43 pages • 1 hour read
Ron RashOne Foot in Eden
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2002A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Parts 4-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 4 Summary: “The Son”
Content Warning: This section of the guide contains racist language, as well as descriptions of suicide by self-immolation and death by drowning.
As a child, Isaac goes over to Mrs. Winchester’s house because she gives him candy. When Isaac is nine, Amy finds out about this and makes him promise not to go to Mrs. Winchester’s house anymore. One day, when Isaac is 18, he is alone gathering the rest of the farm’s cabbage just before Carolina Power begins flooding the valley to fill the reservoir. Sheriff Alexander arrives and tells Isaac that Mrs. Winchester is refusing to leave her house until she has spoken to Isaac. Isaac agrees to speak with her. He goes inside to his old room and takes out the Gold Star that Mrs. Winchester once gave him.
Sheriff Alexander drops Isaac off, telling him that he needs to go to his brother’s house. When Isaac enters the house, he sees Mrs. Winchester standing in the middle of the room with an empty can of kerosene. She tells Isaac that she will burn her house to the ground before she lets the lake cover it. Isaac takes her out onto the porch, away from the fumes. He tries to give her the Gold Star, but she tells him that Holland wanted him to have it. Mrs. Winchester tells Isaac that he is Holland’s son, and that Billy and Amy killed Holland. She tasks him with finding out what happened to Holland. Isaac does not believe her, but Mrs. Winchester tells him to show Amy the Gold Star and see how she reacts. Mrs. Winchester asks Isaac to make his parents tell him where Holland’s remains are because she wants him to find peace in a proper burial. Sheriff Alexander returns to drive Isaac home. Mrs. Winchester goes inside. Isaac feels a rush of air and realizes that she has ignited the house. Isaac and Sheriff Alexander run inside and find Mrs. Winchester engulfed in flames. Isaac carries her out to the front yard, but she is already dead.
Isaac walks back to the farm in a daze. He walks to the river and thinks about the week before, when he went with his father to the cemetery to help Sheriff Alexander and the undertaker, Mr. Pearson, dig up graves. Sheriff Alexander thought that the dead should rest in the valley, but Mr. Pearson reminded him that the water would make the coffins resurface in the reservoir.
Isaac comes out of his reverie when a Carolina Power man approaches him and tells him that he is trespassing. Isaac explains that his family owns the land until the next day, but the man tells him that they are evicting everyone from the valley immediately because Mrs. Winchester set herself on fire. The man calls him a “hillbilly” and tells him to leave before the sheriff arrests him. As Isaac walks back, he thinks about the “witch” buried down by the river and wonders why no one has dug up her grave. After a while, Billy and Amy arrive. Billy tells them that Carolina Power has set up a roadblock and they will not be able to return to their house. Billy is sorry that Isaac saw Mrs. Winchester die. As they pass Travis Alexander’s house, they see Sheriff Alexander arresting his own brother for refusing to leave his property.
The next morning, Isaac shows the Gold Star to Amy. He tells her that Mrs. Winchester said that Amy would know where Holland was. Amy looks panicked, and Isaac asks her if she killed him. Billy comes into the kitchen and admits that he killed Holland and will show Isaac where the body is buried. They put shovels in the truck and all three of them get inside. When they come across the roadblock, Isaac drives off the road to avoid stopping. When they get to the house, Sheriff Alexander arrives and tells them to leave, but Billy states that they need to find Holland because he murdered him. Billy’s confession stuns Sheriff Alexander, but he says that they should let the water cover up what has happened in the past. When Will sees that they will not change their minds, he brings a rope to help them cross the river. Sheriff Alexander calls Bobby to meet them at the Holcombe farm, then Billy leads the group to the river. After they cross the river while holding onto the rope, Sheriff Alexander warns that the rain will make the river rise quickly. Billy and Isaac dig up Holland’s remains. Isaac wishes that he could hate Billy, but he knows that Billy has only been kind to him. They fill up a sack with the remains. Sheriff Alexander tells Isaac that if he brings the sack with them, when the deputy arrives it will reopen the murder case. Isaac wades into the river, drops the Gold Star in the sack, and lets the current take it all away.
Sheriff Alexander throws Isaac the rope, and he starts to lead them back across the river. Billy’s leg catches on something in the river, and the current pulls him under. The river also pulls Amy under, and the rope rips out of Isaac and Sheriff Alexander’s hands. Isaac sees Amy come back up, but Billy does not. Isaac tries to get to Amy, but she dives under to find Billy. Isaac searches for Amy but soon realizes that the current swept away both his parents. Isaac goes into shock from the cold, but Sheriff Alexander pulls him safely to shore.
Part 5 Summary: “The Deputy”
Bobby arrives at the farm and sees Sheriff Alexander carrying Isaac up the hill. Sheriff Alexander tells Bobby that Amy and Billy are still in the river. Bobby looks for Amy and Billy but does not find them. Later that day, divers arrive and search the river, but they cannot find the bodies.
The next day, Bobby goes to the cemetery to help Mr. Pearson dig up the last of the graves. One of the coffins gives way, and the skeleton falls out. Bobby sees that the coffin held Sheriff Alexander’s father. He is glad that the sheriff is not there to see his father’s skeleton desecrated. Bobby realizes that they should have left the graves alone. He reflects that Amy and Billy’s bodies will eventually float to the top of the reservoir.
The coroner tells Bobby that Billy and Amy’s bodies will rise to the top of the river in a few weeks. However, months go by, and the bodies never resurface. In the spring, Carolina Power tells Bobby that a coffin has resurfaced. When Bobby picks up the coffin, he tells the coroner that he will rebury it. Instead of driving to the cemetery, Bobby takes the coffin back to the lake. He borrows a boat from a friend and takes the coffin and a box of salt out on the reservoir. When he gets out into the lake, Bobby opens the coffin and tells the “witch” that he does not want her resting with his family in the cemetery. Bobby dumps the Widow’s skeleton in the lake and watches it sink. As he goes back to shore, Bobby thinks about Isaac, who is living with Sheriff Alexander until he attends Clemson in the fall. Bobby looks into the lake and can see the road and houses below him. He feels like God looking down on the world. Bobby starts to feel like someone might walk out of one of the houses and look up at him, not realizing that they have drowned. This thought makes Bobby uncomfortable, and he heads back to shore. Before he returns the boat, he stops to put some rocks in the coffin to weigh it down, and sprinkles the salt inside before nailing it shut. Bobby drives the empty coffin out of Jocassee for the last time, thinking that he never wants to return because it is only “a place for the lost” (214).
Parts 4-5 Analysis
In the final section, Isaac grapples with The Impact of Secrets on Human Behavior when he learns the truth about Holland’s murder. Although Isaac holds the key to his father’s identity because Mrs. Winchester gives him the Gold Star, he does not fully understand what the star means until Mrs. Winchester explains it. Mrs. Winchester tasks Isaac with finding Holland’s body because she does not want Holland to drown like the rest of the valley, and she sees this as her last chance to set the record straight and gain some semblance of justice for her son. The ambiguities of the situation are further outlined as Isaac struggles to reconcile the truth of Billy’s crime with his personal experience of Billy’s kindness. Even though he knows that he should hate Billy for killing Holland, Billy is the only father he knows; he does not feel an emotional connection to Holland, even when they dig up his body. This inner conflict explains Isaac’s choice to let the truth of Holland’s murder go by releasing the body and the Gold Star into the river, accepting his parent’s choices, however immoral they may be. However, despite this implicit form of forgiveness from the only person who matters to them, Amy and Billy know that their crimes will not go unpunished, and this proves to be true when they both drown in the river immediately after Isaac’s decision. This event reinforces The Ambiguities of Justice and Morality, fulfilling the Widow’s “prophecy” that they will die by water rather than fire. It also serves as a reference to the drowned Cherokee princess, Jocassee, whose body was never found. Just like Jocassee, Amy and Billy’s bodies never resurface, implying that their secrets and crimes have died with them.
As Carolina Power evacuates the valley in order to fill in their reservoir, the monumental action highlights the displaced residents’ Cultural Connections to the Land. Even though Carolina Power has made it clear that they will not allow the farmers to stay in the valley, the people feel lost without their home. To highlight the significance of this event, Rash invokes the symbolism of fire and water to create conflicting images of purification and oblivion. After Mrs. Winchester tells Isaac the secret of Holland’s murder, she sets herself and her house on fire rather than abandoning the only home she has ever known. Like Will, Mrs. Winchester correlates water with erasure, while fire represents cleansing. She chooses to set herself and her house on fire because she would rather have control over her death and die in her home. The concept of water as a form of erasure persists in Bobby’s narrative as well, for after the reservoir begins filling the valley, the body of the Widow surfaces, and Bobby’s superstitions compel him to dump her body in the lake in order to erase her memory forever. Bobby, like the other farmers, believes that the Widow held their secrets and wielded the power to destroy them. By dumping her skeleton into the lake, Bobby ensures that her secrets will sink into the reservoir along with her. Rash accordingly follows this moment with another example of biblical allegory, for as Bobby looks down on the submerged community beneath him, he gains an eerie sense of seeing the world through God’s eyes and fears that a drowned body will come out of one of the houses, look up at him, and not realize that they drowned. The significance of this final moment draws a connection to Will’s initial observations about the human condition. Will feels that every person yearns for something that they cannot reach and therefore suffers from lifelong loneliness. Although Will does not know if he connects this feeling to something religious, such as searching for Eden, he does know that the feeling of yearning indicates loneliness and loss. Bobby’s realization at the end of the novel offers a different perspective, for he reflects that God sees people on earth as lost and already dead, even if they do not know it yet. Bobby does not like the hopelessness of this realization, so he decides that it is better leave Jocassee forever and forget those lost in the valley.
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