59 pages • 1 hour read
Jeff ZentnerIn the Wild Light
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2021A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 64-EpilogueChapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 64 Summary
Content Warning: This section contains an incident of sexual assault.
Cash cannot shake his grief. He realizes that anything he does for the rest of his life will be diminished because he cannot share it with his Papaw. He even abandons words, for they cannot articulate this overwhelming sense of absence.
Chapter 65 Summary
In the cafeteria, Delaney shares a memory of Papaw with Cash about the two of them sitting at a McDonald’s for hours after Middleford contacted her and she was so conflicted. “I miss him” (346), she admits.
Chapter 66 Summary
With Alex, Cash asks the big questions: What happens after we die? Is there some reason God likes to make us suffer like this? Is Papaw’s spirit here still? Alex assures Cash he will come to feel God’s abiding presence.
Chapter 67 Summary
Walking with Delaney, Cash shares that he has not been happy since Papaw’s death. Delaney can only say that time will help put the death in perspective, and he will remember all the great times they had and all the important life lessons he gave Cash. To Cash, these are flimsy clichés. Cash realizes with a jolt that Delaney cannot help him through this, that he is alone in his grief.
Chapter 68 Summary
Cash cannot sleep. He calls his grandmother one night at her pizzeria and tells her how deeply troubled he is, how he cannot stop thinking of everything he and Papaw will never share. “I’m tired of losing people I love” (354). He takes some measure of relief just listening to his grandmother on the other end.
Chapter 69 Summary
By the middle of March, Cash decides he cannot stay at Middleford. He does not belong there, and he misses Sawyer, saying, “Billions of people live and die without going to Middleford Academy” (356). It is a failure of courage, and he knows it. He decides to head home and finish the year back at Sawyer High. He understands that when he leaves, he will probably never see Delaney again. For a moment he considers the feelings he has for Alex and Vi and for Dr. Atkins, but he knows he must go.
Chapter 70 Summary
He heads back to his dorm only to find a party with the lacrosse team in full swing on his floor. He elbows his way through the hallway and heads into his room. He finds Tripp in bed with a half-naked, inebriated, and unconscious student whom Cash recognizes from biology class. Knowing that he has been caught in a moment of serious wrongdoing, Tripp tries to bribe Cash for his silence. Cash, however, leaves the room intent on finding a resident assistant (RA) so that he can report Tripp.
In an attempt to stop Cash, Tripp attacks him from behind. As Tripp pins him down, two of his lacrosse buddies carry the unconscious student out of the room. Tripp beats Cash up until the RA appears. Through his pain, Cash tells the RA what happened. Tripp denies it and claims “that redneck” just attacked him for no reason (364). Paramedics arrive to take Cash to the hospital, and Alex goes with him and stays the night. Cash calls his grandmother before falling into a troubled and heavily medicated sleep.
Chapter 71 Summary
The next day when Cash wakes up, Alex, Vi, and Delaney are in his room waiting. Cash relates how his friends “all stand there for a second without speaking, giving me such looks of fondness and love, it’s almost unbearable” (368). In a moment of remarkable epiphany, Cash realizes that he truly belongs at Middleford, saying to himself, “I choose them. I choose to stay” (368). His only worry now, is that the school might believe Tripp’s version of events and expel him.
Chapter 72 Summary
That afternoon, the dean of the academy arrives at the hospital. He tells a shocked Cash that copious witnesses have corroborated his story and commends Cash for helping his classmate and defending her against Tripp’s assault. The dean also states that Tripp has been expelled and that Cash did the right thing at great personal risk, saying, “Our school needs people like you” (371). He assures Cash that the school will cover all his hospital costs.
Chapter 73 Summary
That afternoon as Cash watches television in his hospital room, Delaney visits. Her voice catching with emotion, she tells him that she is not ready to see him in a hospital bed looking all “banged up” (375). She tells him from the heart that she cannot be without him, which is why she pushed him to come to Middleford. She says, “I think about you constantly and that really sucks because I have to watch you fall in love with Vi” (375-76). Cash says nothing but pulls Delaney in for a kiss. They hold each other and confess their mutual love for each other. Inspired, his faith in language reanimated, Cash writes a poem that night.
Chapter 74 Summary
Returning to school, Cash finds himself something of a hero. He meets with the dean, who assures Cash that he although he can finish the semester without a roommate if he wishes, Alex has stepped forward and requested to be placed with Cash. This arrangement pleases Cash.
Chapter 75 Summary
Students in Dr. Atkins’s poetry class give Cash a round of applause when he comes into the room. “The world needs more men who do the right thing” (382), Dr. Atkins tells Cash. Poets, she tells him, need such courage.
Chapter 76 Summary
That night, Cash thanks Alex, now his new roommate, for his prayers, saying, “I think it helped” (385).
Chapter 77 Summary
Delaney and Cash both agree to talk with the campus therapist to help them through their traumas—Delaney, the ongoing hardships with her mother, and Cash, the still-heavy feel of grief and loss. They both know that talking with someone will help.
Chapter 78 Summary
Cash returns to his poetry, and even though he sees his grandfather’s face everywhere, he knows that “the world is filled with new green, and it reminds [him] that there are beautiful things that continue on” (389).
Chapter 79 Summary
Competing with the crew team gets Cash back on the river, and he responds with vigor and strength. He pulls steadily and cleanly, feeling the power of each stroke. They win the conference competitions and head to Philadelphia for a championship series.
Chapter 80 Summary
When Delaney gets the news that she got a perfect score on the SAT, their group of friends celebrate, “whooping and hollering” (393). Cash quietly whispers how proud he is and how much he loves her.
Chapter 81 Summary
In the dorm laundry room, Alex and Cash try to record an episode of a YouTube series they hope to do together, a parody of school life that they will call Blaundry Boys.
Chapter 82 Summary
With the semester nearing its end, Vi wants to show Cash the ocean that she so loves. Cash is stunned by the expanse of blues, grays, and greens and how the sunlight dapples the waves. Amazed by the circle of seagulls, Cash takes it all in. “You need to write a poem about the ocean” (398), Vi tells him.
Overwhelmed by the moment and by Vi’s generosity, Cash finally tells her the full story of “his broken life” (399): the story of his mother and her overdose. When he finishes, she hugs him “hard and deep” (399).
Chapter 83 Summary
At the end of their last class together, Dr. Atkins tells Cash that she has accepted a teaching position at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. She tells him that he and his grandmother are invited to her house for Thanksgiving. He gifts Dr. Atkins with a poem he wrote just for her, about how she gave him the courage to write poetry, to give voice to his emotions, what he describes as “calling forth / of breath from stone” (403).
Chapter 84 Summary
Delaney will be staying at Middleford for the summer working in the lab, but she assures Cash that she will be interning for part of the summer at the Sawyer Hospital in order to study addiction medicine and “maybe find the switch that tells us to destroy ourselves and switch it off” (406). She tells Cash that when she and Papaw went to McDonald’s so long ago, Papaw told her then that Cash loved her and that she needed to be patient with him while he figured it out. It is then that Cash knows he will always love Delaney.
Epilogue Summary
A few weeks into the summer, Cash is back in Sawyer mowing lawns. His grandmother shares with Cash how her mother had mixed up a potent salve, which she dubbed the Balm of Gilead after the Old Testament verse, a miraculous salve reputed to be able to help heal cuts and bruises and aches.
His grandmother promises to share the formula with him before he returns for those long crew practices when every muscle aches. He goes out into the sunset, takes up his notebook, and pen in hand, in that “wild light” (415), begins to write a poem about how his grandfather is everywhere with him. He writes, “The world is knives and wolves / but also swans and stars / You taught me that” (416).
Chapter 64-Epilogue Analysis
The novel at last breaks into springtime, and as the world breathes new life around him, Cash also begins the difficult work of recovering from the massive grief of his grandfather’s death. It will not be easy—he has shut down all communication with his friends, denied himself contact with the teacher he most admires, and cannot find his way back to the comfort of poetry. He begins these closing chapters alone and, worse, voiceless.
But the world “moves from desolation toward blossom” (388), and accordingly, it is also time to embrace spiritual recovery. These chapters are keyed to the kitchen conversation Cash has with his grandmother as the summer unwinds, when she mentions her “balm of Gilead,” a homeopathic cure-all made of poplar buds and used for “healing cuts and bruises and aches” (414). In ways that recall the miracle mold that Delaney scraped off the cave walls and that promises a new weapon against the most virulent and vicious bacteria and viruses, the balm of Gilead is nature’s way “to make the wounded whole” (414). Cash’s grandmother tells him that the biblical “Balm in Gilead” was his grandfather’s favorite hymn, implying that Cash’s many memories of his grandfather have a vital role to play in his new and delicate process of healing.
Thus, that conversation sets up the inspirational tone of the closing chapters. Part of the novel’s investigation into The Dynamic of Grief, particularly with a teenager, is to chart a way out of its cloaking darkness. Cash begins these chapters as a brooding, self-involved, emotional wreck, even going so far as to ask the Christian Alex whether Papaw’s spirit is alive “out there somewhere” (347), and the very vagueness of the question reveals the depths of Cash’s despair. Even Delaney, whose love he finally begins to appreciate, fails in her attempts to console him, for he says, “She’s slowly leaving me behind in my mourning” (352). Middleford seems at best a distraction and at worst a reminder of his emotional isolation. Weeks pass without his picking up his poetry notebook. He cannot focus on his classes; his attention drifts during crew practice; and he cannot sleep. “One night it overwhelms me—the sorrow and loneliness like staring through black glass” (353).
The event that triggers his redemption is his interference in his roommate’s attempt to sexually assault an inebriated classmate. In this moment, Cash forgets his all-consuming grief and acts without thought, without deliberation, and as Dr. Atkins later tells him, it is ultimately that sort of courage, not elegant wordplay or vast experiences, that makes him a poet. Later, as Cash sees his friends gathered around his hospital bed, he finally understands that he is not alone, realizing, “I don’t have to leave them. I don’t have to walk away from some of the greatest richness my life has ever held” (368). Their laughter resolves into sobbing, tears of joy as their friendship helps rescue Cash from his despair.
In turn, language and communication bring inspiration back to Cash’s life as he works through the dynamic of grief and agrees to attend counseling sessions with Delaney as the two begin to work their way through the emotional baggage they carry from their mothers. This development reflects the energy of shared experiences and the power of words to connect and to build bridges.
Cash and Delaney at last set aside their childhood games of emotional hide and seek and simply and directly exchange the mutual declarations of love that are long overdue. As Delaney shares the frustration and pain she felt while watching Cash explore his amorous feelings for Vi, she is in tears, a remarkable moment for a person whose homelife and inclination toward science have given a stoic demeanor. She admits, “I love you more than I’ve loved any person in my whole life. Lots of days it was the only thing that got me out of bed, the only thing I had to hang on to” (375). The candor of Delaney’s confession, words that she long resisted sharing, shakes Cash out of his spiraling depression. In turn, Cash opens up about his feelings, finding at last the words that he has struggled against saying since that long-ago afternoon when they first hashed out the implications of leaving Sawyer.
Nothing better reveals Cash’s recovery from grief and his return to the glorious confidence in language than his confession to Vi along the ocean just days before the end of the school term. Despite his infatuation with Vi and their long chats in which Vi shares her family problems, Cash has held back sharing anything of his backstory and has thus been guilty of a lie of omission, selfishly certain that honesty would only leave him more alone than he already was. Instead, he discovers that Vi “listens without judgment […] She hugs [him] hard and deep” (399). In this moment, words bond the two, and Vi becomes so much more than a girlfriend or a love interest or a crush. She becomes Cash’s friend.
What truly signals Cash’s recovery from his grief, however, is his return to poetry. With Dr. Atkins revealing to him that she will not be returning to Middleford, Cash understands that her days of mentoring him are finished. Resolved now to return to poetry and allow words to give shape and purpose to his grief, joys, and anxieties, Cash writes first a farewell poem to Dt. Atkins, and then in a moment of joyous outpouring, a poem that pays tribute to his grandfather by assuring his spirit that his lessons about engaging life have not been lost. In this, the novel closes with Cash experiencing The Redemptive Power of Poetry, or what he describes metaphorically as “calling forth” (403) breath from stones. He has learned from the patient support of his grandfather, from the books of poetry Vi and Dr. Atkins gave him, and now from his own experience that nothing in life can be wasted, that “every wound, every hurt” (408) creates the joy that is life lived now, urgently and fully. In the poem that closes the novel he acknowledges that all these things together represent what it means to live “in the wild light” (417).
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By Jeff Zentner
