Beret Timeline and Summary

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• Beret moves with her family to the American prairies and cries as soon as she realizes what a desolate, windswept place their new home is going to be. Still, she keeps going because she loves her family and is pregnant with her fourth child.
• When she finds out her family's new farm is built on a Native American burial ground, Beret fears that a group of "savages" is going to come to her house and kill her family. But when Native Americans actually show up, they turn out to be really nice and they give Beret's husband Per a new pony for helping them.
• Beret has a lot of trouble giving birth to her new son, but she and he eventually make it through. She thanks God for sparing her life, but gets nervous when she realizes that her husband plans on naming the boy Peter Victorious. She thinks this name is a little too cocky and that it might anger God.
• Beret's mental health gets steadily worse as the seasons and years go by. She finally has a total nervous breakdown when a giant storm of locusts descends on her family's farm. In the Bible locusts are a sign of God's wrath, and Beret is convinced that her family has angered God by trying to live on such barren land.
• As her mental state gets worse, Beret starts acting strangely around her kids. It gets to the point where Beret's neighbors offer to raise her new baby because they don't think Beret is a fit mother.
• At the end of the book, Beret learns that a neighbor has come down with a deadly fever. She orders her husband Per to find a minister to take the man's last confession. Per thinks it's too dangerous to go out (there's a blizzard). But he eventually gives in and ends up dying of hypothermia. We never get any word of how Beret reacted to his death.