Winter In The Blood

Louise Erdrich is an award-winning novelist and poet who is a member of the Chippewa Indian tribe. Erdrich opens the Introduction by explaining that Winter in the Blood should rightfully have been awarded the Pulitzer Prize in fiction; she credits the omission to the novel’s “visionary simplicity and the raw depth of the heart that wrote it” (ix). Like Harjo, Erdrich cites the novel’s origins as a poem and credits Welch with the creation of “one indelible image after the other” (x). She praises Welch’s ability to draw big themes through small interactions between characters, and argues that he is able to generate sympathy for each of his characters. Erdrich also suggests that the character of the narrator’s grandmother, “the old woman,” is at the novel’s core, even though the narrative seems not to involve her until the ending: “She is the presiding spirit of both anguish and tenacity, and she stands for the mysterious and undestroyable will of a people” (xii).

Erdrich describes Welch’s style as a Kafkaesque “transparent,” one which features straightforward, unpretentious language that is poetic in its simplicity. Explaining that this style is often interpreted as describing alienation, Erdrich counters that it is more accurately about the narrator’s quiet despair. She knew Welch and describes him as a kind and humble man; she laments the loss of a teacher and friend, and the works he could have created if he hadn’t died at the age of 62. Erdrich explains that she wanted to write this introduction because the novel was so meaningful to her as a young writer. She credits this to the familiarity of the novel’s setting and events, and to Welch’s feat of “[writing] about Indians without once getting pious, uplifting, or making you feel sorry for The Plight” (xiii).

The narrator approaches home through the undeveloped and sparse landscape of Montana’s Milk River valley. It is hot; the narrator has a black eye and his knee aches from walking. The narrator is going home to his mother, his grandmother, and his girlfriend Agnes, a woman who the others believe is his wife. Agnes’s name is not revealed until Chapter 27; she is referred to as the girlfriend, the ex-girlfriend, or the Cree girl. The narrator thinks that he feels nothing for his family, or for anyone, only distance within himself. He wonders if it’s the rural, sparsely populated area that creates this distance. Noting that he’s thirsty, he resumes his walk, with two miles still ahead of him.

The narrator’s mother, Teresa, tells him that Agnes left three days earlier, taking his gun and electric razor with him. Teresa says that she was too busy to do anything about it, and that the girl was young and Cree—a tribe that the narrator’s family does not like. She tells the narrator to at least get the gun back. The narrator has not used the gun in four years, when he “killed Buster Cutfinger’s dog for no reason except that [he] was drunk and it was moving” (2). He hears a rocking chair squeak in the living room—it’s his grandmother, who rarely leaves her chair. He asks after the grandmother and Teresa says that the woman is old and on a diet of soft foods. The narrator suggests they butcher a cow to give the old woman steak, but Teresa says this will just kill her more quickly.

The narrator asks after someone named Lame Bull, but his mother is evasive. She sends him to get a bucket of water. At the well, he thinks about Agnes—a Cree girl from Havre who didn’t fit in on the reservation (3). His mother assumed they were married and was polite to the girl, but Agnes usually sat sullenly in the living room and read movie magazines, which deepened the grandmother’s dislike for her. The narrator explains that his grandmother distrusted Agnes because she was Cree, a tribe that she distrusts. The narrator explains that his mother is Catholic; she drinks with the priest from Harlem, a nearby town. The priest will not come to the reservation to bury the deceased; he insists that the dead are brought to him, and the narrator resents him for this.

The narrator finds his late father’s fishing gear and goes to the river. He explains that there was a sugar beet factory up the river that polluted the water and killed all the fish. The factory closed seven years ago but the river did not improve. Men came to stock the river with pike, but those fish all disappeared. The fish department men tested the water and tried adding other kinds of fish, but those disappeared too. Eventually, “the men from the fish department disappeared, and the Indians put away their new fishing poles” (4).

When the narrator’s father, First Raise, was alive, he’d was known to fix machinery well. The narrator reflects on his father’s habit of drinking with a neighboring town’s white men; he would tell them stories and fix their machinery. The narrator explains that First Raise would charge high rates for these repairs: “Twenty dollars to kick a baler awake—one dollar for the kick and nineteen for knowing where to kick” (5). First Raise had dreams of hunting elk in Glacier Park. He created intricate plans for sneaking in and killing an elk and was very interested in what the penalty would be if he were caught. Despite his detailed plans, he never made the trip. First Raise died 10 years ago, when he froze to death on the route home.

Lame Bull, who is revealed to be Teresa’s boyfriend, comes upon the narrator fishing and suggests that dumping bacon grease into the river creates a good lure to catch fish. The narrator asks if the fish are good; Lame Bull says they’re “muddy” and that it’s been a bad year. Lame Bull references a flood that occurred 12 years ago; he says that the narrator is too young to remember, but the narrator replies that he was almost 20 at the time. Lame Bull tells more stories about the flood and although the narrator insists that he remembers,

They walk back to the house and Lame Bull tells Teresa that the narrator has said she’s ready to marry him, which Teresa denies. They flirt a little, with Teresa appearing to reject Lame Bull. In the living room, the old woman squeaks her rocking chair. Teresa asks the narrator to go feed a calf who was separated from its mother for weaning. The narrator finds the calf nursing through the bars of the fence. The narrator scares the cow off and captures the calf. For a moment, he remembers riding calves with his brother Mose, who died a long time ago.

He gives the calf hay and fills the washtub with water. He finds a motionless tadpole and tries to revive it with no success. He puts it back in the tub. He chases the cow further away, but he knows she will be back to feed her calf because her udders are full of milk.

After supper, Teresa tells the narrator to make sure his grandmother gets anything she needs. She and Lame Bull leave the house, and the narrator is surprised to hear them drive away but thinks that maybe they’re going for groceries. He turns on music for the old woman and fills her pipe before sitting on the floor and looking through one of the magazines that Agnes left behind. He’s read all of the stories already, but he rereads one about some men who tracked and shot a lion after it killed a pregnant Black woman. Surprisingly, the baby survived. It took the men four days to discover that they’d been going in a large circle with the lion, who had also been tracking them.