Here's your bonus for Tuesday evening, November 12: name the type of automobile in the photo. Yes, it ties into the story and no, you must say more than a red convertible.
TURN IN YOUR TORONTO ARTICLE FROM YESTERDAY, IF YOU HAVE NOT ALREADY. THEY ARE A WRITING GRADE....AVOID A ZERO!
ALSO MISSING QUITE A FEW WEEK 1, VOCABULARY 2. AT THIS MOMENT THEY ARE ZEROS....FIX THIS!
Due on Thursday: week 1, vocab 3...you will have a cumulative assessment next Monday, after we have completed 4 of these. Remember to learn the idiomatic expressions.
Please find below the story we are reading the next couple of days.
The questions did not format on the blog, but follow the story.
Over the next three days, we are reading Louise Erdrich's short story "The Red Convertible." The story has been chuncked and their are accompanying questions that explore all levels of thinking:
The objective is to use specific, textual evidence wherever possible. There are also questions that there are several possible responses. I am collecting these on Friday. Next Monday, after your cumulative vocabulary assessment, you will have two days to write an essay. The thesis statement is on the handout; you will use your graphic organizer as a reference.
Find below the class handout.
We will be reading a short story by Louise Erdrich
to construct the next essay. I have given you the thesis statement for your
introduction.
Before we begin reading, answer the following:
What is the genre of this writing? _________________________________
In what person point of view is the story told?
________________________________
Define
foreshadow.______________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
Define dramatic irony
_______________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
We will read the story first as a class; then as you
reread the story, respond to each paragraph as needed. On a third read through,
select the textual evidence that best supports the thesis statement.
In the
short story “The Red Convertible,” Louise Erdrich uses a first person narrator,
Lyman, to recount a narrative with a poignant and ironic resolution. To
heighten the mystery of the story as it unfolds and to foreshadow the dramatic
irony of its ending, Erdrich plays with time within her episodic narrative structure.
THE
RED CONVERTIBLE
(1974)
LYMAN
LAMARTINE
THE
RED CONVERTIBLE
By
Louise Erdich
(1974)
LYMAN
LAMARTINE
1.
I was the first one to drive a convertible on my reservation.
And of course it was red, a red Olds. I owned that car along with my brother
Henry Junior. We owned it together until his boots filled with water on a
windy night and he bought out my share. Now Henry owns the whole car, and his
younger brother Lyman (that’s myself), Lyman walks everywhere he goes.
2.
How did I earn enough money to buy my share in the first place? My
one talent was I could always make money. I had a touch for it, unusual in a
Chippewa. From the first I was different that way, and everyone recognized
it. I was the only kid they let in the American Legion Hall to shine shoes,
for example, and one Christmas I sold spiritual bouquets for the mission door
to door. The nuns let me keep a percentage. Once I started, it seemed the
more money I made the easier the money came.
3.
Everyone encouraged it. When I was fifteen I got a job washing dishes
at the Joliet Café, and that was where my first big break happened.
4.
It wasn’t long before I was promoted to bussing tables, and then the
short-order cook quit and I was hired to take her place. No sooner than you
know it I was managing the Joliet. The rest is history. I went on managing. I
soon become part owner, and of course there was no stopping me then. It
wasn’t long before the whole thing was mine.
5.
After I’d owned the Joliet for one year, it blew over in the worst
tornado ever seen around here. The whole operation was smashed to bits. A
total loss. The fryalator was up in a tree, the grill torn in half like it
was paper. I was only sixteen. I had it all in my mother’s name, and I lost
it quick, but before I lost it I had every one of my relatives, and their
relatives, to dinner, and I also bought that red Olds I mentioned, along with
Henry.
6.
The first time we saw it! I’ll tell you when we first saw it. We had
gotten a ride up to Winnipeg, and both of us had money. Don’t ask me why, because
we never mentioned a car or anything, we just had all our money. Mine was
cash, a big bankroll from the Joliet’s insurance. Henry had two checks—a
week’s extra pay for being laid off, and his regular check from the Jewel
Bearing Plant. We were walking down Portage anyway, seeing the sights, when
we saw it. There it was, parked, large as life. Really as if it was
alive. I thought of the word repose, because the car wasn’t simply
stopped, parked, or whatever. That car reposed, calm and gleaming, a FOR
SALE sign in its left front window. Then, before we had thought it over
at all, the car belonged to us and our pockets were empty. We had just enough
money for gas back home.
7.
We went places in that car, me and Henry. We took off driving all one
whole summer. We started off toward the Little Knife River and Mandaree in
Fort Berthold and then we found our-selves down in Wakpala somehow, and then
suddenly we aver in Montana on the Rocky Boys, and yet the summer was not
even half over. Some people hang on to details when they travel but we didn’t
let them bother us and just lived our everyday lives here to there.
8.
I do remember this one place with willows. I remember I laid under
those trees and it was comfortable. So comfortable. The branches bent down
all around me like a tent or a stable. And quiet, it was quiet, even though
there was a powwow close enough so I could see it going on. The air was not
too still, not too windy either. When the dust rises up and hangs in the air
around the dancers like that, I feel good. Henry was asleep with his arms
thrown wide. Later on, he woke up and we started driving again. We were
somewhere in Montana, or maybe on the Blood Reserve—it could have been
anywhere. Anyway it was where we met the girl.
9.
All her hair was in buns around her ears, that’s the first thing I
noticed about her. She was posed alongside the road with her arm out, so we
stopped. That girl was short, so short her lumber shirt looked comical on
her, like a nightgown. She had jeans on and fancy moccasins and she carried a
little suitcase.
“Hop on
in,” says Henry. So she climbs in between us.
“We’ll
take you home,” I says. “Where do you live?”
“Chicken,”
she says.
“Where
the hell’s that?” I ask her.
“Alaska.”
“Okay,”
says Henry, and we drive.
10. We got up there and never
wanted to leave. The sun doesn’t truly set there in summer, and the night is
more a soft dusk. You might doze off, sometimes, but before you know it
you’re up again, like an animal in nature. You never feel like you have to
sleep hard or put away the world. And things would grow there. One day just
dirt or moss, the next day flowers and long grass. The girl’s name was Susy.
Her family really took to us. They fed us and put us up. We had our own tent
to live in by their house, and the kids would be in and out of there all day
and night. They couldn’t get over me and Henry being brothers, we looked so
different. We told them we knew we had the same mother, anyway.
11.One
night Susy came in to visit us. We sat around in the tent talking of this
thing and that. The season was changing. It was getting darker by that time,
and the cold was even getting just a little mean. I told her it was time for
us to go. She stood up on a chair.
“You
never seen my hair,” Susy said.
12. That was true. She was
standing on a chair, but still, when she unclipped her buns the hair reached
all the way to the ground. Our eyes opened. You couldn’t tell how much hair
she had when it was rolled up so neatly. Then my brother Henry did something
funny. He went up to the chair and said, “Jump on my shoulders.” So she did
that, and her hair reached down past his waist, and he started twirling, this
way and that, so her hair was flung out from side to side.
“I
always wondered what it was like to have long pretty hair,” Henry says. Well
we laughed. It was a funny sight, the way he did it. The next morning we got
up and took leave of those people.
13. On to greener pastures, as
they say. It was down through Spokane and across Idaho then Montana and very
soon we were racing the weather right along under the Canadian border through
Columbus, Des Lacs, and then we were in Bottineau County and soon home. We’d
made most of the trip, that summer, without putting up the car hood at all.
We got home just in time, it turned out, for the army to remember Henry had
signed up to join it.
14. I don’t wonder that the
army was so glad to get my brother that they turned him into a Marine. He was
built like a brick outhouse anyway. We liked to tease him that they really
wanted him for his Indian nose. He had a nose big and sharp as a hatchet,
like the nose on Red Tomahawk, the Indian who killed Sitting Bull, whose
profile is on signs all along the North Dakota highways. Henry went off to
training camp, came home once during Christmas, then the next thing you know
we got an overseas letter from him. It was 1970, and he said he was stationed
up in the northern hill country. Whereabouts I did not know. He wasn’t such a
hot letter writer, and only got off two before the enemy caught him. I could
never keep it straight, which direction those good Vietnam soldiers were
from.
15. I wrote him back several
times, even though I didn’t know if those letters would get through. I kept
him informed all about the car. Most of the time I had it up on blocks in the
yard or half taken apart, because that long trip did a hard job on it under
the hood.
16. I always had good luck
with numbers, and never worried about the draft myself. I never even had to
think about what my number was. But Henry was never lucky in the same way as
me. It was at least three years before Henry came home. By then I guess the
whole war was solved in the government’s mind, but for him it would keep on
going. In those years I’d put his car into almost perfect shape. I always
thought of it as his car while he was gone, even though when he left he said,
“Now it’s yours,” and threw me his key.
“Thanks
for the extra key,” I’d said. “I’ll put it up in your drawer just in case I
need it.” He laughed.
17. When he came home, though,
Henry was very different, and I’ll say this: the change was no good. You
could hardly expect him to change for the better, I know. But he was quiet,
so quiet, and never comfortable sitting still anywhere but always up and moving
around. I thought back to times we’d sat still for whole afternoons, never
moving a muscle, just shifting our weight along the ground, talking to
whoever sat with us, watching things. He’d always had a joke, then, too, and
now you couldn’t get him to laugh, or when he did it was more the sound of a
man choking, a sound that stopped up the throats of other people around him.
They got to leaving him alone most of the time, and I didn’t blame them. It
was a fact: Henry was jumpy and mean.
18. I’d bought a color TV set
for my mom and the rest of us while Henry was away. Money still came very
easy. I was sorry I’d ever bought it though, because of Henry. I was also
sorry I’d bought color, because with black-and-white the pictures seem older
and farther away. But what are you going to do? He sat in front of it,
watching it, and that was the only time he was completely still. But it was
the kind of stillness that you see in a rabbit when it freezes and before it
will bolt. He was not easy. He sat in his chair gripping the armrests with
all his might, as if the chair itself was moving at a high speed and if he
let go at all he would rocket forward and maybe crash right through the set.
19. Once I was in the room
watching TV with Henry and I heard his teeth click at something. I looked
over, and he’d bitten through his lip. Blood was going down his chin. I tell
you right then I wanted to smash that tube to pieces. I went over to it but
Henry must have known what I was up to. He rushed from his chair and shoved
me out of the way, against the wall. I told myself he didn’t know what he
was doing.
20. My mom came in, turned the
set off real quiet, and told us she had made something for supper. So we went
and sat down. There was still blood going down Henry’s chin, but he didn’t
notice it and no one said anything, even though every time he took a bite of
his bread his blood fell onto it until he was eating his own blood mixed in
with the food.
21. While Henry was not around
we talked about what was going to happen to him. There were no Indian doctors
on the reservation, and my mom was afraid of trusting Old Man Pillager
because he courted her long ago and was jealous of her husbands. He might
take revenge through her son. We were afraid that if we brought Henry to a
regular hospital they would keep him.
“They
don’t fix them in those places,” Mom said; “they just give them drugs.”
“We
wouldn’t get him there in the first place,” I agreed, “so let’s just forget
about it.”
Then I
thought about the car.
22. Henry had not even looked
at the car since he’d gotten home, though like I said, it was in tip-top
condition and ready to drive. I thought the car might bring the old Henry
back somehow. So I bided my time and waited for my chance to interest him in
the vehicle.
23. One night Henry was off
somewhere. I took myself a hammer. I went out to that car and I did a number
on its underside. Whacked it up. Bent the tail pipe double. Ripped the
muffler loose. By the time I was done with the car it looked worse than any
typical Indian car that has been driven all its life on reservation roads,
which they always say are like government promises—full of holes. It just
about hurt me, I’ll tell you that! I threw dirt in the carburetor and I
ripped all the electric tape off the seats. I made it look just as beat up as
I could. Then I sat back and waited for Henry to find it.
24. Still, it took him over a
month. That was all right, because it was just getting warm enough, not
melting, but warm enough to work outside.
“Lyman,”
he says, walking in one day, “that red car looks like shit.”
“Well
it’s old,” I says. “You got to expect that.”
“No
way!” says Henry. “That car’s a classic! But you went and ran the piss right
out of it, Lyman, and you know it don’t deserve that. I kept that car in
A-one shape. You don’t remember. You’re too young. But when I left, that car
was running like a watch. Now I don’t even know if! can get it to start
again, let alone get it anywhere near its old condition.” “Well you try,” I
said, like I was getting mad, “but I say it’s a piece of junk.”
25. Then I walked out before
he could realize I knew he’d strung together more than six words at once.
After
that I thought he’d freeze himself to death working on that car. He was out
there all day, and at night he rigged up a little lamp, ran a cord out the
window, and had himself some light to see by while he worked. He was better
than he had been before, but that’s still not saying much. It was easier for
him to do the things the rest of us did. He ate more slowly and didn’t jump
up and down during the meal to get this or that or look out the window. I put
my hand in the back of the TV set, I admit, and fiddled around with it good,
so that it was almost impossible now to get a clear picture. He didn’t look
at it very often anyway. He was always out with that car or going off to get
parts for it. By the time it was really melting outside, he had it fixed.
26. I had been feeling down in
the dumps about Henry around this time. We had always been together before.
Henry and Lyman. But he was such a loner now that I didn’t know how to take
it. So I jumped at the chance one day when Henry seemed friendly. It’s not
that he smiled or anything. He just said, “Let’s take that old shitbox for a
spin.” Just the way he said it made me think he could be coming around.
27. We went out to the car. It
was spring. The sun was shining very bright. My only sister, Bonita, who was
just eleven years old, came out and made us stand together for a picture.
Henry leaned his elbow on the red car’s windshield, and he took his other arm
and put it over my shoulder, very carefully, as though it was heavy for him
to lift and he didn’t want to bring the weight down all at once.
“Smile,” Bonita said, and he did.
28. That picture. I never look
at it anymore. A few months ago, I don’t know why, I got his picture out and
tacked it on the wall. I felt good about Henry at the time, close to him. I
felt good having his picture on the wall, until one night when I was looking
at television. I was a little drunk and stoned. I looked up at the wall and
Henry was staring at me. I don’t know what it was, but his smile had changed,
or maybe it was gone. All I know is I couldn’t stay in the same room with
that picture. I was shaking. I got up, closed the door, and went into the
kitchen. A little later my friend Ray came over and we both went back into that
room. We put the picture in a brown bag, folded the bag over and over
tightly, then put it way back in a closet.
29. I still see that picture
now, as if it tugs at me, whenever I pass that closet door. The picture is
very clear in my mind. It was so sunny that day Henry had to squint against
the glare. Or maybe the camera Bonita held flashed like a mirror, blinding
him, before she snapped the picture. My face is right out in the sun, big
and round. But he might have drawn back, because the shadows on his face are
deep as holes. There are two shadows curved like little hooks around the ends
of his smile, as if to frame it and try to keep it there—that one, first
smile that looked like it might have hurt his face. He has his field jacket
on and the worn-in clothes he’d come back in and kept wearing ever since.
After Bonita took the picture, she went into the house and we got into the
car. There was a full cooler in the trunk. We started off, east, toward
Pembina and the Red River because Henry said he wanted to see the high water.
30. The trip over there was
beautiful. When everything starts changing, drying up, clearing off, you
feel like your whole life is starting. Henry felt it, too. The top was down
and the car hummed like a top. He’d really put it back in shape, even the
tape on the seats was very carefully put down and glued back in layers. It’s
not that he smiled again or even joked, but his face looked to me as if it
was clear, more peaceful. It looked as though he wasn’t thinking of anything
in particular except the bare fields and windbreaks and houses we were
passing.
31. The river was high and
full of winter trash when we got there. The sun was still out, but it was
colder by the river. There were still little clumps of dirty snow here and
there on the banks. The water hadn’t gone over the banks yet, but it would,
you could tell. It was just at its limit, hard swollen, glossy like an old
gray scar. We made ourselves a fire, and we sat down and watched the current
go. As I watched it I felt something squeezing inside me and tightening and
trying to let go all at the same time. I knew I was not just feeling it
myself~ I knew I was feeling what Henry was going through at that moment.
Except that I couldn’t stand it, the closing and opening. I jumped to my
feet. I took Henry by the shoulders and I started shaking him. “Wake up,” I
says, “wake up, wake up, wake up!” I didn’t know what had come over me. I sat
down beside him again.
32. His face was totally white
and hard. Then it broke, like stones break all of a sudden when water boils
up inside them.
“I know
it,” he says. “I know it. I can’t help it. It’s no use.”
We start
talking. He said he knew what I’d done with the car. It was obvious it had
been whacked out of shape and not just neglected. He said he wanted to give
the car to me for good now, it was no use. He said he’d fixed it just to give
it back and I should take it.
“No
way,” I says, “I don’t want it.”
“That’s
okay,” he says, “you take it.”
“I don’t
want it, though,” I says back to him, and then to emphasize, just to
emphasize, you understand, I touch his shoulder. He slaps my hand off.
“Take
that car,” he says.
“No,” I
say, “make me,” I say, and then he grabs my jacket and rips the arm loose.
That jacket is a class act, suede with tags and zippers. I push Henry
backwards, off the log. He jumps up and bowls me over. We go down in a clinch
and come up swinging hard, for all we’re worth, with our fists. He socks my
jaw so hard I feel like it swings loose. Then I’m at his ribcage and land a
good one under his chin so his head snaps back. He’s dazzled. He looks at me
and I look at him and then his eyes are full of tears and blood and at first
I think he’s crying. But no, he’s laughing. “Ha! Ha!” he says. “Ha! Ha! Take
good care of it.”
“Okay,”
I says, “okay, no problem. Ha! Ha!”
33. I can’t help it, and I
start laughing, too. My face feels fat and strange, and after a while I get a
beer from the cooler in the trunk, and when I hand it to Henry he takes his
shirt and wipes my germs off. “Hoof-and-mouth disease,” he says. For some reason
this cracks me up, and so we’re really laughing for a while, and then we
drink all the rest of the beers one by one and throw them in the river and
see how far, how fast, the current takes them before they fill up and sink.
“You
want to go on back?” I ask after a while. “Maybe we could snag a couple nice
Kashpaw girls.”
He says
nothing. But I can tell his mood is turning again.
“They’re
all crazy, the girls up here, every damn one of them.”
“You’re
crazy too,” I say, to jolly him up. “Crazy Lamartine boys!”
He looks
as though he will take this wrong at first. His face twists, then clears, and
he jumps up on his feet. “That’s right!” he says. “Crazier ‘n hell. Crazy
Indians!”
34. I think it’s the old Henry
again. He throws off his jacket and starts swinging his legs out from the
knees like a fancy dancer. He’s down doing something between a grouse dance
and a bunny hop, no kind of dance I ever saw before, but neither has anyone
else on all this green growing earth. He’s wild. He wants to pitch whoopee!
He’s up and at me and all over. All this time I’m laughing so hard, so hard
my belly is getting tied up in a knot.
“Got to cool me off!” he shouts all of a sudden. Then he runs over to the
river and jumps in.
35. There’s boards and other
things in the current. It’s so high. No sound comes from the river after the
splash he makes, so I run right over. I look around. It’s getting dark. I see
he’s halfway across the water already, and I know he didn’t swim there but the
current took him. It’s far. I hear his voice, though, very clearly across it.
“My
boots are filling,” he says.
36. He says this in a normal
voice, like he just noticed and he doesn’t know what to think of it. Then
he’s gone. A branch comes by. Another branch. And I go in.
37. By the time I get out of
the river, off the snag I pulled myself onto, the sun is down. I walk back to
the car, turn on the high beams, and drive it up the bank. I put it in first
gear and then I take my foot off the clutch. I get out, close the door, and
watch it plow softly into the water. The headlights reach in as they go down,
searching, still lighted even after the water swirls over the back end. I
wait. The wires short out. It is all finally dark. And then there is only the
water, the sound of it going and running and going and running and running.
|
1. Who owned the red Olds?
1a.What is confusing about Lyman's ownership of the vehicle?
2. What is the ethnicity of the narrator?
2a. How did Lyman earn money?
3. How did Lyman's biggest break happen?
4. Write three adjectives to describe Lyman?
5. How does Lyman transform "the total loss of the diner.?
6. What simile does Lyman use to describe the Olds? (quote)
6a. Define repose, according to the text.
7. Based upon the text, hwat attitude did Henry and lyman take toward their driving all one summer?
8. What simile describes the bent willow branches?
8a. What previous word used to describe the Olds fits their experience of lanying "under those trees?'
9. What was the girl doing?
9a. Where was the girl heading?
10. What phrases in the paragraph create a tone of repose?
11. What is implied by "the season was changing?"
12. Henry carried Susy around on his shoulders, her long, black hair flowing below his waist. what image comes to mind here?
13. What is implied by the phrase "on to greener pastures?"
13a. What is ironic about Henry's joining the army?
14. Where was Henry sent to fight? What happened to him? (quote)
15. Why would Lyman keep Henry "informed about the car?"
16. what is implied when Lyman says, "the whole war was solved in the government's mind?"
17. How exactly had Henry changed when he returned home?
18. What is the advantage of a black and white tv? (use text)
18a. What simile is used to describe how Henry watched tv?
19. How is Henry's personal pain indicated?
20. What is implied by Henry not noticing the blood on his chin?
21. why would the family have preferred "Indian doctors?'
22/23 Why does Lyman do to the Olds?
22/23 what does this indicate about his relationship with his brother?
24. Read this paragraph carefully. How is the car a metaphor for Henry?
25. What purpose is the Olds serving for Henry?
25a. What changes can be specifically noted?
26. Give two adjectives that describe Lyman's reaction when Henry says, "Let's take that old shit box for a spin."
27. What phrases indicate something is being foreshadowed.
28. What happened to the photo?
29. What simile describes the shadows on Henry's face?
29a. what is the deeper meaning of the simile?
30. What is the tone of this paragraph?
30a. What text supports this?
31. What phrases does the author use to build tension?
a.
b.
c.
32. What is foreshowed with "his face was totally white and hard?"
32a. Why does Henry rip Lyman's jacket?
33. How is the tension releived between the two brothers?
34.What is ironic about Lyman saying "Crazy Lamartine brothers?"
34a, Why does henry dance before jumping in the river?
35. What is ironic about Henry saying, "my boots are filling?"
36. Why is this said in a "normal voice"
37. Why does Henry "watch [the car] plow softly into the water?
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