Medicine Walk: Chapter 18 Summary & Analysis

It’s chilly the next morning. The kid gives his father some medicine and some hooch, though it’s difficult for Eldon to swallow. Then he heads down to the stream to water the mare and refill his canteen. He spears some trout and guts and cleans them, then carries them back up the ridge. He also hunts some mushrooms and cooks all of this over the fire. His father is suffering from the shakes, and when the kid touches him, he convulses. The kid offers him some hooch, but he refuses it. Giving him medicine instead calms him almost immediately; he lies on his side and stares at the kid.

As the kid whittles on a stick, his father finally says there is one more thing. The kid knows what that is: “my mother.” When he asks how he can know for sure that his father is telling him the truth, Eldon says he couldn’t lie about her. He tried to lie to himself and drink it away, but it didn’t work. He asks Frank to help him sit up, so the kid settles him on a log and wraps a blanket around him. His father looks frightened.

Eldon says that time was something he always carried around with him. It wasn’t until after Korea that he figured that out. He’d go through stretches of calm, clear-minded hard work, but he’d always eventually feel hunted down by a sense of foreboding and danger. Then he’d start drinking again, until time became indistinct. He thought that if he did this, he’d find a place that was free of memory.

He wound up returning to Nechako. He took whatever jobs he could in Parson’s Gap, enough to pay for his next binge. He had a reputation for being a hard worker, but once he earned a paycheck, he became unpredictable. He lived in flophouses and abandoned buildings, alternating between drunken, raucous spells in which he charmed women, and crashing, angry lows that drove people away.

When such crashes came, he’d wind up on a corner known as The Dollar Holler. Raggedly dressed men drifted together around dawn and drank and smoked and talked a little. As morning broke, trucks would pull up. The men would make themselves as presentable as they could and start yelling at the trucks. The trucks’ drivers would pick one or two men for half a day’s labor. Most would end up shuffling back home. For a couple years, this was the only way Eldon found work.

Eldon became a regular customer at Charlie’s. He felt like part of something there and took care to faithfully pay his tab. It was the working man atmosphere of the place that he loved, right down to the grunge and occasional fights. He also loved the predictability. Then, one payday, he was drinking in a corner, aching from a trench-digging job, and he noticed a change in the jukebox music. There was a semicircle of people gathered around a dancing couple; the man was ungainly and awkward, but the woman was tall, thin, and graceful, with long hair that whirled as she spins. She kept twirling out of her partner’s reach. When the song ended, she embraced the man, and the crowd dissipated.

When Eldon sat back down, there was an older man with a bronzed face sitting across from him. He asked if he could sit there, and he offered to buy Eldon a drink. As they drank together, the man, Bunky, admired the girl and tells Eldon that she’s Indian like him. Eldon asked him what a name like “Bunky” could mean. The man explained it’s a childhood nickname—his frizzy hair always makes him look as if he’d just rolled out of bed. The music starts again, and they watched as the couple started dancing again, to a country waltz. The woman’s proud face grabbed Eldon’s heart.

A small, sweating, toothless man entered the bar. Eldon told Bunky it was Everett Eames, a man he knew a little from working together in the bush. Eames walked toward the table full of lumberjacks where the graceful woman was sitting. The woman’s big dance partner, Dingo, told Eames, a “mooch,” to get out and get a job. The woman looked worried and tried to stop Dingo, but he stood up, grabbed Eames’s collar, and dumped a pitcher of beer into his face. Eames desperately gulped it down, making the whole bar laugh. When Dingo started pouring a second pitcher, Bunky moved over to their table and said, “That’s enough.”

The other lumberjacks stood up. Dingo drew up to his full height and threatened the older man, but Bunky stood his ground, saying this wasn’t right. Finally Dingo stood aside and said Bunky could side with the mooch if he wanted, so Bunky pulled Eames to his feet and got him a whisky and beer at the bar and clapped him on the back. Then he sat down with Eldon again. Suddenly, the woman was standing at their table. She told Bunky it was the kindest, bravest act she’s ever seen. She introduced herself as Angie Pratt. Bunky introduces Eldon, but Angie was focused on Bunky. Eldon studied her cheekbones, her black eyes, and the motions of her hands as she talked. He was in love before he knew it. Eventually he got up, shook hands with Angie, and left her with Bunky.