When the weather becomes warmer, Welch begins to bloom with a particular kind of beauty. All the flowers and the growing grass soon hide the abandoned cars and refrigerators and the shells of broken down houses.
During the summer, the family reads more than ever. Mom brings home dozens of books and admits this is her addiction, because she does nothing else but read. Lori becomes obsessed with The Lord of the Rings. Jeannette reads books in which people must deal with hardships, especially A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. She really identifies with Francie Nolan and how Francie feels about her father. Jeannette comes to believe she's not a complete fool for believing in her own father or at least trying to believe in him. However, it is getting harder.
One night that summer, she awakens to hear her drunken dad come in the
door. When she goes downstairs, she sees that he's covered in blood. When
she asks him what happened, he says, I got in a fight with the mountain
and the mountain won. He also has a terrible gash on his head, so deep
Jeannette can see the white of his skull. She cleans it out and pours
rubbing alcohol over it. However, the gash on his forearm needs stitches.
Dad decides he can do it himself, but he's too drunk, and he had never
been able to use his left arm as well as his right. So, he tells Jeannette
she has to help him. With his left hand guiding hers as well as he can,
they sew two stitches, but Jeannette can't go any farther. Dad tells her
it's fine handiwork anyway and that he's proud of her. When she leaves
the next morning, Dad is still asleep. When she comes home in the evening,
he is gone again.
There is a sense of nostalgia and memories of betrayal in this section.
These are memories of summers when the beauty of the blooms is overwhelming,
and the days are wiled away reading. Jeannette's identification with Francie
Nolan, a character in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn reflects the complicated
relationship she has with Dad. She wants badly to believe in him, she
shares frightening and happy experiences with him, like sewing up a gash
in his arm, and she feels the despair when he leaves them all again.
Dad continues to disappear for days at a time, and the problems of foraging for food return for the kids. Dad refuses to get a job where he has to work for hire, saluting and sucking up, and taking orders. He says, You'll never make a fortune working for the boss man. When he does come home, he usually brings bags of groceries that last them for a few days, but he's actually gone for weeks at a time. Mom also receives a periodical check from the oil company for the lease on her land in Texas. However, this money is never a steady source of money, and Mom refuses to sell the land to help out the family.
When the electricity is on, they eat a lot of pinto beans, sometimes mixed with mayonnaise or jack mackerel. Sometimes, they mix it with cat food when things are really tough. Even a bag of popcorn may be the only food they have for dinner. Mom adds lots of salt to it to make it look more nourishing. Once when a really large oil royalty check comes, they buy a huge canned ham and eat off it for a week. Mom even makes them eat it when it has little white maggots growing on it.
Jeannette and Brian once again become expert foragers. They pick crab apples, wild blackberries, and pawpaws in the warm weather and steal field corn from Old Man Wilson's farm. They find a wounded black bird and think about making a blackbird pie, but they can't bring themselves to kill the animal. They also had heard of a dish called a poke salad and think they might be able to make it from poke weed. However, even when they boil the poke weed, it is still bitter and sour. Then, they come across an abandoned house where they find a shelf full of canned goods. Unfortunately, all the food in every can is rotten.
When Jeannette starts the sixth grade, the other kids begin to make
fun of them, because they are so skinny. They call them names, every one
of which Jeannette cannot forget. At lunch, during school, the two of
them always have excuses for why they have no lunch. They just take out
a book and read while everyone else eats. Jeannette eventually begins
staying in the bathroom to avoid the comments, and after the girls throw
away their lunches in the trash in there, Jeannette finds a wealth of
food. She even thinks of taking what she can't eat home to the family,
but her fear of being discovered by other kids makes her place a bologna
sandwich she had stolen back in the trashcan. Maureen is lucky, because
she has made so many friends that she often shows up at the houses of
other girls just at dinnertime. However, Jeannette has no idea what Lori
or Mom are doing to fend for themselves. In fact, Mom actually seems to
be getting heavier. They soon learn why, when one evening the whole family
except Dad is sitting around the living room. Mom keeps disappearing under
the blanket until Brian finally pulls it back and reveals that she has
been sneaking pieces of chocolate from a family-sized Hershey bar and
then hiding it. She begins to cry saying that she is a sugar addict just
like their father is an alcoholic. Brian grabs the bar and the kids break
it into equal pieces and wolf them down.
This section once again reflects the monumental selfishness of Rex and Rose Mary Walls. He is an alcoholic who may feel sad that his children are suffering, but not enough to come home and swallow his pride and laziness to get a job that he may not like, but will work at so his children can eat. Rose Mary is worse. She also makes no attempt to work and then hides food so that she gets to eat it while her children are foraging in trash cans for leftover lunches.
Clapsaddle, Diane. "TheBestNotes on A Long Way Gone".
TheBestNotes.com.
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