Medicine Walk takes place on multiple timelines. The primary one is the kid’s journey through the wilderness with his dying father, Eldon. Alongside this journey, the kid (Frank) recalls episodes from his childhood relationship with his father, and, most significantly, the father tells stories of his life. The father’s stories are all Eldon has to pass down to the kid before he dies, and they’re all the kid has of his mother, Angie, who died when he was born. As the kid considers the memories his father has shared with him, he finds it difficult to make a coherent story out of the dissonant pieces. When he gets home after Eldon’s death, he tells the old man his father’s stories as he resumes the rhythms of their life together. Through the kid’s process of hearing his father’s stories and tentatively incorporating them into his life, the novel suggests that no one’s stories are theirs alone, and that people’s self-understanding depends on the stories others tell.
Storytelling is essential to being a whole person. Eldon spends his life avoiding stories because they remind him of the pain in his past, but this not only costs him emotionally, it prevents him from opening up to other people. At one point, he describes stories as his “wound”—a symbol of “the sudden holes life can sometimes fall into.” As a child, he’d loved the stories his mother would tell him by firelight. But her stories also attract a lover who abuses her and pushes Eldon out of his mother’s life forever. After this, Eldon believes that stories only bring pain, and he begins holding his own stories inside, unspoken.
Only in his final days does Eldon tell Frank his own stories. When Frank complains that Eldon’s storytelling is a poor substitute for being around, Becka suggests that stories capture who a person really is—thus Eldon’s offering Frank part of himself. She tells Frank, “What he done was brave […] It's all we are in the end. Our stories.” In other words, telling a story is a much more courageous act than letting the truth stay buried—and by telling Frank his stories, Eldon is trying to make sure that Frank’s life is more whole than Eldon’s was.
Certain stories shouldn’t be told by just anyone. Bunky refuses to tell Frank what it’s Eldon’s responsibility to tell him. When Eldon first tells Frank he’s his father, Frank asks Bunky how this can be true. Bunky replies, “Gonna have to ask him, Frank. It ain't mine for the tellin’. Certain things when they're true gotta come right from them that knows them as true.” Even though withholding the truth of Frank’s parentage puts Frank at a disadvantage, Bunky believes it’s more important that truth come directly—from the person most responsible to tell it, in this case Eldon. Simply telling Frank the facts himself wouldn’t actually give Frank the full story he needs his father to tell in his own words. Similarly, Bunky wants Eldon to give Frank the story of his mother, Angie. Frank tells Becka, “I asked once. But I was told it was a father's job to do, tellin' me about her […] I'd look at women in town sometimes […] wonderin' if she was one of them […] an' I never knew.” Even though Bunky’s reticence pained Frank, it offered Eldon the opportunity to give Frank something Bunky couldn’t. Bunky seems to have understood that hearing the story from Eldon would bring greater healing and wholeness, in the end, than if he’d told Frank himself.
Angie begins to change Eldon’s view of stories, though he resists it, and he takes a long time to act on it. She notices that Eldon seems stuck inside himself and suggests that hearing a story “takes you back to […] a story you been carrying a long time.” In other words, stories can unburden a person, connecting them to others in healing ways. Before he dies, Eldon tells Frank that all he has left to give him is the story of Angie. He says he wishes he could get back “Every single wasted, drunken [year]. But I can't get 'em back. […] all's I got left is the story of her now.” Eldon’s openness suggests that he’s finally accepted Angie’s view of the power of stories. He understands that telling Angie’s story is a way of giving her to Frank, and also giving Frank what he's able to give of himself.
At the end of the novel, Frank tells Bunky the full story of Eldon’s life, since Eldon is no longer around to tell it for himself. This suggests that Frank has learned Becka’s lesson—that people are their stories, in the end—and has accepted that stories are a necessary part of healing. Having found greater wholeness from hearing Eldon’s stories, he now offers the same chance to Bunky, bringing things full circle.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Memory and Story ThemeTracker
Memory and Story Quotes in Medicine Walk
"I want you to take me out into that territory you come through. The one you hunted all your life. There's a ridge back forty mile. Sits above a narrow valley with a high range behind it, facing east […] Because I need you to bury me there."
The kid sat with the coffee cup half raised to his mouth and he felt the urge to laugh and stand up and walk out and head back to the old farm. But his father looked at him earnestly and he could see pain in his eyes and something leaner, sorrow maybe, regret, or some ragged woe tattered by years.
Truth was, he wanted nothing else because that life was all he'd known and there was a comfort in the idea of farming. He knew the rhythms of it, could feel the arrival of the next thing long before it arrived, and he knew the feel of time around those eighty acres like he knew hunger, thirst, and the feel of coming weather on his skin. Memory for the kid kicked in with the smell of the barn and the old man teaching him to milk and plow and seed and pluck a chicken. His father had drifted in and out of that life randomly[.]
It was the old man who had taught him to set snares, lay a nightline for fish, and read game sign. The old man had given him the land from the time he could remember and showed him how to approach it, honour it, he said, and the kid had sensed the import of those teachings and learned to listen and mimic well. When he was nine he'd gone out alone for the first time. Four days. He'd come back with smoked fish and a small deer and the old man had clapped him on the back and showed him how to dress venison and tan the hide. When he thought of the word father he could only ever imagine the old man.
Then he strode off and returned in a short time with mushrooms and greens and berries that he crushed up and fashioned into a paste. He gathered a clump of it on a stick of alder and held it out to his father.
[…]
"Sometimes I'll put some pine resin in with it if I got a pot and a fire. Makes a good soup. Lots of good stuff in there."
"Old man?"
"Yeah. At first he brung me out all the time when I was small. Showed me plants and how to gather them. Everything a guy would need is here if you want it and know how to look for it, he said. You gotta spend time gatherin' what you need. What you need to keep you strong. He called it a medicine walk."
“Near as I can figure they're stories. I reckon some are about travelling. That's how they feel to me. Others are about what someone seen in their life. The old man doesn't think anyone ever figured them out."
"Ain't a powerful lotta good if ya can't figure 'em out."
The kid shrugged. "I sorta think you gotta let a mystery be a mystery for it to give you anything. You ever learn any Indian stuff?"
His father lowered his gaze. […] "Nah," he said finally. "Most of the time I was just tryin' to survive. Belly fulla beans beats a head fulla thinkin'. Stories never seemed likely to keep a guy goin'. Savvy?"
"I guess," the kid said. "Me, I always wanted to know more about where I come from."
"'What he done was brave. You know that, huh?"
"Done what?"
"Tellin' you. That took some grit."
"I don't think it'd take much grit to tell what ya already know."
"Maybe. But it sat in his gut a long time. Most'll just give stuff like that over to time. Figure enough of it passes things'll change. Try to forget it. Like forgettin's a cure unto itself. It ain't. You never forget stuff that cuts that deep."
His father moaned and the kid regarded him. "He don't seem much of a warrior to me." He sipped at the tea.
"Who's to say how much of anythin' we are?" Becka said. "Seems to me the truth of us is where it can't be seen. Comes to dyin', I guess we all got a right to what we believe."
"I can't know what he believes. He talks a lot, but I still got no sense of him. So far it's all been stories."
She only nodded. "It's all we are in the end. Our stories." She stood and put a hand on his shoulder and gave it a pat.
He thought about what Becka had said and worked at finding some pattern to the shards and pieces of history he'd been allowed to carry now. They jangled and knocked around inside him. It felt like jamming the wrong piece into a picture puzzle. Like frustration alone could make it fit the pattern. He cast a look back over his shoulder at his father, who seemed to be asleep, but he'd mumble when the horse's step over a rock or a root made him lurch in the saddle. When the kid looked back at the thin trail they followed he felt worn and makeshift as the trail itself.
"You're supposed to try to get to know me like a father knows a son," he said quietly.
"Jesus. I know that. Think I didn't want that? Think I'da asked you here if I didn't wanna get to that?"
"You lied. All you wanna do is drink and dance and break stuff."
"Wanted to see ya, was the point of it all."
"Well, you seen me."
"I'm your dad."
The kid shook his head. "Ain't got one. Never had one. Wouldn't know what it's supposed to mean 'cept what you show."
His father slammed the door closed. The smell of whisky was high in the air. The kid rolled down his window and backed the truck into the grass and then pulled out into the rut of the road. He took it slow, but the truck still bucked along. […] When they got to the gravel road the kid turned back the way they came and his father settled into his seat. "Happy birthday," he slurred.
The kid let out a breath long and slow and focused on the road. His father passed out halfway back to town.
He took the knife and held it under his ribcage and Jimmy stopped, his body going perfectly still as he stared at him over the rim of his hand. He closed his eyes. When he opened them again there was peace there and he nodded at him. The knife went in almost on its own and he twisted it like he was trained to do and leaned forward cheek to cheek with Jimmy and heard his last breath ease out of him.
Time was a thing he carried. It took him a long time after Korea to realize that. […] It rankled him, the unease, the slow creep of terror, like being hunted, tracked by some prowling beast invisible to the eye, recognized only by the sense of looming danger at his back. Then, always, time's dank shadow would fall over him again and sweep him into its chill. […] He spiralled downward and the measure of his days was the depth of the shadow itself. He wandered. He sought a place that carried no reminders, believing that a place existed that was barren of memory and recollection. But he bore time like sodden baggage.
“I never told no stories.”
“You should. When you share stories you change things.”
“Says you,” he said.
“If you told me one of your stories, you’d get lighter.”
“Don’t know as I have any worth the tellin’.”
She smiled at him and touched his leg. “You could let go of something maybe you carried for a long time. I could know more of you. Get bigger with the knowing of you.”
“I recall standin’ on the porch early one morning with a mug of coffee, looking out across the lake, an’ I felt like for the first time I could stand this life. I could settle. […] She brung that alive in me, Frank.
“It got me to wonderin’. Got me wonderin’ if time could make goin’ back to other things possible too. Goin’ back to other people, other places. My mother and such. Never ever thought them kinda thoughts before. Found myself wonderin’ if returnin’ was somethin’ a man could do, if ya could walk back over your trail and maybe reclaim things. They were odd thoughts but she hadda way of getting them into my head.”
“You were scared ya couldn’t be what ya had to be,” the kid said.
“More’n that,” his father said. “Scared I couldn’t be what I never was. I never told her about Jimmy, about my mother, even though she told me I could tell her anythin’. I was ashameda myself, Frank. Bone deep shamed. I was scared if I started in on tellin’ about myself I’d break down an’ I wanted to be strong for her. I really did. But layin’ there knowin’ how weak I really was brung on the dark in me. The dark that always sucked me back into drinkin’. I woke up to the belief that I’d always lose or destroy them things or people that meant the most to me cuz I always done that.”
He closed his eyes for a moment and when he looked down into the valley again he thought he could see the ghostly shapes of people riding horses through the trees. […]
He watched them ride into the swale and ease the horses to the water while the dogs and children ran in the rough grass. The men and women on horseback dismounted and their shouts came to him laden with hope and good humour. He raised a hand to the idea of his father and mother and a line of people he had never known, then mounted the horse and rode back through the glimmer to the farm where the old man waited, a deck of cards on the scarred and battered table.
