Medicine Walk: Chapter 22 Summary & Analysis

The kid asks Eldon where he went after that. Eldon says hollowly that he kept following the work, like he’d said he would. And for the longest time, he didn’t drink. He had to keep to his promise, because Angie “was a wonder”—he wants Frank to know that. While he coughs, the kid snaps some branches off a tree, feeling only rage. He had a right, he tells Eldon, to know all this before now. Eldon says he could never find the words to talk about her.

The kid says Eldon can’t just drop this on him and die, and Eldon admits that there’s no way he can make it up to him. He falls silent for so long that the kid isn’t sure he’s alive. Finally, he asks to be moved to the rock so he can sit and watch dawn break over the valley below. The kid wraps a blanket around his father, and they sit and look at the stars. Eldon says Angie would be proud to know Frank is her son. Rocking in pain, Eldon says he wishes he could get back the drunken, wasted years. But all he has left is the story of her.

Angie made her way as a camp cook, and he got work at a sawmill. They found a lakeside cabin that they worked on fixing up together. Angie taught Eldon how to insulate the cabin for winter. They dug a garden plot for the next spring. This whole time, Eldon didn’t think about drinking. He happily worked and brought home money for their home together. For the first time in his life, Eldon felt he could settle down. He no longer wanted to run away, as he’d done his whole life. Angie even got him thinking about going back and reclaiming other parts of his past.

In the fall of that first year, Angie found out she was pregnant. Eldon had never felt so humbled in his life. He felt tied to his unborn child in their shared need for Angie—the thought frightened him. The kid sees how desperate his father looks and moves in front of him in case he tries to jump off the cliff. He says that Eldon was scared that he couldn’t be what he needed to be, but Eldon says it was more—he was afraid he “couldn’t be what I never was.” He’d always been too ashamed to tell Angie about Jimmy and his mother. He wanted to be strong for her, but thinking about his weakness awakened a darkness in him, which pulled him back to drinking. He believed he would always lose or destroy those who meant the most to him—it’s what he’d always done.

At first Eldon just had a beer or two over lunch. Before long, he was thinking about drinking all the time. By the time the baby was due, he was drinking in secret, kept awake at night by the certainty he was going to fail. The shame made him drink more.

One rainy night, he was at a tavern, broke. He drove home drunk and stumbled toward the cabin. He saw that the door was thrown open. He almost fell over Angie in the doorframe. She was clutching her belly and screaming. He managed to get Angie into the truck and drive her to the hospital, getting stuck in the mud and rain several times. The baby was in a kneeling breech, and by the time the doctors performed an emergency Caesarean, Angie’s life was ebbing away. Afterward, the doctor told Eldon that if he’d gotten home in time, Angie would have had a chance. Eldon left the hospital in search of the only thing that would dull his pain.