63 pages • 2 hours read
LaRose
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Part 5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 5: “The Gathering”
Chapter 12 Summary: “You Go”
Josette and Snow plan a huge graduation celebration for Hollis, trying to plant grass in the dirt volleyball practice court, although they have lost their cultural tradition of farming. Josette goes to the Raviches’ house to ask for help from the green-thumbed Nola. Maggie is excited to see her. Josette inspects the impeccably ordered house. “This is where LaRose lives his other life, the thought” (350). Maggie, LaRose, and Josette eat ice cream, but Josette begins to feel anxious by the order of the house and they go outside, discussing how Maggie and LaRose pick 100 dandelions per day to help weed the garden. Josette imagines rolling up the Raviches’ lawn to borrow it. Josette tells them to come over later to help with the party. Hollis asks for one of the party invitations to keep as a memento for his next home, and Snow tells him to stay. Josette tries to act calm but ends up snorting, telling him to stay. “Then she looked straight at Hollis again and all her heart came into her face” (355).
Josette makes a medallion for Hollis at her grandmother’s place, but keeps messing up while Mrs. Peace sorts through her old letters, happy to have received a promise from the historical society to look for the first LaRose’s bones. Snow helps Josette with beading and taunts her for making a medallion for Hollis. Josette accidentally bleeds on the medallion, and the three women discuss the effect of women’s blood on men’s belongings and other traditions that seem to be becoming more gendered with the passing of time. They watch Terminator while they work, repeating all the lines. They discuss the spirits, and Mrs. Peace admits she’s remained faithful to their grandfather because men are stressful, which Snow knows all too well.
Snow and Josette pick up Maggie and eat carrots and ranch dressing in their room. Josette and Snow tell her to use a condom with Waylon and that she should be on birth control, which Maggie admits she does not know how to get. Josette and Snow tell her to get Waylon tested as well, realizing Maggie knows nothing about sexual health. They decide Maggie should take Snow’s birth control and use a condom, just to be safe.
Emmaline makes a bunch of barbecue for the party and a variety of soups and allows the girls to use her nicest bedsheet for the gift table. The children help make other food as well, including potato salad. The girls are happy the cakes turned out so well. Josette keeps “track of North Dakota National Guard Units […] She was pretty sure that they were in charge of patrolling the roads for I.E.D.s” (364).
The guests arrive, everyone bringing beer and cards to the feast. Maggie, Peter, and Nola arrive and the dog comes too, never leaving Nola’s side. Nola sees Waylon and Maggie together. Romeo arrives and thinks that the best thing he ever did for Hollis was giving him up. He thinks that falling down the church steps fixed whatever broke in his body the day that Landreaux crushed him, finding inner peace in knowing his body is realigned. Maggie and Waylon slip into the woods. LaRose smudges sage on the food and anoints the elders, his sisters, and Hollis in smoke. He walks towards Dusty’s tree and invites all the spirits to the feast. He returns to everyone talking, laughing and eating “like, well, a bunch of Indians” (368). At cake time, Hollis brings Romeo up to stand beside him and Landreaux sings the honor song, then invites Romeo to speak. Romeo admits he’s not a good parent, explaining his decision to give away Hollis and then giving Hollis a check for the $3,000 in their joint bank account. Romeo tells him to go to college and to quit the National Guard, hugging him. Everyone cheers. Romeo tells Hollis who his mother is, explaining that he lost her to a Ph.D. program. One of the elder men, Sam, sundances with an eagle feather, saying a prayer in Ojibwe. LaRose listens intently and feels the power of the words as the spirits join the living. Dusty gets some cake, which both Nola and the dog notice. The first LaRose promises her bones will be sent back soon, and others speak about Ottie’s pending death, the need for LaRose to watch out for Maggie, and the handsome couple that Josette and Hollis make.
Josette serves cake but Randall makes them wait for the cake song, which he and Landreaux sing. Josette tells Hollis to quit the National Guard.
Part 5 Analysis
In contrast to the psychological and physical trauma of the previous section, the last section of the novel mitigates the amount of direct trauma the characters must confront. However, a character’s proximity to violence does not dissolve, even after a person leaves the community. Hollis, for example, will presumably join the National Guard, entering the military during a war. The author implies that he will be subjected to violence, almost as though the characters within the novel feel a preternatural pull toward violence they cannot escape regardless of their actions. The author constructs the War on Terror as a historical continuance of this fate, proving that the characters live amongst a constant threat of violence.
However, violence can seemingly be thwarted as even can death, especially through the character of Romeo. Romeo becomes a Lazarus-like character who rises from the dead to become better than what he was. Romeo seems to need the physical pain in order to correct himself, finding calm through inflicting violence upon himself. The author indicates that Romeo seeks to restore an imbalance that was caused when an external force—Landreaux—crippled him; therefore, in order to rectify this imbalance, Romeo must sacrifice his own well-being and succumb to the pain that he has chased away for so long through opioid addiction.
Much of this section, then, also involves the idea of restoration or return, as the audience also witnesses Hollis reunited with his father. Similarly, this last section reunites the Irons’ household fully with that of the Raviches, who attend Hollis’ graduation party. Although the author does not attempt to mitigate the trauma that both families have undergone, there is a sense that some sort of natural and spiritual balance has been restored, as Peter successfully killed Landreaux without killing him which also allowed for Romeo to exact revenge upon Landreaux, again without actually causing any harm to Landreaux’s physical body and therefore causing more suffering in the Iron household. The spirits of the woods also return to speak with LaRose, as the first LaRose informs the fourth that her bones will soon be returned after having been stolen from her family decades before by white scientists. Although LaRose is able to commune with the spirits, he and Maggie also get to be kids again, returning to a vaguely carefree attitude wherein they no longer must constantly hold vigil over Nola’s emotional wellbeing.
The last section also places a great amount of importance on tradition in a way that was relatively untouched throughout the rest of the novel. The author indicates that traditions take effort to continue, especially regarding the farming anecdote about the lack of grass available in the Irons’ yard, which concerns Josette. Through Josette’s concerns, the author implies that one must tend to one’s traditions as one would a garden, cultivating them as the elders do with LaRose. The author also indicates that the children feel the loss of traditions most acutely, and so the traditions must continue for the sake of future generations. The audience also sees this care put into the preparation of food, during which Emmaline spends an exorbitant amount of time preparing the feast for Hollis’ party. Good food takes time to marinate—the potato salad, the barbecue—just as traditions take the effort and time of parents in order to communicate their importance to the future. However, these are also aspects of traditions that all characters help with, regardless of gender. And yet, the idea of tradition is itself incredibly malleable, much like the family dynamism discussed in Part IV, as even Mrs. Peace admits that the traditions change all the time as the girls make Hollis’ medallion. The very fact of tradition seems to lie in keeping with a kind of manmade fallibility, as only the Creator is perfect and therefore, all else must be subject to transition. The last section revolves around this idea of transition, as all characters—including the spirits—ready themselves for the next step in their respective journeys, which all vary as much as the characters themselves.
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