Winter In The Blood

“Lame Bull had married 360 acres of hay land, all irrigated, leveled, some of the best land in the valley, as well as a 2000-acre grazing lease. And he had married a T-Y brand stamped high on the left ribs of every beef on the place. And, of course, he had married Teresa, my mother. At forty-seven, he was eight years younger than she, and a success. A prosperous cattleman.”

The narrator’s cynical analysis of his mother’s marriage functions on two levels: the first, his belief that the union is a result of Lame Bull’s ambition and cleverness; the second lies in his assessment of the ranch and land as valuable and worthy of pride. This contradicts his earlier description of the land as dry, isolated, and distant.

“She said this gently, perhaps to ease my guilt, if I still felt any, or perhaps because ducks do not matter. Especially those you win at the fair in Dodson.”

The narrator is dismissive of the idea of feeling guilt over the ducks’s deaths, but the memory lingers for him. It echoes the narrator’s recollection of having killed Buster Cutfinger’s dog while drunk (Chapter 1, Page 2) and the unacknowledged guilt he still feels for Mose’s death (Chapter 37, Page 115).

“In the makeshift pen, [Long Knife’s mother] wrestled calves, castrated them, then threw the balls into the ashes of the branding fire. She made a point of eating the roasted balls while glaring at one man, then another—even her sons, who, like the rest of us, stared at the brown hills until she was done.”

The narrator depicts Long Knife’s mother as strong in a similar way to his own mother, but he connects it to this unsettling act of silent aggression. This passage is reflective of the narrator’s fraught gender relations. The passage also exemplifies Welch’s skill in creating vivid characters even when they are allotted only a few sentences of description.

“Lame Bull didn’t grin much after that; at least, not as a rule. For one thing, his hand had become infected; for another, he had decided that it was improper for a property owner to grin so much, as it just caused trouble with the hired hands, who felt they could get away with anything so long as the boss grinned.”

Lame Bull’s change after the altercation with Long Knife shows that the incident spoiled Lame Bull’s uncomplicated joy at being an owner. In this chapter, Lame Bull goes back and forth on the topic of Long Knife, alternately calling him tricky and lazy and calling him a champion who is not a “bad worker.” Lame Bull is clever and likes to talk; the time he hits Long Knife is the only incident of violence we see from him, and his response shows that he was unsettled by his own actions.

“I suppose…but it might make him mad. That’s one thing you learn about men—you don’t joke with them unless you mean business.”

This line is delivered by the barmaid in Malta. In it, she makes explicit the danger that an angry man can pose for a woman and suggests that women, for their own safety, must carefully monitor their behavior and the moods of the men around them.

“I wanted to read it, to see what a priest would have to say to a woman who was his friend. I had heard of priests having drinking partners, fishing partners, but never a woman partner. I wanted to read it because his woman partner was my mother. But I didn’t want to see my mother’s name inside the envelope, in a letter written by a white man who refused to bury Indians in their own plots, who refused to set foot on the reservation. I felt vaguely satisfied as I tore up the letter between my legs and let the pieces fall to the floor.”

This quote shows the intersection of several of the narrator’s suppressed emotions: his resentment of his mother, his awareness of racial politics and the discrimination of white men, and his destructive impulses when faced with something he finds confusing or contradictory.

“It’s for my daughter—I’m going to wrap it up and send it to her. Trouble with you is you don’t appreciate good old-fashioned sentiment.” But he kept walking off to the side. “That’s the trouble with you young buckeroos.”

The airplane man congratulates himself for his thoughtfulness and giving nature. He criticizes the narrator for lacking sentiment. Further dialogue, however, reveals that the daughter the man refers to is an adult woman who the airplane man thinks—but is not sure—is living in Houston. He is congratulating himself on his sentiment but seemingly oblivious to how little he knows about his daughter and does not question the appropriateness of sending a stuffed animal to an adult.

“As the airplane man explained the details of the plan, I experienced a funny feeling of excitement and sadness. If I went through with it, I would become somebody else and the girl would have no meaning for me. Seeing her in front of The Silver Dollar had sparked a warmth in me that surprised me, that I couldn’t remember having felt in years. It seemed funny that it should happen now, since I had felt nothing for her when we were living together.”

The narrator feels poised at a threshold between two possible futures—one in which he pursues Agnes and perhaps resumes their relationship, and another in which he goes with the airplane man and is changed by the enterprise. The warring feelings of excitement and sadness are representative of the conflicted way the narrator experiences much of his life.

“Fall had been brief that year. The heavy August days had lazed into September with a heat that denied the regular change of seasons. The days did not become shorter, the nights did not cool off, nor did the stars turn white. It seemed that the hot, fly-buzzing days would never break, that summer would last through Christmas.”

The chapter begins abruptly with this description, disorienting the reader, who does not know what year “that year” refers to. The description also highlights the narrator’s innate knowledge of the land and ability to speak its language.

“Randolph Scott had plugged me dead with a memory I had tried to keep away.”

Randolph Scott is an actor who appeared in many Westerns of this era. His name on the movie theater marquee spurred a memory of Mose in the narrator’s mind, which in turn brought more memories of his brother. The narrator says he had “tried to keep away” the memory—this pattern of avoidance is evident elsewhere in the novel.

“I wanted to feel good but something was holding me back. I wasn’t afraid anymore. Without announcement, a feeling of resignation had crept into my chest. I was calm, but I didn’t feel good. Maybe it was a kind of love.”

Having found Agnes, the narrator has completed the quest he set for himself back at the ranch. However, faced with the reality of her, whatever fantasy scene he had been imagining evaporates. The narrator’s relationship with reality is fraught throughout the novel, and this scene shows how he retreats to melancholy when the real world does not meet his expectations.

“I had no idea which room she was in and the desk clerk wouldn’t help even if I knew her name. Again I felt that helplessness of being in a world of stalking white men.”

Though the novel does not dwell on the racism Indigenous Americans face in white society, Welch makes references to it throughout the narrative. In this passage, the narrator longs to find the barmaid from Malta and get some answers from her, but he knows that the white hotel clerk would distrust him and refuse to help.

“We took a room in a gray hotel down by the railroad station. The elevator man was as gray as the green walls. He said the elevator was out of order.

‘Why do you exist then?’ I said.

‘To take people up and down, whichever way they want to go,’ said the gray man.”

The narrator asks not why the elevator man is still working, but why he “exists.” The elevator man responds by describing his role in helping people navigate the building. The question the narrator raises is one of purpose, and whether one can fulfill their purpose without the resources they need to do it.

“Finally I laid her back on the bed and unzipped her pants. I never left the softness of her body. The first light of dawn caught me draped over her belly. . . I pinched her nostrils together and a great rasp began in her throat.”

The narrator speaks about Marlene in a way that enhances his autonomy and decreases hers. He lays her back and unzips her pants, then makes himself at home in her body. The use of the verb “caught” in the third sentence suggests an illicit lingering. The narrator pinches her nostrils so that the lack of oxygen will wake her up, a violent act that further demonstrates his objectification and use of her.

“And I was staring at the sobbing woman with the same lack of emotion, the same curiosity, as though I were watching a bug floating motionless down an irrigation ditch, not yet dead but having decided upon death.”

The narrator looks at Marlene struggling against his hold and is unable to empathize with her. This moment surpasses objectification and moves into dehumanizing territory, with the narrator comparing her to an insignificant bug.

“Everything had gone out of me, and I felt the kind of peace that comes over one when he is alone, when he no longer cares for warmth, or sunshine, or possessions, or even a woman’s body, so yielding and powerful.”

This passage shows the shift the narrator makes into “distance,” explaining the relief he finds there from the turmoil of his life. His description of a woman’s body as “yielding and powerful” is ironic in this context, moments after he restrained a woman and watched her suffering for no reason other than his own whims.

“I had had enough of Havre, enough of town, of walking home, hung over, beaten up, or both. I had had enough of the people, the bartenders, the bars, the cars, the hotels, but mostly, I had had enough of myself. I wanted to lose myself, to ditch these clothes, to outrun this burning sun, to stand beneath the clouds and have my shadow erased, myself along with it.”

The narrator confronts the truth of the experiences he tends to face when he goes to town. As he did at the beginning of the novel, he walks home hungover and beaten up. As discussed in the “Nature” entry in the Symbols and Motifs section of this guide, the narrator disparages the reservation and the ranch, but he continuously returns to it after becoming lost and hurt in the outside world.

“For the first time in my life, I was able to look at the room without the feeling that I was invading my grandmother’s privacy. But now I saw that almost nothing in the room belonged to her, just the rocker and the cot next to the oil stove.”

The narrator feels like looking too closely at someone’s space is an invasion of privacy. He makes a similar comment later in the novel during a visit with Yellow Calf, saying that he felt looking at the blind man’s face directly would be a kind of violation. This mimics the narrator’s tendency to divert his attention from complicated or upsetting situations and memories.

“Sunday nights Mose and I used to bathe in the tub on the kitchen floor, in the same water, until it turned the gray of the metal tub. That was a different kind of dirt—dust from the roads, chaff from the hayfields—not the invisible kind that coats a man who has been to town.”

As discussed in the Nature entry in the Symbols and Motifs section of this guide, the narrator’s relationships with town and country are complex. Though he describes home in negative terms, he repeatedly asserts that “town” is a place of “stalking white men,” confusing interactions, and violence.

“An hour later we had the hole dug, squared off and the coffin in place. Instead of any feeling of sorrow for my dead father, I felt only relief that we had finally gotten the hole dug. The sorry, what there was of it, came later.”

The narrator’s description of a muted grief for his father contrasts with the description of his raw agony at his brother’s death. This shows the narrator’s method of coping with painful and traumatic events by distracting himself and avoiding difficult feelings.

“Before he reached the house, he stopped and looked off toward the corral, then the toolshed. He turned and glanced at a stack of bales in the alfalfa field to the east. He seemed to be surveying his property to make sure today and tomorrow would be worth it.”

The narrator imagines that Lame Bull is balancing the financial gain of the marriage against the burden of dealing with his wife’s personal needs and feelings. Whether or not this is true of Lame Bull, it reveals the narrator’s concept of relationships as self-serving and rooted in how they can benefit one’s self.

“’What use,’ I whispered, cried for no one in the world to hear, not even Bird, for no one but my soul, as though the words would rid it of the final burden of guilt, and I found myself a child again, the years shed as a snake sheds its skin, and I was standing over the awkward tangle of clothes and limbs. ‘What use, what use, what use…’ and no one answered, not the body in the road, not the hawk in the sky or the beetle in the earth; no one answered. And the tears in the hot sun, in the wine, the dusk, the chilly wind of dusk, the sleet that began to fall as I knelt beside the body, the first sharp pain of my smashed knee, the sleet on my neck, the blood which dribbled from his nostrils, his mouth, the man who hurried back from his car, his terrible breath as he tried to wrestle me away from my brother’s broken body.”

The narrator finally breaks his self-imposed apathy and confronts his brother’s death in the present. The raw emotion in this passage, along with the vivid detail that connects the animals, ground, and weather to the event, reveal the intensity of the trauma that the narrator, then twelve years old, experienced.

“Some people, I thought, will never know how pleasant it is to be distant in a clean rain, the driving rain of a summer storm. It’s not like you’d expect, nothing like you’d expect.”

Though the narrator refers to his mental state as “distant” in this scene, his description of the “clean rain” and how pleasant it is suggests that instead of distant, the narrator, having acknowledged his grief and physically exhausted from rescuing the cow, is actually present in this moment.