51 pages • 1 hour read
Louise ErdrichThe Painted Drum
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2005A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 1, Chapters 3-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “Revival Road”
Part 1, Chapter 3 Summary: “The Orchard”
Faye views Kurt as an arrogant artist “who believes that he is touched by genius” (50), but she nevertheless fears losing his attention. His visits to New York City make her suspicious that he is seeing another woman, though he laughs at the suggestion. To protect herself from heartbreak, Faye hides her innermost feelings from Kurt and, outside of their passionate, nocturnal trysts, treats him with “manufactured scorn” (15).
After Kendra’s death, Kurt visits Faye every night. He admits that grief fuels his need for her and that there was indeed another woman, but he is finished with her. When he mentions marriage, Faye doubts his sincerity, surmising, “His turning to me in such need is not a true statement of his feelings” (48).
Kurt surprises Faye and Elsie one spring morning by cutting their grass with the lawnmower Faye gifted herself when she turned 50. Faye realizes this is Kurt’s way of openly acknowledging their secret relationship. Later, she finds Kurt and Elsie talking in the kitchen and knows that Elsie supports Kurt’s pursuit of Faye, which enrages her. To prevent Kurt from further insinuating himself into her home life, Faye falsely claims she has hired Kit Tatro, a poor relation of the Tatro family, to mow their lawn. Kurt then volunteers to prune their neglected apple trees, which only stokes Faye’s rage. Before storming out, she asserts, “The orchard is gone. […] I like it ruined” (56). Faye talks with Kit, who believes he is part Indigenous American, and he agrees to provide lawn service.
Kurt asks Faye out for dinner at Sweet’s Mansion. They have never publicly dated, and “out of sheer surprise” (60), Faye accepts. As Kurt’s ongoing grief dominates their evening together, Faye reflects: “The madness of sorrow emanates from him. It enters and unfurls in me. It revives my own pain” (65).
When Faye returns from dinner, Elsie is waiting for her. Having discovered the drum, she urges Faye to return it to Sarah Tatro. Faye says she intends to find the drum’s rightful Ojibwe owner, and by morning, Elsie is eager to help Faye “learn its origins” (68).
Despite Faye’s objections, Kurt restores the apple trees to full bloom. The fragrance revives Faye’s memories of her younger sister, who died in the orchard. Resolving to stop Kurt’s nighttime visits, Faye tasks Kit with changing the lock on her door.
Part 1, Chapter 4 Summary: “Jewelweed”
As summer unfolds, Faye dreams nightly of her sister Netta as “a woman, all grown up in spite of death” (76). In August, the blackberries appear, and Faye decides to make blackberry jam. While she is picking berries near the woods, a helicopter hovers over Faye and then zooms off.
Faye is boiling blackberries in the kitchen when a police car squeals to a halt outside the window. The town officer jumps from the car, pulls his gun, and knocks down the door. Faye and Elsie are stunned when the officer announces that Faye was spotted acting suspiciously near a marijuana patch. Pointing to the stove, Faye protests that she was picking blackberries. The officer quickly departs, sirens wailing. Elsie tells Faye that Kit is growing the marijuana.
Faye returns to the stove, and, considering the blue cookware bubbling with berries, remembers it sparked a dispute between her parents. Her father had scolded Elsie for buying the expensive pan, “yet she made most of the money in the family” (80) with her business. Indeed, Faye’s parents met when Elsie was appraising the estate of her future husband’s mother.
Faye’s father was a professor of philosophy who worked perpetually on a book about science and faith. Absented-minded, pedantic, and mercurial, he was like Faye’s sister, who “could be careless and even cruel” (81). He and Elsie argued often and heatedly, using “elevated words for simple insults […], as if they paged through Roget’s before they fought” (87).
After completing his book, Faye’s father become an object of cult-like adoration. His students invaded their house, sleeping on the floors and congregating in the kitchen for lectures. Initially tolerant, Elsie evicted them when she found a cigarette burn in her Tibetan rug. Thereafter, Faye’s father secluded himself in his office, and Elsie disappeared on lengthy buying trips. Faye and Netta retreated to the orchard, living “for days in the branches” (92).
Their father appeared one evening, holding up his arms and shouting at them to jump from the trees. When Faye accidently fell, her father stepped aside instead of catching her. Outraged on Faye’s behalf, Netta stepped off her branch and fell to her death. Faye, winded but alive, realized her father would allow everyone to believe she was to blame for the tragedy. He died six months later.
Part 1, Chapters 3-4 Analysis
Faye is a reticent narrator. As Kurt grapples with the pain of Kendra’s death, Faye alludes to her own entrenched grief, which she thinks of as so “deep in my bones […] I’d have to break every single one to let it out” (47). She does not reveal the event that caused her sorrow, however, until the end of chapter four. The death of her sister so long ago still profoundly impacts Faye, and she concedes she has “warped my life around her memory” (73). Like the orchard that Faye wishes to keep dormant, Faye has essentially suspended her life since Netta died, unwilling or unable to move beyond that painful childhood tragedy.
Netta’s death traps Faye partly due to feelings of guilt; she reflects that Netta “sacrificed herself for me without hesitation and for no use, no use at all” (73-74). Although Faye’s father caused the mishap, he suggests Faye is responsible, and she assumes the blame. Foreseeing that this will drive a wedge between herself and her parents, Faye, the child, thinks, “I knew that now I was alone” (93). Netta’s death isolates Faye, disconnecting her from the people in her life, and this is another reason she cannot untangle herself from it.
The importance of connecting with others is a theme that takes shape in these chapters in various ways. Faye’s unusual relationship with Kurt, which is both intimate and distant at the same time, demonstrates her fundamental need to connect with someone, even as she resists and fears connections. After Kendra dies, Kurt inadvertently presses Faye to face her own pain, and she quite literally shuts him out.
Kit Tatro’s obsessive efforts to uncover Indigenous American roots in his family tree annoys and fascinates Faye. He explains that “his search is about making some connection. Only connect, he says, absurdly” (53, italics original) referring to E. M. Forster’s novel Howard’s End. His belief that everything “will fall into place” (53) once he finds his true community leads Faye to think, “[M]aybe Kit Tatro irritates me because at some level I understand his longing and confusion all too well” (53).
Neither Faye nor her mother identify to any significant extent with their Ojibwe heritage. As a young girl, Elsie’s mother was taken from the Ojibwe reservation to attend an eastern school established to assimilate Indigenous children into white culture, setting up Faye’s disconnection from Ojibwe traditions, and yet Faye’s unexpected, even irrational reaction to the drum suggests latent ties to her ancestors that are beginning to stir.
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