48 pages • 1 hour read
Thomas KingTruth and Bright Water
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1999A 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 18-26Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 18 Summary
The next day, Tecumseh takes Solider across the Shield to meet Lum at Happy Trails. He doesn’t find Lum there, but he does run into Rebecca. They discuss the corral that Franklin set up where tourists can allegedly “hunt” buffalo by chasing them on motorcycles and shooting them with paintballs. Tecumseh heads down to the corral, where he finds Lum on a motorcycle with a paintball gun. Tecumseh joins him on the motorcycle and the pair mock-hunt the buffalo. After, they ride the bike down to the river. Lum undresses, and Tecumseh sees that he has been badly hurt by Franklin’s abuse. Lum paints his body with river mud, and the boys watch bulldozers push garbage from a landfill toward the river. They agree that they’ll meet back at the river later that night to see if they can find out more about the jumping woman.
Chapter 19 Summary
Tecumseh recalls the story of an older German couple who came to Bright Water a few years back and were found dead together in their camper. The couple had taken photos of the landscape that foregrounded the interiors of the camper. Their cause of death was listed as “exposure” because there were no signs of foul play or suicide.
Chapter 20 Summary
Tecumseh heads to his grandmother’s to help her set up a tipi. He finds her plucking dead chickens, and as they work together, they talk about Monroe’s return and Tecumseh’s mother’s plans to audition for a modern rendition of Snow White. Tecumseh broaches the topic of the skull and the jumping woman. His grandmother listens to the story, looks at the skull, and tells him that whoever it belonged to lived a short, hard life and was from a faraway place.
Tecumseh then brings lemonade to Cassie, and he tells her about his mother and Snow White. Cassie reflects that there wouldn’t be a place for her in a story like Snow White, where the only women are a princess and an evil queen. The conversation turns to Monroe and his disappearing church. Cassie cryptically comments that all men eventually disappear.
Chapter 21 Summary
Tecumseh decides to head to Railman’s for food. On the way, he muses that Cassie is probably pregnant, which is why his mother was giving her the baby clothes. At Railman’s, he finds Miles, Skee, and other locals discussing the town’s economic decline. Tecumseh returns home, where he finds his father waiting in a suit and holding a bouquet. Elvin interrogates Tecumseh about where his mother has gone and gets angry when Tecumseh notes that she doesn’t have a car to travel with because Elvin never fixed the car he gave her.
Later that evening, Tecumseh heads down to the river with Soldier. The dog finds something floating in the water that Tecumseh can’t identify. Initially, he thinks it’s a body but then notes that it looks like “a heavy blanket or wet diaper” (172).
Chapter 22 Summary
Lum arrives later in the night and identifies the refuse from the river as a medical bed pad. The boys scour the area for clues about the jumping woman but don’t find anything. They decide to recreate the “crime scene,” so they head up to the Horns with the skull. From that vantage, they see that the lights in the church are on, so against Tecumseh’s better judgment, they head to the church to spy on Monroe. Peering through the church’s window, Lum claims that he sees Monroe having sex with a woman, but Tecumseh doesn’t see anything when he looks. The boys return to the river, where they left their sleeping bags.
Chapter 23 Summary
Tecumseh recalls when his father first brought Soldier home as a puppy. Elvin insisted that Tecumseh choose a “strong” name for the dog. Tecumseh decided on a name after an incident early in Soldier’s life when Lum got angry at Tecumseh because Lum believed Tecumseh tried to push him off a rock into the river. Soldier came to Tecumseh’s defense, frightening Lum and earning him the name “Soldier.”
Chapter 24 Summary
Tecumseh hasn’t yet received payment for his work. Worried that Monroe may not pay him at all, Tecumseh heads the next morning to the “job gate”—a place where locals go in search of work. There, he finds his father and some of his father’s friends. As they talk, Tecumseh learns that Monroe and Elvin were once very close. Eventually, the men decide to go out for drinks and Elvin asks Tecumseh for money; when Tecumseh doesn’t immediately hand over all of the cash he has in his pocket, Elvin grows violent.
To get away from his father, Tecumseh heads to the church. He plays the church piano to occupy himself, and when Monroe finds him, Monroe asks if he wants to write a song about Monroe’s life. Monroe tells Tecumseh about his likes and dislikes and a little about his past. Soldier runs away while they’re talking, and Tecumseh chases him to a part of the prairie where he finds a discarded sleeping bag that he believes belongs to Lum. He also encounters Rebecca; she gives him a red ribbon from her hair, and he confirms that he’ll see her at “Indian Days.”
Chapter 25 Summary
Chapter 26 Summary
At her appointment with Tecumseh’s mother, Carol Millerfeather tells Tecumseh that his mother landed the lead role in the Snow White play; contrary to Tecumseh’s assumption, though, the lead role is the queen and not Snow White herself. Tecumseh tells his mother that he knows Cassie is pregnant. His mother seems perplexed at first but eventually acknowledges the pregnancy. After Carol leaves, Tecumseh asks his mother about the story of her double date with Cassie. His mother reveals that Elvin was actually dating Cassie at that time and that Franklin was not at the date. Tecumseh deduces that Monroe was dating his mother. All she says in response is “Another time […] Another life” (207).
Chapters 18-26 Analysis
This section does significant work developing the core theme of The Search for an “Authentic” Indigenous Identity. In particular, this section cements the idea—earlier hinted at in Elvin’s carving of wolf figurines—that the residents of Bright Water need to perform a version of their identity that is palatable to white culture/tourists. In Chapter 18, Franklin decides that the best way to get money from white tourists is to bring buffalo back to Bright Water and allow the tourists to mock-hunt them. The image of the buffalo is central to the white imagination’s vision of Indigenous life, and Franklin is committed to (re)creating this vision of Indigenous culture, inauthentic as it may be, to sustain his tribe. That he must import buffalo to do so reveals the ironic subtext of the activity: By participating in the mock-hunt (and the attendant commercialization of Indigenous culture), tourists more closely echo the white colonialist push to exterminate the buffalo than they do any historical Indigenous practices.
Lucy’s discussion of Marilyn Monroe in Chapter 25 shows another character grappling with the question of authenticity. Lucy clings to the idea that Marilyn was secretly Indigenous and went blonde to hide her identity. Lucy’s projection onto Marilyn suggests that this question of “hiding” versus “showing” one’s identity is a struggle Lucy deals with herself. The story she tells herself about Marilyn is one way of coping with and working through this struggle.
The Snow White subplot hints at a way of conceptualizing Indigenous identity more akin to Monroe’s restoration/reclamation projects. The fairytale is Western (specifically, German) in origin, and in the modern world, the heroine’s name all but inevitably evokes race. Carol’s “modern” production is therefore subversive in casting Indigenous actresses in the leading roles. Nor is race the only construct the production challenges. The local women’s discussions of the play reveal that many of Bright Water’s female residents feel a sense of entrapment similar to what the men feel, even if the causes of the feeling are somewhat different. For example, Cassie’s analysis of the trouble with the Snow White narrative points to her sense that there isn’t a place for women like her in a traditional (and Western) narrative of femininity. The only women in Snow White are either wholly virtuous or wholly evil. Cassie sees herself as charting a femininity that is more complicated than this, but she doesn’t see a place for that kind of complication in a place like Bright Water. By the end of this section, though, it’s revealed that Carol has reimagined the Snow White narrative with the queen, played by Tecumseh’s mother, as the lead character. This suggests that some of the novel’s women are finding ways to use art to reimagine gender roles and, in doing so, potentially escape the sense of entrapment that defines so many of their lives.
This section also highlights one of the approaches King uses to add texture and detail to the world of Truth and Bright Water: Short chapters that do not directly forward plot or character arcs but do give information about the history of this place. Chapter 19 is a particularly noticeable example. The story of the dead German tourists doesn’t seem to connect to the narrative arc being developed in the rest of this section; in fact, its placement disrupts the flow of the narrative between Chapters 18 and 20. However, the episode harkens to King’s interest in Indigenous modes of storytelling—in this case, one that is as much rooted in place as it is in individual character. The insertion of a story about unexplained violence on the prairie also mirrors the increasing violence that Lum is experiencing in his domestic life. The abrupt placement of this chapter, coupled with the extremity of the violence experienced by the tourists, creates a sense of foreboding and raises the expectation of more extreme violence to come.
Chapter 23 foreshadows the nature of the climax’s violence more explicitly still. Tecumseh’s history with Soldier could appear at any point in this narrative, but its placement in a section of the book that also highlights the increasing violence in Lum’s domestic life brings Lum’s troubled relationship with Soldier to the fore. Soldier gets his name because of his capacity for defending Tecumseh against Lum’s sudden, unexplained outburst; in this way, it thematically ties Soldier to the novel’s reflections on the nature and outcomes of child abuse and hints at the violent end that Lum and Soldier will meet together.
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