SUMMARY:
The Walls family is still in the same routine, less money, more expenses. In these pages, Jeannett's mother, we find out, is pregnant, this being her 4th postmature child, will all of her kids being postmature. Because of this, Jeannetts mother and father get in a fight about it, where the father was literally chasing his wife out in the darkness of the desert carrying a baby in her stomach. With this arguing, came resonance the next day. But sadly enough, not all of their fighting lasted so shortly. After being pregnant for 12 months, Jeannett's mother finally gave birth to a baby girl, Jeannett's new baby sister, Lilly Ruth Maureen. Living in Blythe, in THE LBJ APARTMENTS, Jeannette goes to school, where she gets beat up after 4 days in the 1st grade, by 4 Mexican girls, because she always raised her hand in class. Also, she was different, being a tall, skinny, pale girl among tan people. A few months after Maureen was born, the family moved out of Blythe, to a town in Nevada called Battle Mountain, with a U-HAUL truck, and kids in the back of the truck. In Battle Mountain, a mining town, the Walls family lived in an old railroad depot called The Tracks, where they had to improvise on much of their furniture (ie. wooden spools as tables). Jeannetts father, Rex, sustained a job as an electrician in a barite mine in Battle Mountain, but fired himself to work on his research for his invention, the Prospector. Here, the kids would always go outside and look for gold and other treasures, such as turqouise, silver, and fool's gold, but never any real gold, which is why the family moved there in the first place, to look for an investment and to strike it rich with gold. Since the Walls family 'doesn't know how to run a budget', the family constantly runs out of food even more than before. Another fight breaks out between the parents, and this one seems like the worst yet. The mother is fed up with the father, who seems to provide very little for his family, where the mother is blamed for everything wrong in their lives and so on. Nevertheless, the mother, with a teaching degree, the mother applies for a job as a teacher in the local elementary school, to earn some sort of salary to help the family out financially. But this extra boost of money still isn't enough for the Walls family.
QUOTE:
"Have I ever let you down?" He asked Brian and me and then turned and walked away. In a voice so low that Dad didn't hear him, Brian said, "Yes." (Walls 78).
REACTION:
This story is touching, really. The quote is a great example of the jist of the story, as well. I mean, throughout the whole novel, the father makes 'empty promises' to the family, where the kids, and the mother, try to keep their mouths shut and cope with their father's 'plans' for a better life. I'm getting the idea that the Prospector the father is building isn't even in the making yet, and that he is just using it as an excuse to move from town to town, gamble, and look for gold. And with the quote, we can see that the kids and wife hide their true feelings about the quality of their lives, just so their parents won't get in any fights and possibly 'split-up'. But even though the story is basically a struggle of a family, the same situation in every 'chapter', I like reading this novel. It's interesting to see how families in poverty lived long ago.
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