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 22-27Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 22 Summary
In December of that year, Zech attends the Fort Drum Christmas frolic. As soon as Zech enters the frolic, he wants to retreat, having realized he is the only man there wearing jeans instead of a suit. Before he can do so, Glenda intercepts him. They drink punch, and Glenda teaches Zech to dance.
Later in the evening, Glenda invites Zech to stay the night in a spare bedroom at her parents’ house. She assures him that her parents won’t mind as long as they are “promised” to one another. Glenda explains, “You know, going steady” (211). Although they kiss and agree to be “promised,” Zech lies and says he needs to return to the homestead early in the morning to help Tobias.
Chapter 23 Summary
After many failed attempts, Tobias’s 100-acre orange grove finally blooms in February of 1880. For Zech, this is all the more reason why the family should own the land. Tobias disagrees. Emma says, “He thinks the land is a gift from the Lord for everybody’s use and it’s not right for anybody to lay claim to it. Maybe it ought to be that way, but it’s not” (219).
Unbeknownst to Tobias, Zech takes some of the family’s gold and buys 20,000 acres surrounding the homestead at $0.20 an acre.
Chapter 24 Summary
On the day of Zech’s wedding, Tobias refuses to wear a suit, only relenting when Skillit threatens to “hang him by his feet in a tree, like a hawg at scrapin’ time, and dress him up real purty” (224). Aside from that, the wedding day goes perfectly.
On the way to an inland schooner headed to Jacksonville for their honeymoon, Zech and Glenda turn off the road and make love for the first time.
Chapter 25 Summary
In late May, Glenda confesses to Emma that she is pregnant. She begs Emma to promise not to tell Zech, or else he won’t let her accompany the group on the summer cattle drive to Punta Rassa. Glenda says, “Going with Zech this time is important to me. I’ve got to prove to him I can do it” (234).
Chapter 26 Summary
With so many rustlers stealing their cattle, the drive of 1880 only amounts to 1,080 cows at the outset. At the edge of the salt march where the MacIveys always graze their cattle, four armed riders turn them away, claiming they arrived at the marsh first. Livid, Tobias wants a confrontation even if it ends in bloodshed. He says, “If we back down, Emma, it will happen again and again. Someday the range is going to get crowded. We just been lucky so far. We’re going to have to fight for what belongs to us” (240). Emma, on the other hand, refuses to put any member of her family in danger and succeeds in convincing Tobias to retreat.
By the end of the drive, the MacIvey herd numbers just over 2,000. With Tobias’s malarial fits getting worse, Zech convinces the group to stay in Punta Rassa for a couple of days. During this time, the group works together to build a cabin on the land Tobias won in the horse race.
Five days out of Punta Rassa, bushwhackers attack their party, shooting and killing both Glenda’s horse and Ishmael. After Zech rescues Glenda from under her horse, the group hides in a palmetto grove. Glenda cries out in pain from her stomach and miscarries a baby girl.
When two men approach the trunks of gold on the wagon, Tobias and Frog shoot and kill both. All the men of the MacIvey crew unload their Winchester repeater rifles in the direction of the bushwhackers. Frog rides off, and when he returns, one of the bushwhackers is tied to his horse. After Zech learns of the pregnancy and miscarriage, he races toward Frog, grabs the rope, and takes the bushwhacker to the woods, where he hangs him.
Chapter 27 Summary
In October, Zech travels alone to Keith Tiger’s village to obtain new marshtackies for Glenda and himself. While there, Zech and Tawanda have sex. Zech justifies his adultery to himself by reasoning:
It was a natural act between a man and a woman who cared for each other. What he had done with Tawanda belonged in the swamp and would remain there, and had nothing to do with his life with Glenda. These were two separate worlds, one real and one fantasy, and there was no reason for them to ever meet (255).
Zech also tries to ease his guilt by reasoning that Glenda deceived him first regarding the pregnancy. He leaves the village with two marshtackies, a stallion and a mare, and he names the stallion “Tiger.”
Chapters 22-27 Analysis
Up until this point in the novel, the roles of the female characters on the frontier have been only sketchily explored or interrogated. Part of this is because, for much of the first half of the novel, Emma is so busy working to ensure her family’s survival that she has little time for introspection. But Smith uses the official initiation of Glenda into the MacIvey clan as an opportunity to compare and contrast the roles the two women play within the family unit. With the MacIveys having established some financial stability, Emma is grateful that Glenda will have the opportunity to play a more traditional feminine role as wife and mother:
Emma watched it all with deep satisfaction, knowing that when children came Glenda could give them something more than she had been able to offer Zech, a chance to break free and do something more than grub for survival (232).
The irony is that by making progress in the realm of financial stability, Glenda’s generation has less flexibility when it comes to gender roles than Emma’s pioneer generation. During the early parts of the novel, Emma frequently shares with Tobias the burden of providing for the family and defending the homestead out of necessity, just as he shares with her the burden of cooking and keeping house. The result is a relatively egalitarian balance of labor between the sexes that is extraordinarily rewarding for Emma:
Each step she took, each hardship overcome and each valley of fear transgressed intact, brought her closer to the realization of a hope she never abandoned: a better life for Zech and his lifemate and for those yet to come (232).
Yet Glenda, despite being the beneficiary of Emma’s hardship, must fight against being placed in a more traditional gender role of wife and mother. When she decides to keep her pregnancy a secret so she can accompany the MacIveys on that summer’s drive, she tells Emma, “Going with Zech this time is important to me. I’ve got to prove to him I can do it” (234). This gender divide between first-generation and second-generation pioneers is supported by the research of history professor Cynthia Culver Prescott, author of Gender and Generation on the Far Western Frontier (Prescott, Cynthia Culver. Gender and Generation on the Far Western Frontier. University of Arizona Press. 2016.). It may seem counterintuitive, but the progress made by pioneer families like the MacIveys in the first generation has the effect of making future gender roles more rigid, not less.
As Zech comes into his own as a man, the book further explores the philosophical schisms between him and Tobias. Despite the increased presence of cattle rustlers, company men, and fellow frontiersmen on the prairie, Tobias refuses to buy the land surrounding the MacIvey homestead. In Emma’s words, “He thinks the land is a gift from the Lord for everybody’s use and it’s not right for anybody to lay claim to it. Maybe it ought to be that way, but it’s not” (219). Zech’s ability to separate the way things “ought to be” (219) from the way things are is one of the most significant ways in which he differs from his father. A more humorous but no less significant example of this generational schism appears in Chapter 24, when Tobias all but refuses to wear a suit to his son’s wedding. Zech, on the other hand, is able to adopt unfamiliar customs more comfortably without losing his true identity as a man of the frontier.
This ability to compartmentalize extends to Zech’s tryst with Tawanda. There is no question that Zech breaks his marital vows to Glenda by having sex with Tawanda. Yet as he works out his emotions over this act of infidelity and betrayal, Zech chooses to think of it as something that:
[…] could not have been prevented under the circumstances, that it was a natural between a man and a woman who cared for each other. What he had done with Tawanda belonged in the swamp and would remain there, and had nothing to do with his life with Glenda. These were two separate worlds, one real and one fantasy and there was no reason for them to ever meet (255).
Despite the book’s refusal to judge Zech for his unfaithfulness, the character’s somewhat facile rationalization and refusal to take responsibility suggests that his ability to compartmentalize may not always have a positive effect on him or those around him.
