59 pages • 1 hour read
Patrick D. SmithA Land Remembered
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1984A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 18-21Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 18 Summary
The MacIvey drive of 1874 is the clan’s biggest yet, totaling 3,000 cows. The next spring, a few miles from the homestead, Zech, Frog, and Bonzo tend to a corral of 60 cows. Against Zech’s better judgment, the three leave the cows unattended while they go to nearby Fort Drum for dinner. Although they only plan to be gone an hour, Frog convinces Zech to stay in town a little longer for a party that locals call a frolic.
At the frolic, Zech meets a beautiful red-haired girl named Glenda Turner. Zech takes Glenda for a ride on Ishmael and is enchanted by the smell of her lilac water perfume: “He breathed deeply, drawing the fragrance into his lungs, feeling a strange sensation pulse through his veins, making him giddy” (153).
Back at the corral, the cows are gone. When Zech, Frog, Bonzo, and the dogs track the cows in the morning, they come under fire by cattle thieves or “rustlers.” Zech watches in horror as Tuck’s head is blown apart and Nip is shot in the side. As they hide by the tree line, Zech reluctantly lets Frog shoot Nip in the head, putting him out of his misery. Despite the danger of remaining in the area too long, Zech insists on burying Nip and Tuck before they leave.
At the homestead, Zech feels guilty for enjoying the frolic and inadvertently causing the dogs’ deaths. Tobias says, “Them men was backshooters, Zech! Don’t you understand that? Staying for the frolic might have saved your life” (158).
The pall of sadness hanging over the homestead abates somewhat when Skillit returns to the homestead with a 20-year-old bride named Pearlie Mae.
Chapter 19 Summary
When the MacIveys embark on the drive of 1875, they start with around 2,000 cows. Amid a devastating drought, the only pond for miles attracts an array of animals, from bears and wolves to rabbits and foxes. The MacIveys set up their camp a few miles away, wishing to keep the cows safe from wildlife. At night, Zech rides back to the pond by himself and discovers an unexpectedly peaceful scene:
There were no growls of anger, no warnings to move away, no snarling flashes of superiority—deadly natural enemies seemingly under a truce understood only by themselves, sharing equally a thing they all must have to survive (167).
Two days later, the herd stops at a salt marsh full of much-needed vegetation for the ailing cows. When rain finally comes, it leaves behind an inch of standing water from which millions of mosquitoes hatch, creating “a solid black cloud extending from the ground thirty feet upward” (170). As they literally choke on mosquitoes, the men, women, and horses flee for two miles before finally escaping the plague-like swarm.
When the crew returns to the prairie the next day, 73 cows are dead and the rest are in poor condition. All around them, the rotting carcasses of foxes, rabbits, and raccoons give off a stifling stench of decay. Tobias says, “It don’t seem to be no end to the pestilence this land can bring. Sometimes I think the Lord is warning us to go away” (172).
Chapter 20 Summary
With his tribe decimated by the drought, Keith sends his grandson James and another boy named Willie Cypress to track down Tobias. Tobias is happy to offer the boys 12 cows. While Seminoles are frequently killed for hunting their own wild cattle, Tobias believes that the MCI brand on the cows will prove to others that the boys acquired them fairly.
In Punta Rassa, Tobias sees a man with 12 MCI-branded cows. When Tobias asks the man where he got them, he says he took them off two teenaged Seminole boys he assumed were rustlers. Furthermore, the man says he hanged the two boys. In retribution for killing James and Willie, Tobias whips the man half to death before Skillit stops him.
Chapter 21 Summary
While the rest of the MacIvey crew heads back to the homestead, Tobias and Zech drive the 12 cows deep into the swamp and jungle in search of Keith’s village. After three days of wandering the jungle lost, a Seminole named Tony Cypress intercepts Tobias and Zech, leading them to Keith. After revealing the fates of James and Willie, Tobias collapses, sick with malaria from the mosquito incident.
While a medicine man named Miami Billie treats Tobias, Zech spends time with Willie’s beautiful 16-year-old sister, Tawanda Cypress. As they ride together to the sacred Pay-Hay-Okee marsh, “the female spell of her made Zech dizzy, like the night he rode with Glenda, only this time the scent was not flowers; it was an outdoor smell, like smoke and crushed pine needles” (196). After a canoe ride through Pay-Hay-Okee, Zech and Tawanda kiss.
The next day, Tobias’s fever breaks. Over the next week, while Tobias recovers, Zech and Tawanda are inseparable. On the last night in the village, Zech and Tawanda sleep in each other’s arms but do not have sex. When Tobias and Zech return to the homestead, they learn that Bonzo died of malaria.
Chapters 18-21 Analysis
One of the most powerful scenes in A Land Remembered comes in Chapter 19, when Zech briefly abandons his night watch to inspect the only pond for miles around. When the MacIveys first encounter the pond during the day, Emma recommends that they set up camp a few miles away to avoid subjecting the cows to the predators the pond will inevitably attract at night. Zech predicts, “That’ll be a sight to see. I’ll bet the fur’ll fly thicker than dandelions” (166).
But when Zech revisits the pond himself that night, he witnesses a much different scene:
The first forms that visited the stand were deer, and they were soon replaced by the smaller vague bodies of foxes and rabbits and raccoons. He lay there in the dry grass and watched a procession come in groups of their own kind: wolves, bears, a mother panther with a litter of cubs, all passing each other without comment, drinking and disappearing again into the night. There were no growls of anger, no warnings to move away, no snarling flashes of superiority—deadly natural enemies seemingly under a truce understood only by themselves, sharing equally a thing they all must have to survive (167).
The contrast between how men fight over natural resources and how animals share it sharpens for Zech when the MacIveys encounter James and Willie on the prairie. As it was with Keith in Chapter 3, the de facto laws of the frontier prohibit the teenaged Seminoles from procuring their own wild cattle. By doing so, James and Willie risk inciting the ire of any number of white men. While Zech has encountered racism in the past, he is now old enough to interrogate the practice for himself. More than anything, he is deeply mystified by man’s refusal to share the land’s bounty with others, unlike the animals of the pond:
When they returned to the camp Zech lay on his blanket wide awake, thinking of the things James Tiger told him, wondering why anyone would kill an Indian over a few scrub cows when they were numerous everywhere. He could not comprehend some people denying the Indians the right to even own a cow. None of it made sense to him, and he felt a deep sympathy for James Tiger and Willie Cypress and all the others who suffered hunger because of what he could only see as gross stupidity and greed. Even the animals were willing to share if it meant survival for all (177).
In forthcoming chapters, as the prairie becomes far more crowded, man’s unwillingness to share the land will come into even sharper relief. Range wars and the arrival of wealthy railroad and lumber tycoons will pose an existential threat to the lifestyle the MacIveys presently enjoy. Elsewhere, Zech’s harmonious attitude toward nature will stand in stark contrast to the attitude of his son Sol, who embraces wholeheartedly the winner-takes-all philosophy of the most extreme practitioners of modern capitalism.
These chapters also introduce the two women with whom Zech will share very different but equally passionate love affairs: Glenda and Tawanda. The differences between the two young women are most apparent during the separate horse rides Zech shares with each of them. For example, Glenda wears a fashionable dress and therefore must ride sidesaddle. Tawanda, on the other hand, rides with one leg on either side like a man. Glenda sits in front of Zech so that he can hold her steady on the ride. Tawanda sits behind Zech as is customary among the Seminoles. The most dramatic difference for Zech, however, is the scent of each woman: “The female smell of [Tawanda] made him dizzy, like the night he rode with Glenda, only this time the scene was not flowers; it was an outdoor smell, like smoke and crushed pine needles” (196).
For Zech, Glenda and Tawanda stand in for two sides of his own personality. The former represents the comforts and privileges of white mainstream society, while the latter represents Zech’s urge to live apart from the frontier world. The balance he strikes between the two makes sense given Zech’s philosophy and his place within the MacIvey lineage. Unlike Tobias, Zech will show a willingness to engage with the people, laws, and customs of the non-frontier world. But unlike Sol, Zech doesn’t view the wilderness as something to tame or exploit for the benefit of humanity, but rather as something worth preserving for its own sake.
