Night of the Living Rez

Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 2022

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“The Blessing Tobacco”Chapter Summaries & Analyses

“The Blessing Tobacco” Summary

David visits with his grandmother, who, due to dementia, has mistaken him for her own brother, Robbie. The grandmother gives David a cigarette and David, deciding that he will play along with his grandmother’s delusion, takes the cigarette. When he finishes one, she insists he takes another, and so on until he becomes sick. As he runs from her house, looking for a place to vomit, she accuses him of having stolen from the family’s blessing tobacco.

David returns home and Paige, who has moved back in with their mother and now works in a pawnshop, finds him looking ill. She gives him some ginger ale and argues with their mother about how much she can expect to receive from the pawnshop for some silver jewelry. After their conversation, David’s mother tells him that he didn’t refill the wood box at his grandmother’s house and needs to go back to do that. David does this, and his grandmother makes him dinner.

David returns home late that night and finds his mother and Paige fighting. Paige claims that their mother embarrassed her at work, and their mother claims that Paige should have offered her more money for the silver jewelry. David goes to bed but is awoken later by the arrival of tribal police and EMTs bringing his grandmother to the house. His grandmother is distraught, believing she drove Robbie out of the house with her punishment for stealing the blessing tobacco and that he drowned in the river. She calms when she sees David. David, disturbed by the encounter, reflects on how his great-uncle Robbie would have felt when he was still alive.

“The Blessing Tobacco” Analysis

David’s grandmother’s dementia, a degenerative memory disease, sheds new light on the interconnectedness of Personal and Communal Histories. As she transposes her dead brother’s identity onto the young David, she inadvertently demonstrates that, within a family, individual identity is always intertwined family history, one identity bleeding into another. David initially plays along, seeing his grandmother’s delusion as an amusement and a chance to get free cigarettes. But the experience swiftly becomes overwhelming and uncontrollable, as he absorbs this other man’s punishment—another illustration of Entrapment in Cycles of Trauma.

This story continues to develop David’s complicated relationship with his family and cultural history. For most of the stories preceding this in the collection, David has struggled to learn much at all about his family history. The sudden resurgence of the past that comes to him through his grandmother’s delusion is an upsetting immersion into an unfamiliar history that he only becomes familiar with by allowing himself to be punished for transgressions committed by another man generations ago. As physically and emotionally traumatizing as this experience is for David, it does more fully invest him in wanting to have a relationship with his familial history. The final scene of this story sees David inventing his own history of his dead great-uncle, one in which his uncle acts a nurturing father figure whose gentleness as a hunter starkly contrasts Frick’s disposition. The story’s final line, in which David imagines his great-uncle walking ahead of him “in quiet strides through a dark-pined forest” (125) connotes a surprising serenity and suggests that David wants to find a way that he can be at peace with his history.