47 pages • 1 hour read
Claire KeeganFoster
Fiction | Novella | Adult | Published in 2010A 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 4-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary
Time passes in the Kinsellas’ routine. Though the narrator “keep[s] waiting for something to happen, for the ease [she] feel[s] to end” (37), her days stay the same: breakfast with all three together, Kinsella heading to work on the farm, Edna and the girl cleaning and cooking and gardening, a walk to the well, dinner, the nine o’clock news, and bedtime.
The girl notes that once she’s in bed, the Kinsellas occasionally receive visitors. She overhears chatting and raucous card games. One night, she hears a sound that resembles a donkey’s bray, and Edna comes up to get her and bring her downstairs, explaining that “nobody could get a wink of sleep with the Ass Carey in the house” (38). Two men come by to sell raffle tickets benefiting the local school and are surprised when Kinsella buys some despite having no children of his own. Edna challenges her generation’s ability to play cards properly except when the rules benefit them, and the gathering devolves into laughter.
Chapter 5 Summary
While the woman and the narrator are making gooseberry jam, Kinsella comes in and says that the girl needs clothing of her own. She is wearing another set of pants and a shirt that Edna brought out of a drawer, and the woman asks why she needs a change. Kinsella says that he doesn’t want to bring her to Mass again looking the way she does and implies that his wife should understand. Edna does not reply but finishes her task very slowly before going upstairs. Kinsella and the narrator observe a twitchy sparrow at the window. He instructs his charge to wash up before they leave and suggests that her father was neglectful for not teaching her to do so. The girl braces for Kinsella’s temper, but he shows no sign of anything more. When the narrator runs to the bathroom, the door is locked. Edna emerges, not trying to hide the traces of tears on her face, and is ready for the trip to town.
The town of Gorey is full of people, and its shops are full of beach toys. Kinsella gives the girl a pound to buy a “Choc-ice,” which is more than enough for a little ice cream. In the clothing store, the narrator tries on a range of clothes while the shop assistant tells Edna that the girl looks just like her. At purchase, the assistant refers to Edna as the narrator’s mother. Back outside, the summer sun is so strong that the girl can’t see well, and she wishes that it were overcast. Several people say hello to Edna and the narrator, staring at the girl and asking about her. One woman patronizes Edna, who pleads having to leave to find her husband. Once the acquaintance is out of earshot, Edna says that she hopes she never sees that woman again. They buy bacon and sausage, go to the pharmacy, and visit a gift shop, where Edna gets the girl to pick out a birthday card for her mother. The cashier suggests that it’ll be a relief when the children return to school in several weeks, but Edna replies that she isn’t looking forward to it. The last stop is the candy store, where the girl uses her gifted money to buy Kinsella his chocolate ice cream, Edna a chocolate bar, and herself fruit gummies. They head home, the girl contented and listening to the wind mix with the couple’s conversation.
A woman is waiting back at the farm and asks Kinsella to help dig a grave. He goes right away in the car. Shortly afterward, Edna walks with the girl, clad in her new clothes, to the deceased’s wake. The narrator notes that “there’s a taste of something darker in the air” and sees a lost heifer at a crossroads along the way (49). The woman explains what to expect from a wake, namely a dead body for viewing and people drinking alcohol. When they arrive, the house is full of people, and the narrator is mesmerized by the deceased old man in his coffin. Kinsella sits her on his lap and gives her a taste of beer, which he is pleased that she doesn’t enjoy. The girl stays drinking lemonade on Kinsella’s knee but eventually gets antsy. A woman named Mildred offers to take the girl to play with her own children until the Kinsellas are ready to leave and pick her up. Edna hesitantly agrees. As soon as they’ve left, Mildred peppers the narrator with questions about the Kinsellas’ habits, which the girl answers until she is confused by the last one. Mildred gleefully explains that the Kinsellas had a son who died and that the girl wore the dead boy’s clothes to the past week’s Mass. The story that Mildred heard and thus repeats is that the boy drowned when he followed the dog into the “slurry tank,” but Kinsella still couldn’t bear to shoot the hound afterward. Mildred claims that the experience turned both the Kinsellas’ hair white and that Edna dyes hers black. The narrator is consumed by the knowledge of the dead son and wonders why she didn’t figure out about him sooner given the many clues she now identifies.
Mildred’s cottage is unkempt, and she begins gossiping nastily about the wake. The narrator doesn’t know what to do with herself, but soon Kinsella appears to take the narrator home. Mildred says that the child is quiet, to which Kinsella replies, “May there be many like her” (59). In the Kinsellas’ car, the couple asks the girl about her time with Mildred, and eventually she admits that Mildred told her about their dead child.
Back at the house, the narrator realizes that she’s never heard the Kinsellas use a name for the hound. Edna gets ready for bed, but Kinsella takes the girl for a walk out to the beach. Their path is lit by the moon, and Kinsella holds the narrator’s hand, which she realizes her father has never done. She almost “wants Kinsella to let [her hand] go” as he holds it on the way out because the feeling in comparison to the disinterest of her own father is too intense (61). She notes, too, that “he takes small steps so [they] can walk in time” (61). The wind blows noisily through the trees. At the top of a sand dune, the narrator is awed by the view of the sea and sees two lights out in the water. They run in the waves, and Kinsella talks about a man he knows who pulled a colt out of the ocean to find that the horse was just fine after a rest. Then he brings up the girl’s visit with Mildred and explains that Edna is too optimistic about people. He tells the girl that she doesn’t “ever have to say anything” and to remember that silence is always an option (64). When the two turn back, they observe that only the girl’s footprints from the trip out are visible. Kinsella jokes that the narrator had to have carried him for that patch of sand. Back at the sand dune, the two see that the two lights out in the ocean have become three, and Kinsella embraces the narrator.
Chapters 4-5 Analysis
The clues pointing to an absent child that begin in the first three chapters become instances indicating quiet grief in Chapters 4 and 5, which builds tension up to the narrator learning about the drowned boy. The first comes in Chapter 4 when the men selling raffle tickets to repair the school reply, “We didn’t really think—” (39), to Kinsella’s assent to purchase some. Similar hints come from outside the household, creating a new sense of social pressure and surveillance. The “woman with eyes like picks” in Gorey offers Edna overwrought sympathy with “God help you” (46), representing the oppressive aspects of the Catholic Church in Ireland, particularly in relation to motherhood. Other acquaintances stare at the woman’s young companion. This intrusion by others culminates in Mildred’s question of, “Are the child’s clothes still hanging in the wardrobe?” (55). It also explains John’s insistence at the opening of Chapter 5 that the narrator have her own clothes to wear to the next Mass, where all of their circle will see her. This observation prompts the novella’s greatest display of grief: Edna weeping in the bathroom, which will be paralleled by her crying in the car at the end of the novella when she loses a child again.
The expanded social presence in Chapters 4 and 5 also brings joy, as is evidenced by the nighttime card games that the narrator witnesses. This gambling is presented as different from Da’s costly version, resulting in more of “a tittering match” one evening than a game (40). Just as the community looks to Kinsella for help as with the grave digging, it gathers at his table. Mildred aside, the wake also depicts a lively if morbid social engagement, with people “drifting in and out, shaking hands, drinking and eating and looking at the dead man, saying what a lovely corpse he is” (53). This emphasizes the importance of community despite its intrusiveness and juxtaposes with the implied isolation of the girl’s life previously.
The theme of Rural Life as Shaped by Natural Rhythms is prominent in this section. In Gorey, the gift shop cashier points out that it’s “not long now till [the children will] be back to school” (47), introducing the oncoming reality of autumn. The narrator then senses “something that might fall and change things” on the way to the wake (49), where she also encounters the symbolic lost heifer. Cows are large animals and crossroads are dangerous places in folktale, so the sighting adds to the foreboding quality that Keegan constructs around the changing season. In contrast, during this same walk, the girl and Edna meet “men on tractors, going in different directions” as they bring in “the wheat, the barley and oats” (50), suggesting again the abundance that the girl associates with this environment. However, the reason that Kinsella’s help is needed with the grave digging at all is the demands of nature keeping the other farm’s men harvesting “all out on the combines […] till God knows what hour” (48-49), implying that maintaining this abundance is grueling. The rhythm of the season dictates events and behavior in a mostly ominous manner.
Kinsella’s growing bond with the narrator is the primary emotional focus of these two central chapters. Though the girl is still wary of him at the beginning of Chapter 5, he is the one who takes enough notice of her to advocate that she get her own wardrobe. In Gorey, he connects with her through the simple generosity of money for sweets, which she repays by getting him and Edna treats of their own. At the wake, he holds the narrator on his lap, telling her that she’s “like a feather” and to “stay where [she is]” (53). This chapter marks the introduction of Kinsella’s second, more tender nickname for the girl, “Petal,” which he uses first while retrieving her from Mildred’s. This development changes the novella’s associations of fatherhood from discipline and fear to protection and love, emphasizing the theme of Healing Through Found Family.
It is the walk on the beach that cements Kinsella and the narrator’s relationship, marking a turning point for her as she senses the power of their connection. After they play in the waves, Kinsella speaks freely with the girl and offers the lines that highlight The Power of the Unspoken:
‘You don’t ever have to say anything,’ he says. ‘Always remember that as a thing you need never do. Many’s the man lost much just because he missed a perfect opportunity to say nothing’ (64-65).
This philosophy makes Kinsella’s openness with the girl all the more meaningful. As they walk back along the strand, the two see only the narrator’s footprints. Invoking the allegorical Christian poem “Footprints in the Sand,” which details two footprints disappearing into one to symbolize God carrying someone, Kinsella jokes that the girl “must have carried [him] there” (66), ascribing divine elevation to her presence. The pair of lights across the ocean that subsequently become three symbolizes their growing family and the openness that Kinsella demonstrates by sharing and being affectionate with the girl.
