Solar Storms

Bush tells Angel that while she was looking after Hannah, she sang songs to take out the “bridges between bad spirits and people, to close bridges between those places and here” in an attempt to rescue Hannah from the influence of her ancestors (102). 

Motivated by these voices, Hannah did terrible things, such as molesting children and killing dogs. They wanted to send her away, but couldn’t bring themselves to, because her actions were dictated by entities outside of herself. Then Hannah went away to Oklahoma and came back only when she was pregnant with Angel. Bush feared that Hannah might kill Angel. 

When winter comes, it is a time for Angel to contemplate her journey and her role among her many grandmothers. She situates herself within the Native-American experience of colonization, learning that she comes from “a circle of courageous women and strong men who had walls pulled down in front of them” and were forced to live in a “narrowing circle of life” (107). Angel possesses a sense of loss and feels the great wrong done to her people.

As winter comes, Angel learns that each winter in the north is characteristic, measured by absences such as “no wolves […] no ptarmigan  […] no children” or “terrible presences,” such as influenza or a frozen rain that breaks the legs of deer (108). Winter, she learns, is a time of losses, and this one is no exception, with the loss of Tommy’s cousin and French’s daughter, Helene.

Bush tells Angel that she was born “in a house of snow” one February, where the snow was so deep it collapsed the roofs of houses (108). The midwife, Ruby Shawl, was afraid to leave Angel alone with Hannah, so she stayed on a few days. When Ruby crept out to salt the icy steps, Hannah locked her out. Ruby sought Bush’s help and, mysteriously, Bush was able to enter the house, though “Hannah was not the one who opened it, even though no others were there to be seen” (111). Hannah said that her baby died at birth, tidings that sent Bush on a furious hunt, looking for Angel in various places. She found Angel outside “still and blue,” snow-dusted, though “alert and alive” (113).

The winter that Angel experiences on Fur Island is also harsh and Agnes sends Tommy over on visits, as she is worried about Angel putting up with Bush’s “long, brooding silences” (116).

Angel feels that Bush is secretive, though Angel has a secret of her own, concerning her long-lost sister, Henriet, who was Hannah’s daughter by a different father. In order to find Henriet, Angel stole money and then paid a man and slept with him, too, so that he would find her sister. When they met, Angel saw that Henriet cut herself. The two girls were quiet and smoked a pack of cigarettes together and Henriet pinched the end of a cigarette with her finger in a show of not being able to feel pain (118). 

Angel experiences winter as a state of “shifting boundaries,” where she opens up to a more Native-American understanding of nature (118). She learns, for example, that the fish were a kind of people; she also dreams of a plant that she draws for Dora-Rouge, who recognizes it and calls Angel a plant-reader (118). Angel feels that her dreams are the earth’s visions and senses that she is expanding beyond her former limitations: “My fingers grew longer, more sensitive. My eyes saw new and other things” (120). She even experiences synesthesia as she learns to “see with [her] skin, touch with [her] eyes” (120). 

Bush and Angel plan to take a trip north, to the Far Land of the Fat-Eaters. Hannah will be there, in a town called Ohete, New Hardy. The journey has to be carefully planned as they will go by canoe and will need to negotiate the currents of rivers on their trip. Angel senses that however much Bush plans, they will be going into “a geography that was whimsical at times, frightening at others” (121). 

Tommy comes to visit and Angel thinks how he is different from all of the other boys she met before coming to Adam’s Rib, in that he’s being “a provider already” (126). Their attraction deepens, but Angela is not in a rush to consummate it, feeling that they will have their time. 

LaRue, meanwhile, is attracted to Bush, but Bush is repulsed by him, dreaming that he keeps mummified bodies in his house. While Bush stops working for LaRue, Angel wants Bush to find a partner, so that she will be less eccentric. As a result, Angel gives La Rue some tips on how to handle women and other living creatures. 

By spring, Bush has gathered up maps that are suitable for travel to the mainland. Dora-Rouge will come too, because she wishes to die in the land of her ancestors, the Fat-Eaters. Agnes’s purpose for going on the journey will be to deliver her mother to the place and grieve after her. After the long winter, “spring was a season of madness” as “the warming air and thawing water brought people to a kind of hysteria that could not be helped” (140). 

There is a funeral for Helene, Frenchie’s daughter, who drowned in the lake during winter; her favorite things are buried, in place of the body. The thawing ice precipitates an outpouring of grief in Frenchie and the rest of the funeral attendees. After the funeral, Angel goes back to Agnes’s with Tommy and the specter of death makes them “desperate for love, the shining part of life, and to make love, to enter creation” (143). Angel and Tommy feel connected to the force that wants a people to continue, even after death.