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Chapter 14
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Walk Two Moons, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Judgment, Perspective, and Storytelling
Parents, Children, and Growing Up
Grief
Nature
Summary
Analysis
It’s extremely hot in South Dakota. Gram and Gramps start unbuttoning their clothes, and finally, Gramps stops at the Missouri River. Gram and Gramps undress and sit down in the river. Sal looks up and down the river before she follows them in. She lets her long black hair flow out behind her and remembers Dad asking her to never cut it. That was about a week before Momma left, and Momma had insisted that Dad resented that she cut her hair. Sal saved Momma’s hair; it’s under the floorboards in her Bybanks bedroom, along with Momma’s postcards.
Given what else Sal has alluded to about the weeks leading up to Momma’s departure, it seems as though Momma wasn’t happy in her role as a wife and mother. Cutting off her hair was, perhaps, a way to try to free herself from her identity and, by extension, these roles that seemed to trap her. When Sal collected Momma’s hair, she was trying to cling to her own perception of her mother rather than accepting who Momma herself wanted to be.
Themes
Sal is trying not to think about the postcards when, suddenly, a teenage boy appears on the bank. He has a big bowie knife in his belt, and Gramps tells Sal and Gram to get behind him. If Phoebe were here, she’d think the boy was a lunatic. Gramps greets the boy, who insists the riverbank here is private property. Sal is terrified, especially when the boy starts to go through Gramps’s pants pockets and finds his wallet. Sal picks up a stone from the riverbed and skips it across the water as a snake slides into the river.
Although Phoebe does make rash judgments about people, this boy does behave menacingly—he has a knife, and he seemingly wants Gramps’s money (or perhaps just his ID). Sal also implies that Phoebe uses the term “lunatic” to more generally refer to young men who mean to do her harm—it’s a catch-all phrase for her rather than the dictionary definition of the word (a mentally ill person).
Themes
The veins in Gramps’s neck are standing out. He tells the boy to watch what Sal can do. Sal picks up another rock and tosses it at a nearby tree—the rock sticks in the knothole. The boy stops going through Gramps’s pockets and stares at Sal. Suddenly, Gram cries out and flails. She pulls a snake out of the water and asks if it’s a poisonous water moccasin. It bit her leg.
Sal’s ability to throw the rock into the knothole is meant to intimidate the boy. The boy and Gramps’s attempts to intimidate each other, though, abruptly end when the snake bites Gram. Dad was right: Gram and Gramps attract trouble wherever they go.
Themes
Gramps carries Gram out of the water, tells her to put the snake down, and takes the boy’s knife from his belt. He cuts a slit between the two punctures in Gram’s leg, and the boy starts to suck the venom out. Gramps and the boy settle Gram in the backseat of the car. The boy continues to suck at the snakebite while he directs Gramps to the hospital. Later, in the waiting room of the hospital, Sal offers the boy a $50 bill from Gramps, but he refuses to take it. The boy compliments Sal’s hair, tells her not to cut it, and says the river wasn’t actually private property.
Gramps and the boy immediately become allies as they get Gram medical treatment. This sudden change suggests that they both misjudged each other—the boy assumed that Sal and her grandparents deserved to be taken advantage of, while they assumed he was going to hurt or steal from them. In reality, the boy was just trying to scare them—now, he shows himself to be helpful, humble, and kind.
Themes
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A bit later, Sal goes in to see Gram. Gramps is on the bed with her, stroking her arm. A nurse comes in and makes him get off. He explains that Gram has had medicine that makes her a bit delirious. When the nurse leaves, Gramps gets back on the bed and says it’s not their marriage bed, but it will do.
This ordeal has clearly shaken Gramps—after all, the venomous snakebite could have severely injured or killed Gram. Now, much like Sal clings to her memories of Momma, Gramps is literally clinging onto Gram by refusing to leave her side.
Themes
