Walker Brothers Cowboy

Walker Brothers Cowboy Summary | Detailed Summary

The story takes place in late summer in and near Tuppertown on Lake Huron in Canada. The time is the 1930s. Tuppertown is an old grain port that has clearly seen better times. The story is told by a young girl whose family has recently moved to town from the country where their fox farm suffered a financial collapse.

As the story opens, the girl and her father take an after-dinner walk down to the shore of Lake Huron. They leave behind her mother and little brother. The mother is busy remaking old clothes into new ones for the girl to wear on the first day of school. The brother is very young and has already been put to bed on the screened-in porch. As the girl and her father leave, he calls out to them to bring back some ice cream, but the girl tells him in an offhand manner that he will be asleep by the time they return.

The way to the lake takes the father and daughter along a shabby street through town. There are ice cream signs on the sidewalk in front of small stores. In parts of the street, maple tree roots have grown under the sidewalk, heaving it up and cracking it. The girl thinks they look like crocodiles in the dirt yards of the houses along the way. The father sometimes greets the people sitting outside on their porches. The girl does not know any of these people because her mother makes her stay in her own yard with her brother. The mother says the boy is too young to leave the yard and the girl must watch him. Although this means that she cannot play with the other children in the neighborhood, she does not really mind. She watches them doing the same sorts of things she does, like writing in the dirt with a stick.

They walk on past the houses, a boarded-up factory and a closed lumberyard to where the sidewalk ends. The way to the lake becomes a sandy path through what the girl describes as nameless weeds to a vacant lot. The girl describes the lot as a park because it has a bench with a missing slat where they can sit and look at the water. The water is always gray in the evening light; there are no colorful sunsets and only a dim line of the horizon to be seen.

Further down the shore there is a sandy swimming beach with a lifeguard's chair and floats marking the safe swimming area. There is also a sort of pavilion where farmers and their wives go to socialize on Sundays in their best clothes. The girl remembers that she and her family used to visit this part of town before they lost their farm. They would visit a few times each summer and go down to the docks to see the old grain. She wondered how these old worn-out boats ever made it across the lake.

Sometimes, when the girl and her father pass the docks on their after-dinner walks one of the tramps from around the docks will come up and talk to her father. She is afraid of the tramps so she does not pay attention to the conversation, but she hears her father tell the tramp that he too is hard up and then offers to roll him a cigarette if he wants one.

When they reach the shore, the father tells his daughter about how the Great Lakes were formed. He tells her ice came down from the North to cover the flat plain that had been there. He tells her the ice pushed into low spots on the plain and then shrank back toward the North Pole, leaving its traces in the depressions it gouged out of the earth. The depressions that were filled with ice then became the Great Lakes. He presses his hand, fingers spread, into the ground to illustrate his point but his hand does not make much of an impression on the hard ground. He tells her that the ice had more power behind it than his hand does.

The father tells the girl that the lakes are relatively new compared to the age of the earth, and this information makes her uncomfortable. She does not want to think of such big changes. She is horrified at how short a period of time humans have to be alive on earth, but she perceives that her father is at peace with this idea. She suddenly realizes that even he, who seems to have been in the world as long as it has existed, was not alive at the beginning of the century, nor did he know a time when there were no cars or electric lights. She does not want to think about the enormity of time or the changes wrought by irresistible forces. She wants the world to stay the same forever, just as she knows it, with the lake having always been a lake with a beach and a town.

The father has a job selling products for Walker Brothers. His route takes in the rural areas around Tuppertown. Walker Brothers products include fruit concentrates for making soft drinks, medicines, tonics, shampoo, spices, rat poison and liniment, among the other things that farm households might need. To amuse himself while driving his route he makes up songs about the job and the things he sees.

The girl's mother sees nothing amusing about these songs, which she calls peddler's songs. To her they are only another indication of how far down the social ladder the family has fallen. She is having a difficult time adjusting to life in town, and she takes no comfort in the fact that many people are in the same situation, having suffered serious financial reversals. She does not see that her husband is lucky to have a job at all. She only speaks to one of her neighbors, a woman she also considers to have lost social status because she was a schoolteacher who married the janitor. The mother does not see that her family's situation is not unique and represents part of a national problem. She believes that fate has forced her to live among poor people in a bad part of town, and none of the house's amenities like the claw-footed bathtub, nor any of the town's offerings, which include restaurants, movie theaters, and a Woolworth's store, can distract her from her sense of shame at being there.

The mother tries to maintain what she believes to be her rightful social position. When she goes grocery shopping in the afternoon, she dresses up in a navy blue dress, white shoes and a white straw hat. She curls her daughter's hair into ringlets and makes her wear a large hair ribbon, and when they walk down the street to the store she makes a point of acting like a lady, in contrast to the other women in their loose, worn housedresses. The girl hates these outings and even hates the sound of her name when her mother says it out in public.

Sometimes they bring back a brick of ice cream from the store as a treat to share with the little brother, but they must eat it all at one time because they do not have a refrigerator. Her mother tries to engage the girl in conversation about their previous life on the farm, prodding her to remember specific things and events. The girl pretends to remember less than she really does because she does not want to be trapped into feeling things she does not want to feel.

The mother suffers from terrible headaches and has to lie down until they pass. She likes to lie on the porch and look up at the tree branches, pretending she is back on the farm. Her husband tries to convince her to go with him for a drive in the country to get some fresh air to relieve her pain, but she knows that what he is really offering is only a ride with him as he travels his sales route.

On one occasion when she turns down his invitation, he decides to take the children with him instead. The girl is excited at the prospect of getting out of town. After getting her little brother ready she watches her father put on his salesman's outfit, complete with white shirt, light slacks, a straw hat, and pencils clipped to the shirt pocket. He loads suitcases filled with bottles into the back of their old Essex car. The girl notes how different it is to go out with her father. She does not have to curl her hair or scrub her knees to go with him. There is no need to pretend anything.

They take a shortcut out of town, and the father starts to sing a song he has made up about himself. He calls himself the "Walker Brothers Cowboy" in the song. It has lines about how he wants to be on the Rio Grand and about how he got his route because the previous salesman died. As they pass the Baptist Camp he makes up a song about how all the Baptists on down in the Lake Huron water getting their sins washed away. The little boy looks out the car windows for the Baptists but says he cannot see them, and his father says again that they are down in the lake.

The car leaves the highway, taking dirt roads that lead further into the empty flat countryside and to the farmhouses at the ends of their lanes. The girl observes deep black pine shade in the bush lots behind the houses, "like pools nobody can every get to." The blinds of the houses are drawn against the heat. The houses often have doors on the second story that open out onto nothing. The father says that those are doors that sleepwalkers use, and the girl feels foolish for realizing too late that he is joking. Her brother says anyone who used the doors would break their necks. The narrator notes how much she associates the 1930s with this type of farmhouse, this kind of afternoon, and with her father's straw hat, bright tie and Essex automobile.

Some of the cars in the farmyards are operational, but others are junk, stripped of their doors and seats. There are no living things to be seen in the yards except dogs. The father speaks gently to the dogs as he walks past them up to the door. He uses one voice to calm the dogs and another, cheerier one when he begins his salesman's pitch. When he goes inside a house, the children must wait in the car for him, wondering what he does inside.

Sometimes, when trying to entertain his wife, the father will pretend that she is one of his farm clients. He goes into his pitches for various products and remedies. Eventually, he makes his wife laugh, even though she thinks some of his talk is uncouth, and she assures the children that he is only joking, that he actually is too much of a gentleman to say such things.

The drive along the sales route goes from one sad farmhouse to another, and the children get hotter and hotter in the car. They see no other children or any men in the fields. The girl tries to amuse herself and her brother with a game of "I Spy." She has to use colors because he is too young to recognize letters, and it is difficult to find colors beyond the gray of dilapidated buildings, the brown of the yards, and black and brown of the dogs. She looks for new colors in the worn patches of painted surfaces on the cars or doors, sometimes finding purple, maroon, or yellow. Her brother says these colors are not fair, and the game quickly deteriorates.

At one house, after the father walks up to the door, whistling and calling out to the inhabitants, he finds no one home. Just as he is picking up his suitcases, a window opens upstairs and a white pot is emptied over the sill. While the window is not directly over him, some of the contents of the pot splash onto him. He carries his suitcases back to the car, no longer whistling, and drives off. The girl tells her brother that the pot was full of pee, and the little boy thinks this is very funny and laughs about it until the father asks him not to tell his mother what happened because she will not see the joke. The boy asks if he will put it in a song, and the father says he will try.

After a while, the girl notices that they are not going down any more farmhouse lanes nor do they seem to be headed back toward home. She asks if they are still in her father's territory and he says they are not. Her brother notices how fast they are going, and in fact, they are bouncing hard through dry puddle holes, and the bottles in the suitcases rattle and gurgle "promisingly." Eventually they do go down another lane and stop in front of an unpainted farmhouse that is "silver in the sun." The girl asks why they are stopping here if it is not in the territory, and her father says she will see.

A woman is gathering wash set out in the sun to bleach and dry in front of the house. She stares at the car when it pulls up and asks if they are lost. The father says no, he is the Walker Brothers man. The woman tells him that someone else is their Walker Brothers man and that he had just been there. Then she recognizes the father as an old friend from long ago. Seeing him is something of a shock to her, and it takes her some time to recover. She apologizes for how she looks and expresses amazement at the children in the car, that they are his. The father asks how she has been and if she has a husband hidden in the woodshed somewhere. She jokes that if she had a husband that is not where she would keep him. She invites them into her kitchen, which is cool, simple and clean. Her mother, old and blind, is sitting there when they come in. The old woman asks her daughter, Nora, if they have company. Nora tells her that it is Ben Jordan. When she asks if he has been out of the country because they have not seen him in so long, Nora answers "aggressively" that he is married now and that he has brought his children with him.

The girl is excited to meet her first blind person. She notes that the blind woman's eyes are closed, with sockets that are sunk into shapeless hollows. From one eye comes what she calls a miraculous silver tear.

Nora leaves them visiting with her mother while she goes to change her clothes. When she returns she is wearing a flowered crepe dress and Cuban-heeled shoes. She smells of cologne. Nora offers to make them cool drinks and reaches for her bottle of Walker Brother orange syrup to do so. She and Ben, the father, talk about old times. He tells her how he lost his farm, and she fills him in on news about her sisters. While they talk Nora's mother falls asleep, and Nora suggests that they move to the front room so they will not disturb her.

Ben tells the children to go outside and play, but the girl wants to stay inside and investigate the interesting things in the front room. There is a pump organ, a gramophone and a picture of the Virgin Mary on the wall. The girl realizes then that Nora must be a Roman Catholic. Her family has never known any Catholics well enough to visit their houses so she is intrigued at this new development. She remembers how her grandmother and aunt used to talk about Catholics and imagines what they would say about Nora; they would say that she "digs with the wrong foot," the girl speculates.

Nora takes a bottle out of the top of the organ, telling Ben she does not like to drink alone. She pours a drink for herself and for Ben. The girl remembers that her mother once said that her father did not drink whiskey but now she sees that he does. As they drink, Ben entertains Nora with his stories about selling for Walker Brothers. He even describes the recent incident involving the chamber pot, and Nora laughs hard at his story. He sings her the songs he makes up along the road, and she thinks they are very funny too. Nora suddenly realizes that the little boy is studying the gramophone and tells him she will play a record for him. She chooses one that she and Ben used to dance to when they were young. Nora begins to teach the girl to dance. The girl is happy to learn and is having a good time. Nora tries to get Ben to dance with her several times, but he refuses. Then he says they should be going. She invites them to stay for supper, but Ben says the children's mother would worry. He tells her he will come again if he gets the chance, and he gives her directions to their house in town, inviting her to visit them. Nora does not write the directions down, though. When they leave, she touches the car's fender, her hand making "an unintelligible mark in the dust."

On the way home, the father buys licorice instead of ice cream and shares it with the children. The girl knows he is using it to hide the smell of the whiskey. She understands that she is not to mention the visit to Nora to her mother. Her little brother asks his father to sing one of his songs, but the father says he is "fresh out" of songs. He tells him to watch for rabbits instead.

As the father drives, the girl understands that she has seen an important part of his life that she had not known about before. She feels it fading away and taking all the magic of the afternoon with it. The changes she observed in her father during the visit to Nora disappear as they approach Tuppertown, where the sky again becomes the even gray it always was on summer evenings by the lake.