House Made of Dawn: 8. The Priest of the Sun, January 26 Summary & Analysis

This chapter moves to Los Angeles in 1952. It begins by describing the spawning process of fish off the coast of southern California that throw themselves out of the water and onto land. On land, they are helpless. 

Reverend John Big Bluff Tosamah, also known as the Priest of the Sun, lives with his disciple Cruz above a church called the Holiness Pan-Indian Rescue Mission. The chapel is run-down, and Tosamah leads it with “both arrogance and agony.” He begins to preach about the beginning of the Gospel of John, peppering his sermon with slang and casual exclamations. Tosamah emphasizes the first line, “In the beginning was the Word.” He believes that this line epitomizes the holiness of Truth, and that convoluting Truth with overly complex sentences weakens it.

Tosamah blames John and his followers for overcomplicating God’s Truth with their wordy gospel. Tosamah tells his congregation this is the way of white men. They do not grant stories the reverence that Native Americans do, and they “dilute” language’s power by overusing it and taking it for granted.

Tosamah tells the congregation an ancient story that his grandmother taught him, emphasizing the durability of the oral tradition. In the story, which takes place during a famine among the Kiowa people, one man hears a voice of thunder and lightning while searching for food. The voice belongs to Tai-me, a supernatural being with the feet of a deer and a feathered body. Tai-me promises to give the Kiowa whatever they want if they bring him with them. After concluding the story of Tai-me, Tosamah turns his attention back to John. Tosamah asserts that John failed to comprehend that the Word is older than silence, and silence is made of the Word. With this, the tired priest dismisses his congregation.

The scene transitions suddenly to Abel, who thinks about fish and the sea even though they are not of his world. He thinks of what his friend Benally told him about Navajo religious ceremonies that connect people to the earth, but the vast sea and spawning fish seem removed from that earth.

The scene shifts again as Abel, cold and in pain, wakes up hungover in an industrial area by the sea. He once loved his body, but as a young man he fell off a horse and injured his back. Though Fat Josie, a woman in Walatowa, healed the injury, Abel still remembers feeling like his hurting body betrayed him. He thinks of Angela, and of the trial he faced for killing the albino man. He’d had little interest in the trial, which he found “ceremonial, orderly, civilized.”

At the trial, Father Olguin argues that Abel was not in his right mind when he committed the murder. Father Olguin has little notion of how to describe Abel’s actions, since he can’t understand Abel’s motivation. Abel admitted to killing the albino man and has not spoken since. He is disdainful of the discussions around him in court, but he feels no need to participate since he is disconnected from “their language.” To Abel, the murder was simple and justified: the albino man was his enemy.

The narration moves back to Abel waking up, and it follows his confused, disjointed thoughts as he takes in his surroundings. He thinks of old men running in white leggings, then of his disconnect from the world around him, then of fish. He recalls filling out a form with basic information about himself. As he recalls his prison cell and the bus that took him to war, the questions become more personal. He wishes to be drunk.

Abel’s fragmented psyche continues to recall his past, revealing that the questions were posed by Milly, his social worker. He remembers in detail the night he had sex with her. She believes in Industry, Brotherhood, the American Dream, and––most surprising to Abel––in Abel himself. He listens to the powerful, overwhelming crashing of the sea.

Back at the chapel, Tosamah prepares his congregation for a peyote ceremony by explaining the botanical properties of the peyote plant. He has painted his skin for the ceremony. The ceremony begins, and Tosamah presides over it with care for each detail, including the arrangement of the altar, the rolling of cigarettes, and the blessing of incense. After this, the congregation eats peyote buttons. They drum and dance around a fire, sharing a rush of intense and varied emotions that seems to mirror the liveliness of the flames. The congregation forms a circle, and people voice their thoughts, feelings, and drug-fueled impressions. One man, Ben Benally, sees a “house made of dawn.” As the ceremony concludes, Tosamah steps outside and blows an eagle-bone whistle in four directions.

Abel lies helpless and in agony on the ground. He remembers how the childless Fat Josie cheered him up after his mother died. The memory is interrupted by a single thought––“Milly?” Abel is afraid. He is always afraid, since he knows something he can’t imagine lingers at the edges of his consciousness.

Abel’s thoughts become fractured again. He remembers a white soldier describing Abel whooping and dancing around bullets. He thinks of Milly, and briefly his awareness returns to his injured body, but then he slips back into his memories. He hunts waterfowl at night with Vidal. He lifts a dead bird and the narration’s structure takes on a stream-of-conscious form as Abel imagines telling Milly about the dead bird and his pain.

Abel remembers that his relationship with Milly became meaningful when they realized how lonely they both were, and the narration slips into Milly’s first-person perspective. She describes her impoverished rural childhood. The land is unfruitful, so her father starts to think of it as his personal enemy. Milly marries a man who soon abandons her, leaving her to raise their daughter Carrie on her own. Carrie dies of illness when she is 4 years old.

Abel recognizes that he will die of exposure if he remains on the ground, so he forces himself to get up. He travels through back alleys, trying to avoid being seen. He stows away in the back of a pickup truck, which he rides for a while. When it stops, he gets out and continues traveling in the shadows. His pain eventually overcomes him, and he sees Milly and Ben running on a moonlit beach.