56 pages • 1 hour read
Annette Saunooke ClapsaddleEven As We Breathe
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2020A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Prologue-Part 1, Chapter 5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “Bones”
Prologue Summary
Clapsaddle opens with a sensual poem by Benjamin Cutler, “The Lovers’ Prayer to the Body,” that describes the aesthetic sensation of touch as an essential aspect of the human experience, linking a person to life and death. As an old man, Cowney looks back over the summer he spent at Grove Park Inn and his chance finding of a random bone in the ground, which caused great problems for him. He also thinks of a little girl who disappeared and a teenage girl he fell in love with who taught him there are many different kinds of love: “And now it seems possible that love is the only thing that will outlive us all, but only if we continue to tell its story” (3). The experience revealed above all that people and their place on the earth belong to each other beyond any legal prescriptions—a first expression of the theme of Life and Death as an Eternal Cycle.
Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary
Cowney, the protagonist, is also the novel’s narrator. He tells the story of his paternal grandmother, Lishie, taking care of him after his father dies in World War I. His uncle Bud also served in the war and recounts the ultimate importance of his service:
If it wasn’t for guys like me and your dad, this wouldn’t even be your country. And again, Bud was only half right. All Indians were finally recognized as US citizens following World War I partially because of the service of so many volunteers like Bud and my father (11).
He imagines the scene at the time they buried his father. He tells of Lishie constantly making quilts.
As he grows, Cowney stays with Lishie and Bud, her surviving son, and ends up working for Bud. Cowney has a birth deformity: his left foot turns outward, making it difficult for him to run and ineligible for military service.
Part 1, Chapter 2 Summary
Cowney is hired to work at Grove Park Inn in Asheville, North Carolina. Before he leaves, however, he works a final job with Bud. Because of the establishment of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Bud contractually cannot cut down as many trees to fulfill his agreement with the logging companies. Still, he has secretly cut down dozens of extra trees. He quietly strikes a deal with some fellows to use horses to pull trees to the river and float them down. He needs Cowney to be the person who stops the logs as they float down the river by organizing the logs into a dam that will break open when the rains come in the springtime.
As he watches the logs come down the river, Cowney realizes there is no way that he can stop them and almost drowns: “The water reddened with clay and frayed bark. I was blind. Calling for help was a waste of time. The skeleton crew of men were stationed elsewhere. My survival was my own” (18). The idea of saving himself in dangerous circumstances will recur throughout the narrative. He saves himself by diving down under the logs and swimming as hard and as far as he can until he reaches shore. Bud finds him and kicks him with his boot, telling him to get up. His uncle does not pay him anything for that day of work. Cowney only sees Bud one more time before he goes to work in Asheville.
Part 1, Chapter 3 Summary
Cowney prepares to make his trip to Grove Park Inn. He reads in the newspaper that the important German, Japanese, and Italian diplomats are being kept at the Grove Park Inn while detained Americans of Japanese descent languish in reservations in California. This reveals the disparity in the treatment received by Japanese American citizens compared to aristocrats and potential foreign agents. He says ironically, “For once in their lives, those Japanese Americans must have wished they were just Japanese in America, like the diplomats and nationals that I’d be serving at the inn” (24).
As he prepares to go, he thinks about the job and how he might become the servant of some aristocrat. The prospect of riding two hours with a Cherokee girl named Essie—who will also work during the summer at the Grove Park Inn—thrills Cowney.
Part 1, Chapter 4 Summary
As they drive to The Grove Park Inn, Cowney tries to talk to Essie, who seems uninterested. Cowney and Essie are distantly related. Their Cherokee heritage has shaped their lives and worldviews. Cowney says, “We were products of ‘the reservation,’ pronounced low and quickly by us […]. Broken into at least five whispered syllables when spoken by visitors or neighbors across the mountain—thuh-rez-her-va-shuuun” (25). Cowney perceives Essie to be brighter and more urbane than he is.
As he talks to her about the possibility that builders constructed the Grove Park Inn over Indigenous graves, he also brings up the notion that there might be Nazi war criminals at the inn from the higher echelons. She falls asleep and wakes up as they get to Asheville. He has chosen to take the long route to spend more time with her. As they make their way through the corridors of Asheville with its tall skyscrapers on their way to the inn, Cowney’s infatuation with Essie is clear.
Part 1, Chapter 5 Summary
Cowney and Essie arrive at the Grove Park Inn. The military police, who surround the inn, check Cowney and Essie in and guide them to the front of the institution. Once inside and checked in, they meet their shift supervisors and receive instructions. The man who is supervising Cowney seems friendly enough. His name is Lee. The woman in charge of housekeeping seems less friendly, so Cowney worries about how Essie will deal with her: “I looked back to read Essie’s face and watched as the confidence I had seen earlier fell away” (40). He notes the fact that this is a totally new beginning for them: They have the chance to prove themselves and discover who they are.
Prologue-Part 1, Chapter 5 Analysis
Death haunts life from the beginning of Cowney’s tale, which is a reflection of Clapsaddle’s thematic treatment of Life and Death as an Eternal Cycle. The death of his oldest and best friend inspires Cowney to tell this story. He acknowledges that the only part of ourselves that endures beyond death is our love—though, he says, we must share the stories of our love in order to persist. Beyond the Prologue, death is the backdrop to almost everything that transpires in the first four chapters of the book.
Cowney says his earliest memories cannot really be memories since he was only an infant at the time of his father’s funeral. Still, the awareness of grief and unfulfilled lives abides within him. Traveling toward Asheville with the lovely Essie, Cowney seeks to begin a conversation and brings up the subjects of death and of children who have disappeared. Mortality, the fragility of life, and the possibility of unjust death seem to be inescapable topics in this first section of the book. The author’s use of the word “Bones” as the title of Part 1 reflects this thematic preoccupation. Escaping the constant weight and morbidity of death’s backdrop is, in large measure, the reason Cowney and Essie perceive their summer at the inn as an opportunity not only to meet other new people but to get to know themselves. Cowney has never known himself as anyone other than the person responsible for his mother’s death, the person whose father never came home from the war to embrace him.
Cowney also yearns to escape the pervasive negativity of his uncle, whose unaddressed grief and perpetual rage set the tone for all the unpleasant work Cowney has had to do in his 19 years. Even when Cowney thinks he has escaped Bud, his uncle forces him to complete one more job: stopping floating logs as they barrel down the river. Of course, there is no way Cowney could do this, and he dives beneath the logs to save his life. The river spares him, in Clapsaddle’s first reflection on the balance between Christian Faith and the Eternal Earth. Though he does not recognize it at the time, the very land he seeks to reject is his source of solace and salvation.
The counterpoint to Bud’s aggrieved discontent is the perpetual optimism of Cowney’s grandmother, Lishie. Lishie embodies compassionate love, along with a strong sense of right-versus-wrong that springs from her unwavering adherence to the Christian Faith. Love guides all that Lishie does, and the love she embodies is evident in the way Cherokees admire and embrace her. It is out of love, whether proper or not, that she holds back the most important answers Cowney wants regarding his parents. Her love holds Bud in check, though not without driving her to tears. The most beautiful and tangible expression of her love is her constant quilting. Symbolically, Lishie strives to cover her whole world and all those she adores with love in the form of quilts.
The mistreatment of Indigenous Americans and prejudices against them arise as well. In Chapter 1, Tsa Tsi describes the treatment received by his relatives, confined in a US Army stockade like cattle before their removal to the west. His grandfather remarked that the white men turned his brother into an animal. Also prevalent throughout the narrative is the theme of Hypocritical Bias Against Indigenous Americans. Clapsaddle points out repeatedly that prejudice of one group against another is rife with hypocrisy and irony. For example, Cowney learns in Chapter 3 that foreign nationals of countries engaged in war against the US receive housing at the Grove Park Inn, arguably the nation’s finest resort. American citizens of Japanese descent, on the other hand, find themselves locked up on desert reservations. When Bud proclaims that Cowney would not even be a citizen of the land if he and Cowney’s father had not served in World War I, it is a supreme irony: The US government conquered Indigenous people, removed most of them, and only after decades allowed them to become citizens of the land stolen from them.
Irony emerges in this first section in other respects as well. Clapsaddle mentions novelist Thomas Wolfe, who wrote the novel You Can’t Go Home Again because he felt unwelcome in his native Asheville. Yet Asheville now celebrates Wolfe, with his grave and his home open to visitors. In this, the author sets the stage for Cowney and Essie to discover that one can go home and, in fact, home calls one back to one’s place of origin. The author also plays with irony when she sends two young people who yearn to escape the bonds of their reservation to a place full of people held against their will, all of whom want nothing more than to return to their native lands.
