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 34-38Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 34 Summary
The ice storm devastates the region, killing orange trees and countless other plants and animals. “Only buzzards profited from the freeze” (310). Zech infers that the closest place to buy new orange trees is Fort Dallas in what is now modern-day Miami.
When Keith and members of his tribe come to pay their respects to Tobias, Zech sees no sign of Tawanda. He learns from her parents that she died in childbirth, giving birth to a stillborn son conceived during Zech’s most recent visit. They also tell Zech that Toby stayed behind because that is what Tawanda would have wanted.
Chapter 35 Summary
Zech, Glenda, and Sol ride down the coast to Fort Dallas to buy more orange trees. On the way, they stop at the luxurious Royal Poinciana Hotel in Palm Beach, where the man at the front desk turns them away because of their uncouth appearance. Disgusted by the opulence on display, Zech says, “Someday the damned railroads will haul folks in here thicker than deer flies, and it’ll spread elsewhere. I’m glad Pappa never saw such as this. It would ‘a killed him quicker than the malaria and the cold” (321).
At a pet store, Sol is flabbergasted that the same birds he encounters every day in the wilderness sell for $100 or more here. This gives Sol an idea: he collects two dozen baby buzzards from the trees and sells them to tourists for $25 apiece, referring to them as “kookabens.” Though somewhat disturbed by the deception, Zech is impressed with his son’s entrepreneurial spirit: “I guess you’re going to make out all right, Sol, but I sure wouldn’t want to do business with you” (322).
At Fort Dallas, Zech buys 8,000 orange trees and arranges for 1,000 more to be shipped to him each month. He also buys 6,000 acres of land in the area. Sol uses his buzzard earnings to buy a little land on the beach for half the price per acre.
Chapter 36 Summary
In the spring of 1896, rustlers steal 100 head of MacIvey cattle. Fed up with the lawlessness, Zech asks Frog to hire six of the meanest gunslingers he can find from the meanest town in Florida. Zech learns that the rustlers are part of a small but fearsome criminal organization led by ex-Confederate deserter Wirt McGraw and headquartered south of Punta Rassa.
At the cabin in Punta Rassa, Zech convenes with Frog, the six hired guns, and 13 more ranchers Zech convinced to accompany them. Glenda and Sol are there too, but Zech instructs them to stay at the cabin while they raid McGraw’s hideout. About an hour after the raiding party leaves, Sol chases after them on his horse.
At the hideout, Zech’s men are slightly outnumbered but have the element of surprise on their side. Within moments of the attack, half of McGraw’s men are dead, and the rest surrender. As one hidden adversary takes aim at Zech’s head, Sol approaches on horseback and shoots the man dead. As the man hits the ground, his gun goes off and hits Zech in the foot. Zech hangs McGraw and the remaining cattle rustlers.
Back at the cabin, the doctor says he lacks the tools and skill to remove the bullet from Zech’s foot, concluding that the only option is amputation. Instead of letting the doctor remove his foot, Zech rides with Sol to Keith’s village to seek help from Miami Billie, the medicine man. Miami uses a heated knife to pull back the skin from the wound and removes the bullet with his teeth.
While Zech recovers, Sol meets Toby and learns they are half-brothers. Over the next six days, the two become fast friends.
Chapter 37 Summary
By March of 1898, the MacIveys own 8,000 acres of orange groves. Zech also purchases an expensive Brahma bull, sensing that the future of the industry involves breeding high-quality cows. The bull, however, is highly aggressive. When Frog tries to brand it, the bull escapes from its pen and gores both Frog and Glenda to death. Sol shoots and kills the bull before it can hurt anybody else. Devastated, Zech blasts the bull’s dead carcass repeatedly with his shotgun, telling Sol, “Leave that varmint right there where he’s lying till the buzzards pick him clean. When there ain’t nothin’ left but bones, I want you to throw ‘em in the river” (352).
Chapter 38 Summary
The summer after Glenda’s death is the last MacIvey cattle drive. Because of the Spanish-American War, the Cuban market is closed, but the military buys Zech’s cows for $40 a head at inflated prices. From that point forward, Zech concentrates on breeding high-quality cows delivered to buyers by rail. He also buys 70,000 acres of land in the Okeechobee area around Keith’s village and Pay-Hay-Okee to ensure that “no one ever put axes or machines to it, destroying it as the land was destroyed around Palm Beach” (359).
In 1905, Zech and Sol inspect their latest purchase, a purebred Hereford bull. As thunderclouds form above, Sol rides back to the homestead, leaving behind Zech, who wants to stay a little longer in the rain because it reminds him of Glenda. Before long, the storm intensifies, and the land begins to flood. On the way home, Zech’s horse gets caught in the mud and, in a panic, throws Zech from the saddle. Zech’s lame foot—which never healed properly after the raid on McGraw’s hideout—becomes stuck in the stirrup. Zech drowns in the overflowing waters of Turkey Creek. His horse survives and returns to the homestead by instinct, pulling Zech’s dead body behind it.
Chapters 34-38 Analysis
After the deaths of Tobias and Emma, Zech must lead his family in the aftermath of the ice storm, a historical event so singularly devastating to the region it is known simply as “The Great Freeze.” After the storm, Florida’s fruit industry collapsed, as production plummeted from six million boxes per year to one hundred thousand. It would take six years before the state’s fruit production reached even one million boxes per year again. According to the historian Charles Alexander McMurry, the economic impact was on par with that of the Great Chicago Fire (McMurry, Charles Alexander. Type Studies from the Geography of the United States. Macmillan & Company, 1908.). Were it not for the MacIveys’ vast savings, the family would likely not have recovered financially. As Zech observes, the devastation extends far beyond the realm of economic figures, attaching an almost mystical quality to the destruction nature meted out to itself: “It seemed to Zech that all of the creatures had gone mad, driven to a bloody frenzy by the ice and snow and death that lingered because of it” (311).
On the trip to Fort Dallas to replenish the orange groves, the reader gets an early sense of the man Sol will become. His scheme to pass off baby buzzards as exotic “kookaben” birds is at once ingeniously entrepreneurial and disturbingly dishonest. His father’s reaction is appropriately mixed. Zech tells him, “I guess you’re going to make out all right, Sol, but I sure wouldn’t want to do business with you” (322). The kookaben scene is indicative of Sol’s personality both literally and symbolically. As a boy with a preternatural command of predatory capitalism, Sol himself is like a baby buzzard: cute now, but he will grow into the kind of creature who doesn’t think twice about picking apart others’ ruined livelihoods for his own gain.
Despite his deviousness, Sol shows great courage during the raid on Wirt McGraw’s compound. As Zech waits for the right moment to carry out the raid, he considers the cycles of violence that brought him to this precipice:
He wondered who these men were, where they came from, why they were here and what drove them to do what they were doing; he knew that soon now someone would die, maybe them and maybe himself. Is it really worth all this, he asked himself, all this approaching death because of cows? But he knew it was more than cows that brought him here, remembering the dogs and the horses and the bullet in Bonzo and the bushwhacking and the firefight and the murder of an unborn baby and the absolute need to take these men’s lives from them in order to stop it. But why had they started it in the first place? This he couldn’t answer, knowing only the fact that some men would rather take than share and would indeed as soon kill another man as a snake (338).
When Zech lists off the bushwhackers’ victims in his head, the grisly cost of doing commerce in a lawless land comes into sharp focus. Yet despite these men’s outlaw status, they are not so distinguishable from the tycoons—and even Sol later in life—who operate within the bounds of the law. The characteristic they all share is that they “would rather take than share” (338).
Meanwhile, Glenda’s death, having been caused by an animal, is not so easily avenged. Her loss is shattering for Zech, who feels many of the same emotions his father did at Emma’s passing:
Zech sat on the stoop, his face buried in his hands, remembering, thinking of things done and not done, said and not said, hearing vividly the conversation of only yesterday and the plans that were now canceled forever. He also remembered the day of Emma’s death when Tobias urged him to do things for Glenda before it was too late (352).
His next words to his son will have a particularly strong impact later in Sol’s life. Zech advises him, “Sol, don’t ever get yourself tied up with a woman. It’s like owning dogs. You get to liking them, and it hurts powerful when they go away. And they all go away” (353). The fact that Sol will never marry or bear children is not entirely surprising, given his father’s words at this pivotal moment of loss.
McGraw’s men get their final revenge on Zech from beyond the grave, when the foot he injured during the raid gets caught in his horse’s stirrup, and he drowns. This twist of fate serves to undermine Zech’s belief that killing McGraw and his men will put an end to the cycle of violence. On the contrary, it keeps going even after the rustlers’ deaths.
