Figures in the Distance
- Our first-person narrator (hi, narrator) recalls the summer holiday she spent on Fort Road with her family when she was ten years old… and learned an important lesson about death and children. We are in reflective mode (check out the use of past tense throughout the book).
- Her father built a house "with his own hands" on Dickenson Bay Street, but it was in need of roof repair, so they were staying "far out on Fort Road" (1.1).
- The narrator spends the quiet, uneventful days of summer feeding the family pigs and guinea fowl and speaking only to her parents and sometimes their neighbor, Mistress Maynard, when she was around.
- She "could see the cemetery" from their yard and noticed "sticklike figures, some dressed in black, some dressed in white, bobbing up and down in the distance" sometimes in the morning and sometimes in the evening (1.1). These are the "Figures in the Distance" mentioned in the chapter title. Thanks for making it easy for us, Kinkaid!
- The a-ha epiphany of the chapter comes when the narrator's mother explains that the figures she sees in the cemetery in the morning are "probably a child being buried, since children were always buried in the morning." Dang, that's sad.
- Our child narrator reveals that "[u]ntil then, I had not known that children died" and she also did not know anyone personally who had died (1.1).
- She is afraid of the dead, because death is terrifying. This fear stems from the idea of the dead coming back in a dream or, most frighteningly, showing up in real life, "standing under a tree just as you were passing by" (1.2). Yikes.
- The narrator becomes semi-obsessed with death and funerals. "[T]he smell of pitch pine and varnish in the air" signals the proximity of the undertaker's workshop (1.3). Although she is afraid of the dead, she wants to learn more. If there are not funerals, she comments to her mother, "[n]o one died" (1.3).
- The narrator and her family move back to their house in town on Dickenson Bay Street without the view of the cemetery. At this point, no one she knows has died.
- Then, the daughter of one of her mother's friends named Nalda, a red-haired, thin little girl, dies in the narrator's mother's arms. She had a cough and trouble breathing. They were en route to the local doctor, Dr. Bailey, when she "let out a long sigh and went limp" (1.4).
- Dr. Bailey pronounces Nalda dead. The narrator adds a joke here in the matter-of-fact delivery of a (weird) little kid: "when I heard that I was so glad he wasn't my doctor" (1.4).
- The narrator's parents took care of the details of Nalda's funeral because her mother was too distraught. Her father made a coffin with flowers carved on the sides while her mother prepared Nalda's body.
- The narrator tells her school friends about Nalda's death and, in exchange, they would tell her stories of people they knew who had died. Pretty chipper conversation for ten year olds, right? The narrator relates that she and her friends would say "[f]ancy that," to each other after relating these grim stories (1.5).
- The narrator "loved very much" and "tormented" a classmate named Sonia (1.6). She shows her love by allowing her to copy her homework and buying her sweets. And, she torments her by pulling her arm and leg hair.
- Sonia's mother dies and the narrator never speaks to her again. "She seemed such a shameful thing, a girl whose mother had died and left her alone in the world" (1.6).
- Next on the narrator's running death toll is Miss Charlotte, her neighbor. Miss Charlotte dies in her mother's arms and she is not allowed to go to her funeral. Although she has seen Miss Charlotte in various situations (coming from the market, going to church etc), she couldn't imagine the way Miss Charlotte looked dead.
- Next, our narrator decides she wants to see an actual dead body. So, she begins visiting funeral parlors as an unofficial mourner, yet this doesn't completely satisfy her curiosity because she didn't know these people and thus "couldn't make a comparison" (1.9).
- One day, a "hunchback" girl from a nearby school dies: "At last, though, someone I knew was dead" (1.10). Finally, she is able to satisfy her curiosity about the comparison between a living body and a dead body, and especially a living face vs. a dead face. She runs to the girl's funeral immediately after school.
- When she finally takes a close look at the dead girl's face, the narrator compares the sight of the dead girl's face to the image of a View-Master working improperly. As you can probably tell by now, death is a major theme, especially in this chapter.
- In a flight of imagination and excitement, the narrator wonders if the dead "humpbacked" girl's spirit might show up under a tree and entice her, like an angel of death, "to go for a swim or eat a piece of fruit" (1.11). Then, Mr. Oatie would have to make her coffin because her father would be too "overcome with grief" to do it (1.11).
- The narrator arrives home from school extremely late and without the fish her mother asked her to pick up from Mr. Earl. The narrator lies to her mother and says the fishermen didn't go out to sea that day because the water was too rough. Her mother knows this is untrue because Mr. Earl has already delivered the fish at this point. Oops.
- As a punishment for lying about the fish, the narrator must eat dinner alone outside under a tree and go to bed without her mother's kiss goodnight. In the end, her mother still kisses her goodnight.