sad and jealous, as she wants a husband herself and knows that she’ll miss Hattie if she gets married and moves out. But Hattie and Geoffrey seem to love each other dearly; he laughs at her jokes, and she’s always overjoyed to have him around. Lester starts setting aside some money for their potential wedding.

As Lester and Oriel work at the Anzac Club one night, a sad-looking woman approaches Oriel and asks her if she believes in Hell. Oriel senses that this woman is a lonely widow, and she tells the woman this. The woman, Beryl Lee, tells Oriel that her husband was killed in the war, and that she figured Oriel was a Christian woman she could confide in. The two of them embrace and cry as people watch them. That night, Oriel flashes back to what she considers her own Hell: the memory of that night when her childhood home burned down and the blaze killed most of her family, leaving her with survivor’s guilt.

Oriel awakens from her troubled sleep and instinctively checks everyone’s rooms to reassure herself that they’re alright. She reflects on how she hates to be a survivor, remembering the fire and her stepbrother who never came home from the first World War. She recalls how she’s had to force herself to be strong ever since the fire, unable to make choices even when it came to her choice of husband. But she also knows she had truly fallen in love with Lester, as she watches him sleep and sorts through her grim thoughts. Despite all the pain, she’s proud of how she’s made her home into a fortress and a shelter for all who need it. It occurs to her that maybe she could let Beryl from the Anzac Club live with them.

Life at Cloudstreet goes on as autumn and winter roll around. Ted Pickles begins having sex with more and more young women, to the anger of his jealous mother and the relative indifference of the other Pickleses. Beryl Lee moves into the Lamb half of the house and starts working in the shop, as Oriel predicts Hattie won’t be living at Cloudstreet for much longer. A postcard from Quick arrives one day to reassure the Lambs that he’s alright, but no one speaks of it. Lester starts to feel old age creeping up on him, and Geoffrey proposes to a delighted Hattie. Sam is happy to see that Rose is eating and gaining a healthy amount of weight again.

That winter is fairly uneventful until a large man shows up at the front door, furiously letting Sam know that Ted has gotten the man’s daughter pregnant and now Ted is obligated to marry her. The man advances threateningly, but Lester steps out of a doorway brandishing a large meat cleaver, unintentionally scaring the man away. Sam laughs and thanks Lester for his accidental help, and Lester says he was only chopping ham bones for soup when he heard the commotion. Sam offers Lester free rent for a week and jokingly tells him to never have kids.

In the kitchen one night, Lester once again recalls the memory of riding on his father’s shoulders as they trudged through the river on a dark night, long ago. Fish enters the kitchen and Lester draws basic cooking ingredients for Fish to identify, as a game. Lester soon gives Fish a bath, careful to keep the water level low so that Fish won’t drown himself. Fish wants to hear a story and Lester obliges, struggling to come up with something but eventually telling a story about Fish riding on Quick’s shoulders as Quick walks through dark water. Fish finishes the story himself, saying that they end up in “the Big Country,” where people are waiting for them. He smiles blissfully at a bemused Lester.