The Lost Salt Gift of Blood

by

Alistair MacLeod

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The Lost Salt Gift of Blood Summary & Analysis

Summary
Analysis
In a seaside harbor, the sun is beginning to set on the rocks and plants. A recent rain has left the area “briefly and thoroughly drenched,” and more rainclouds “seem to be forming” over the ocean. The narrator feels that Ireland, “the nearest land” to where he is, seems “almost hazily visible” through the clouds.
The narrator’s reflection that Ireland seems almost visible, despite how far away it is in reality, foreshadows the problem of his relationship with his son. He imagines it’s possible for them to become close, but in reality, the distance between them is impassable.
Themes
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Quotes
A colony of gulls in the harbor are “[wheeling] and [crying],” “squawking and garbling,” and “[gathering] in lazy groups on the rocks.” It is high tide, and the sea is coming into the harbor through a narrow channel, moving toward the high-water marks. Near the harbor are a few colorful houses. There are young boys fishing for sea trout nearby, shouting support to each other.
The narrator describes the gulls like a naturalist, as if he has never seen them before, using similes that make a common bird seem strange and unusual. His unfamiliarity with the gulls indicates his ignorance of, and alienation from, this region, later revealed as the Canadian island of Newfoundland.
Themes
Distance and Alienation Theme Icon
The narrator is seeing this scene at the end of the road into the village, where he has stopped in front of a shanty he is going to visit. It is “grey and weatherbeaten” with “a heavy rusted padlock.” He considers turning around and leaving “before anything might begin,” but decides not to.
The narrator thinks of the home as a “shanty,” suggesting a tiny, run-down building. Here, his own financial success distances him subtly from the local people, who live in a poor rural area. His brief longing to turn and leave before anything has happened foreshadows a minor theme of the story, journeys that end, futilely, where they began.
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The Passage of Time Theme Icon
The narrator walks down the path leading to the harbor. Stones leave his shoes “nicked and scratched.” At the end of the path are four boys fishing, one of whom has just hooked a trout. The other boys, including six or seven on the other side of the harbor, are “shouting encouragement” to him.
The narrator’s first encounter with the people of this fishing village, a group of cheerful young boys, evokes an image of the village as a friendly, tight-knit community, loving and productive. Alone and seemingly without family, the narrator has no such place of his own.
Themes
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Cultural Heritage and Identity Theme Icon
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John, the red-haired boy who has caught the trout, struggles to reel in the fish, slips on the rock, and accidentally lets the trout go. Wet and bleeding, he tries not to cry. The narrator “[reaches] down to retrieve the rod and return it to him.”
Here the reader sees for a second time how journeys or quests, in the story’s world, inevitably end without having achieved their end goal. For all he has accomplished, John might as well not have tried to catch the fish at all—much as, at the end of the story, the narrator might as well not have come to Newfoundland. Another notable part of this passage is the narrator’s unemotional awkwardness. Rather than soothe the child or help with his injury, as some adults might have done, the narrator only picks up his fishing rod for him.
Themes
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A “shout rises from the opposite shore”—another boy has landed a trout. The boys shout to him as well, and the narrator wants to shout with them but does not know what to say. The boys on the other side of the harbor run over to look at the trout and “exclaim about its size.”
The sense of camaraderie and community between the boys fishing stands in sharp contrast to the narrator’s solitude and discomfort. The passage of time is subtly emphasized here—he cannot be one of them not only because he is not from Newfoundland, but also because he is an adult, another way in which he is not of their world.
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The boys ask the narrator where he lives and what it’s like, but he struggles to explain the American Midwest to them. He asks them about their schools and they tell him which schools they attend—the local Catholic and public schools—and that they are in grades four and five.
As with the narrator’s other attempts at human connection in the story, his effort to explain his own life to the boys is an awkward, ineffective struggle. He simply does not understand Newfoundland and its people, especially its children, well enough to explain the Midwest in terms the boys will understand.
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The boys also say that they fish almost every day and show the narrator their fishing equipment. There is a “silver spike knotted into the leader” on the end of each fishing line, which some boys say is to attract the fish and some say is a weight.
Cultural heritage is deeply important to the people of the fishing village, and the spike is one of the traditions that binds them together. Though they don’t know exactly what it’s for, they don’t question its necessity—like all traditions, it’s one of many things that create a community.
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John offers his fishing rod to the narrator and encourages him to try to cast, but the narrator is unable to cast successfully and gives him back the rod after “three or four more casts.”
The alienation between the narrator and John is painfully evident in this attempt at a moment of connection. John tries to share the activity he loves most with the narrator, but the narrator, uncomfortable and out of place, has no success and quickly rejects it.
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The boys’ mothers call them in for supper, and the narrator climbs back up the path with them. He realizes that the evening is cold and his feet are wet in his shoes, and thinks that the harbor is “no place to be unless barefooted or in rubber boots. Perhaps for me no place at all.”
Having failed even to cast a fishing line, the narrator feels his alienation and loneliness deeply. He might once have been familiar with this place, familiar enough that he knows he should be “barefooted or in rubber boots,” but now, as a middle-aged Midwesterner, it seems forbidding and remote to him, “no place at all.” Even though he is with the group of boys, he remains isolated and out of place.
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While they walk up the path the boys talk about a tame seagull one of them had that died the previous week, which they buried “where there was enough soil to dig a grave.” By the time they are at the top, the narrator is “wheezing and badly out of breath,” but the boys “walk easily, laughing and talking.” The narrator considers again turning around and leaving, but does not.
The tame seagull’s story parallels, later in “The Lost Salt Gift,” the story of John’s mother, Jennifer, who was “tamed” by her move to a major city from the wilderness of Newfoundland, died in a car accident, and was buried far away from Newfoundland, as the seagull is from the shore where it lived. The passage of time is also invoked here, as the narrator mourns the physical harm that his age has done to him, and linked to the theme of futile journeys by the narrator considering, once again, leaving before he can meet anyone else.
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Quotes
A small black-and-white dog and a short, elderly man appear on the road. The man is wearing fisherman’s clothing and has blue eyes and “heavy, gnarled and misshapen” hands. The narrator cannot tell how old he is. The man says that the weather is good and “it will be good for the fishing.”
This is the introduction of John’s grandfather, whose name, the reader will learn, is Ira. His dedication to fishing is emphasized as it is when John is first introduced, indicating their similarities and their deep bond, founded partly on the tradition of fishing. The narrator’s inability to judge Ira’s age seems to suggest that the passage of time, and the harm it does, no longer affect him, perhaps that he has made peace with it.
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The Passage of Time Theme Icon
The old man throws a stick into the harbor for the dog, and the boys shout encouragement to the dog as he swims. He “cannot see the stick he swims to find,” and the boys throw stones to show him where it is. The old man asks the narrator how he has been and suggests that he stay for supper.
The dog and the narrator are associated with one another—both on journeys that will prove so pointless as to seem almost comical, the dog unable to retrieve the stick, the narrator choosing to leave Newfoundland soon after arriving, having little to show for his trip.
Themes
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The narrator, the old man, and the dog walk along the road toward the houses, accompanied by the boys. The three of them, with John, turn off at the third gate, which leads to the same shanty in front of which the narrator stopped earlier. Inside the gate is a garden with a path lined with stones and flower beds built inside tires. The house is “square [and] green […] with white borders and shutters” and a porch, and around it are “a variety of sou’westers and rubber boots and mitts and caps.”
Though the narrator’s initial description of the house as a “shanty” suggested a tumbledown shack, the family’s house seems to be a pleasant cottage with “white shutters” and homemade flowerbeds, littered with cold-weather clothes. Though minor, this is one of the first instances where it becomes clear that the narrator isn’t telling the reader everything, or perhaps that his perception cannot be trusted.
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The four of them enter the kitchen, where “the woman is at work.” The dog goes to sleep underneath the table. The small kitchen has “an iron cookstove, a table against one wall and three or four handmade chairs.” It also has a rocking chair, a washstand and washbasin, a medicine cabinet, a cupboard, and a couch. On the walls are a barometer and two pictures, one of a “rather jaunty young couple taken many years ago,” and one of the Christ Child.
Some of the furniture in the kitchen is handmade and most of it is old fashioned, suggesting the theme of cultural heritage in both the skill necessary to make furniture and the handing down of the old furniture itself. The picture of the young couple evokes the theme of passing time—they were young once, but the picture was taken “many years ago.”
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The woman at the stove, who is “tall and fine-featured” with grey hair and eyes, is cooking fish. She looks at the narrator with “mild surprise,” which then turns “with recognition” to “open hostility” and in turn to “self-control.”
The woman’s reaction to the narrator is another indication that all is not as it seems between him and the family he has come to visit. Whatever his connection to them is, it seems not to be a positive one. However, like the narrator himself, this woman he has wronged in some way has too much self-control to react openly.
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While they eat, the narrator and the older couple are “reserved and shy […] groping for and protecting […] the only awful dignity we possess.” John talks about what he is learning in school and his lobster traps, which the old man helped him fix. The old man comments that “John here has the makings of a good fisherman” and wakes up earlier than he does. John says, “When I was in Toronto no one was ever up before seven […] There were gulls there though, flying over Toronto harbour. We went to see them on two Sundays.”
The narrator and the couple are intensely uncomfortable in each other’s presence, confirming that something is amiss between the adults that makes it difficult for them to interact. Also, the emotional resonance of fishing for John and the old man (later revealed as his grandfather) is spelled out here—the grandfather is teaching John to be a good fisherman, integrating him into his own culture. John, reflecting on a visit to Toronto, juxtaposes for the reader his happiness and ease in Newfoundland and his discomfort with life in Toronto. The only thing that brought him comfort in Toronto were the gulls, a symbol of his life in Newfoundland, whereas for the narrator, the gulls of the fishing village were as alien as Newfoundland itself.
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Quotes
After supper, the old man turns on the radio, tuning first to the weather forecast and then to a frequency that lets him listen to local fishing boats. John brings out his harmonica, and the old man “notices him, nods, and shuts off the radio,” going upstairs and fetching an “old and battered accordion.” His wife joins him, and the two of them sing a mournful folk song while John plays the harmonica.
The family’s routine is so well established that John, the grandfather, and the grandmother do not have to speak to start making music together, not even to decide what songs they will sing. This demonstrates the extent to which John belongs here, where he has been integrated into family life and into cultural heritage—he knows the songs they sing as well as the grandparents do.
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The old man suggests that John sing with them, and he does. As he taps his foot awkwardly to the rhythm, the narrator reflects that he is “stranded here, alien of my middle generation,” and feels separated from the three of them as if by fog. The three of them sing another folk song about the death of a woman named Jenny.
The narrator’s experience is the exact opposite of John’s: he feels “stranded,” isolated and unable to fit into the family life of John and his grandparents. The folk song about the death of “Jenny” foreshadows the death that the grandfather will later tell the narrator about, the loss of his daughter, Jennifer, and suggests that the family have been mourning and healing from that loss through music and, more generally, their cultural heritage.
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After singing, the four of them “sit rather uncomfortably for a moment,” before John begins his schoolwork and the woman begins to knit. The old man and the narrator go into the parlor, which has a wood-burning heater and an “old-fashioned mantelpiece […] covered with odd shapes of driftwood […] and a variety of exotically shaped bottles.” On the mantelpiece there are also pictures of the couple in the previous picture and their five red-haired daughters.
This passage introduces again the theme of cultural and personal heritage that the narrator is excluded from. The family have been collecting “odd driftwood” and “exotically shaped bottles,” but whereas the collections seem to be something for John and his grandparents to bond over, the narrator knows nothing about them, the circumstances in which they were found, or what they mean to the family. The pictures of the couple and their five daughters foreshadow what the reader will later learn—that the narrator is connected to the family through the daughters, one of whom was his lover many years ago.
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The old man takes out a collapsible card table, a battered checkerboard, and homemade checkers, bright blue and red, in a matchbox. He tells the narrator that John made the checkers and “gave it a good try.” They play checkers while the old man smokes, and “neither of [them] loses all of the time.”
John is described at the beginning of the story as being blue-eyed and red-haired; similarly, the old man has blue eyes, and the fact that all five daughters have red hair (a recessive gene) indicates that both their parents must have as well. The colors that mark John’s genetic heritage from his Newfoundland family are here reflected in his cultural heritage—that is, his learning to make his own checkers.
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The old woman and John both bid them goodnight and go up to bed by “the same route.” The old man and the narrator continue playing checkers. Soon the old man fetches the “ostensible vinegar jug” from outdoors and makes a hot rum drink with sugar on the woodstove. Before taking a sip, the narrator “[knows] the rum,” which comes from the islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon, “to be strong and overproof.” The two of them drink the sweet rum together, “warm within the dark and still within the wind.”
As the narrator and the old man become closer, one of the rare moments of connection the narrator experiences in the story, his relationship to Newfoundland and its culture temporarily changes. Even before he has tasted the rum, he knows where it comes from and that it will be “strong and overproof”—rather than being clumsy and discomforted, as with the fishing line, he is comfortable and familiar with this particular local tradition. His moment of friendship and intimacy with the old man seems to have made possible a larger intimacy with the old man’s world.
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The narrator thinks that “it is difficult to talk at times […] difficult to achieve the actual act of saying.” Eventually the old man begins to tell the narrator about John’s trip to Toronto after John’s mother’s marriage. He explains that he and his wife thought John would “[have] more of a chance” in Toronto, but once they sent him away, they realized that they missed him “wonderful awful” and were “sick unto [their] hearts,” “even the grandmother.”
Until this point, the old man, like the narrator, has been reticent and unemotional, but as he begins to tell the narrator about John’s visit to his mother in Toronto, the reader sees how deeply and selflessly he and his wife love John and want the best for him. The old man, able to express his feelings, is able to show John love and care, while the narrator, seemingly unable to verbalize his emotions, is unable to form any kind of connection with the family.
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The old man goes upstairs and brings back an envelope. He shows the narrator a picture of “two young people […] before a half-ton pickup” with the name “Jim Farrell” lettered on it, and adds that Farrell was “a nice enough fellow, from Heartsick Bay.”
In hindsight, it’s unclear whether or not the narrator knows already that Jennifer is married, or whether he is learning it for the first time. The very fact that he has no evident reaction emphasizes his emotional stagnation—even learning or remembering this woman, who is soon to be revealed as his ex-lover, has married someone else, he makes almost no response to it.
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The old man continues telling the narrator about John’s time in Toronto, saying that “they”—the Farrells—“could have no more peace with John than [the grandparents] could without him.” The Farrells decided to send John back to Newfoundland by plane, but “it was all wrong the night before the going. The signs all bad,” and the grandparents and their neighbors were “wonderful scared and not know what to do.” The day of John’s arrival was foggy, and the old man thought that “in the fog be the bad luck and the death,” but went to meet him at the airport regardless. He describes poignantly how he saw John come through the fog and start to run, “closer and closer till I can feel him in me arms,” and concludes bluntly, “That night they be killed.”
Here, the fog is invoked again as a symbol of geographical and emotional alienation and its defeat by trust and love. Jennifer and her husband, unable to connect with John, send him back to the family he is close to, and the day he is scheduled to return is foggy, suggesting his complete alienation from Jennifer and her husband as well as potential alienation from the family which he has been separated. “In the fog be the bad luck and the death,” the old man thinks, evoking the serious harm that alienation can cause, but pushes on through the fog to meet John. He thinks briefly that John won’t be on the plane, picturing an outcome in which their alienation is insurmountable, but instead John runs through the fog and hugs him. They have been physically separated, but have succeeded in overcoming that alienation and reaffirming their emotional bond.
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Quotes
The old man shows the narrator a newspaper clipping describing the deaths of the Farrells, Jennifer and James, in a car accident on Queen St. West in Toronto. According to the clipping, “bad visibility caused by a heavy fog may have contributed to the accident.” The old man then says that he and his wife are “all alone”; their “other daughters” having traveled away, and that they have only John to keep them company. The narrator’s “head begins to reel,” and he thinks that he is “making [himself] too much at home with […] this man’s house and all the feelings of his love.”
The old man was right, after all, in thinking that “here in the fog be the bad luck and the death”—it is a heavy fog that causes the accident that kills Jennifer and her husband in Toronto. The association of fog with alienation underlines the emotional impact Jennifer’s death will have, making the “heavy fog” a symbol of the alienation between her, John, and her parents that is now permanent. The narrator experiences a resurgence of his own feelings of alienation, provoked, seemingly, by the news of Jennifer’s death and the loss of his closest connection to the family, and withdraws from the intimacy he and the old man have established.
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Quotes
 The narrator and the old man urinate outside, where the wind is blowing violently. The narrator observes that “it will indeed be a good day for the fishing and this wind eventually will calm.” They go upstairs and bid each other goodnight.
The narrator’s observation that “this wind eventually will calm” suggests both the theme of the passage of time and the recurrence of his own coldness and lack of emotion. Even in mourning for Jennifer, he is able to evaluate the weather, and to recognize that, just like the wind, whatever he feels now will pass.
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The narrator notices that the room where he will be sleeping “has changed very little.” “Like a foolish Lockwood,” he goes to look out the window before undressing himself. Instead of going to bed, however, he goes back to the door and out into the hall, where he “[finds] the door quite easily […] But no one waits on the other side.” He listens to John, “his one son,” sleeping inside the other room, but does not touch the door “for fear that I may waken him and disturb his dreams. And if I did, what would I say?” He reflects that he would like to see John sleeping and “see the room with the quiet bed once more,” but that “there is no boiled egg or shaker of salt or glass of water waiting.”
In this passage, the narrator states explicitly for the first time that John is his son, as he lingers outside John’s door and considers speaking to him. The reader also learns, though the narrator reveals it obliquely, that he was Jennifer’s lover; it is she who should be “waiting on the other side” and who previously slept in “the room with the quiet bed.” His reference to Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, invoking the ghost of a woman calling for her lover, confirms that it is Jennifer and their relationship he is remembering.
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The narrator remembers “a belief held in the outports” by which a girl could summon a vision of her future husband by eating a boiled egg half filled with salt and leaving a glass of water by her bedside, “but she must only do it once.” It is the type of belief he would have collected as a “bright young graduate student […] eleven years ago,” “all about the wild, wide sea and the flashing silver dagger and the lost and faithless lover.”
Here, the reader finally learns the exact circumstances of the narrator’s relationship with Jennifer and presence in Newfoundland: he was a young graduate student 11 years ago, collecting local folklore, when he and Jennifer had their affair. Presumably, he left her after she became pregnant with John, as is suggested by the reference to “the lost and faithless lover.” Notably, like the grandfather discussing “the signs,” the narrator interprets his memories of Jennifer in terms of a local belief, using cultural heritage to mediate his grief.
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Quotes
For a moment, the narrator listens to the old couple sleeping, but soon goes back to his own room, where he lies sleepless in bed. He thinks that he would “like to see my way more clearly” and that “I have collected many things I did not understand.” He considers going into John’s room and speaking to him—asking him to come to the Midwest with him, “away from the lonely gulls and the silver trout,” and offering him money. He asks rhetorically, “shall I wait to meet you in some known or unknown bitterness?” However, he finally concludes that any attempt he makes to be a father to John will be misguided, thinking, “Again I collect dreams. For I do not know enough of the fog on Toronto’s Queen St. West […] and of lost and misplaced love.”
At this crucial moment, the narrator decides once and for all that he will leave John behind for good and not attempt to take him away to the Midwest or sever him from his adoptive family. He understands completely the depth of his alienation and ignorance, wishing he could “see his way more clearly” but unable to do so, and realizing that nothing he can offer John will be as fulfilling to him as “the lonely gulls and the silver trout” of the place he calls home. He recognizes that his hopes of being a father to his son were “dreams,” and that he will never be able to comprehend John’s experiences or know and love him as deeply as his grandparents do.
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The next morning, the narrator gets up early as John is hurrying outside with the dog. The old man is smoking a pipe and boiling water, which he gives to the narrator to shave with. The old woman comes downstairs.
The ordinariness of the family’s morning routine is the first indication that, despite the events of the previous night, nothing substantial has changed, and the narrator’s intimacy with the old man has had no lasting effect.
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The narrator tells the couple that he intends to fly back to the Midwest that day, trying to “emphasize the ‘I.’” Neither of them respond. John and the dog return, and the old man asks John what he has found. John shows them a “smooth round stone,” “of the deepest green, inlaid with veins of darkest ebony,” which “glows with the lustre of near perfection.”
Though the narrator’s previous isolation had been forced on him, as in the scene with the boys fishing at the beginning of the story, here he deliberately asserts his isolation, “emphasiz[ing] the ‘I’” and separating himself from the family. He has come to terms with the fact that he will never be able to bridge the gap between them and become one of their tight-knit unit.
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The narrator says that “it is very beautiful.” John explains that he likes to collect them, and then offers it to the narrator as a gift. When the narrator looks at the old couple to gauge their reaction, they are both looking away out the window. He accepts the stone, thanking John profusely, and puts it in his pocket.
This short-lived effort at emotional connection between John and the narrator is one of two that bookend the story, the other being John’s attempt to teach him to fish. However, both of John’s gestures of friendship fail—the first because the narrator is unable to learn, and the second because the narrator’s alienation from John’s family, demonstrated by their looking away, makes it impossible for the narrator to connect with John more meaningfully.
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Quotes
After breakfast the narrator prepares to leave. He shakes the old man’s hand, and the old woman thanks him, saying, “I don’t know if you know what I mean but thank you.” The narrator says, “I think I do,” and adds that he would like to keep in touch, “but…” before the old man ends the sentence for him by reminding him that “there is no phone […] and both of us can hardly write. Perhaps that’s why we never told you.” He does add, however, that “John is getting to be a pretty good hand at it.”
Following John’s gift of the stone, the narrator experiences another moment in which the possibility of emotional intimacy is presented, but just as quickly taken away. When he responds to the old woman’s thanks with “I think I do,” he is suggesting a wordless intimacy between them, almost as if he is able to read her thoughts. It seems that in this moment she is thanking the narrator for bringing John into their lives. However, whatever connection this creates is immediately broken by his and the couple’s agreement that there is no way for them to communicate in the future, as well as the old man’s reminder (“Perhaps that’s why we never told you”) of Jennifer’s death and the narrator’s ignorance. On the other hand, the old man’s mention that John is learning to write leaves room for connection in the future.
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The sun is “shining clearly” outside. The narrator drives away from the house, waving to the old couple, and sees the young boys again at a distance. They are carrying something “that looks like a crippled gull. Perhaps they will make it well.”
The boys have finally succeeded in finding another injured seagull to replace the one that died prior to the beginning of the story. That seagull represented Jennifer, and the “death” of John’s connection with her as his mother. Though the search for a new seagull suggested the appearance of John’s new potential parent, this crippled seagull, which the boys will “make well,” represents not the narrator but John’s community of family and friends, “crippled,” perhaps, by the absence of parents, but able to be healed and whole on its own.
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At the airport, the airport terminal is “strangely familiar […] glisteningly permanent.” It does not take very long for the narrator to buy a ticket and board the plane. In the air, he learns that the man sitting next to him is a “heavy-equipment salesman” who has “been away a week and is returning to his wife and children.”
The “strange familiarity” and “glistening permanence” of the airport terminal evoke the theme of the futile journey, underscoring that the narrator has been through here before and that nothing, least of all the airport terminal, has changed since he passed through the airport last.
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When they land in the Midwest, to the narrator, “the distance we have come seems eerily unreal.” He goes down the stairs from the plane with the equipment salesman, and they enter the terminal together. The salesman’s wife and children are waiting to meet him. The salesman’s children run toward him excitedly, asking, “Daddy, what did you bring me?”
The end of the salesman’s journey and his reunion with his wife and children stand in sharp contrast to the narrator’s loneliness, having cut short his reunion with his own family. What the salesman’s children expect from their own father—a gift, a hug, closeness and affection—is exactly what the narrator was unable to give John, and his failure to supply those things (compared with the grandparents’ success) is why he leaves John behind.
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