Chapter 31: Eda — Summary and Analysis
⚠️ Spoiler Warning: This guide contains detailed spoilers for the entire novel. Proceed only if you've finished reading or are comfortable knowing the plot.
Summary
As spring arrives, the frosts thin and orange buds appear on the maples, the family settles into a new way of living without ever consciously agreeing to it. Nora and Percy sleep at the margins of the bog meadow beside their mother, who continues her slow transformation into something vegetal. Percy occasionally comes up to the house for coffee, but Nora never does. Charlie remains absent, never returning from wherever he drove off in the car.
The family clears fallen branches from the yard, forest, and meadow, letting the ground breathe. Some of the branchless trees die, but others slowly heal and sprout stubby new limbs. In the middle of the season, a week of rain floods the roofless kitchen, and they begin sleeping in the goat shed. They shovel out manure, mop the floor with well water, sweep away cobwebs, and hang blankets on the walls. The goats wander the yard freely. Wenna cooks oats with ramps, mushrooms, and wild radishes gathered from the forest. Eda makes a garden plot from forest humus and plants squash, carrots, potatoes, and nasturtiums from last year's seed packs.
When the kitchen ceiling caves in, they stop going back to the house entirely. They dig a firepit, cut storm-felled trees for firewood, and cook vegetables on the coals. Nora, Percy, and their mother eat sunlight, water, and nutrients from the soil. New maple and pine sprouts emerge, delicate and finger-thin. Lines of orange mushrooms unstitch the boundary between bog meadow and bog forest. Heavy rains swell the bog's mouth open, then the ground absorbs the moisture and the mouth shrinks nearly closed. They shovel earth into the swale and plant rows of pine saplings on top, like restitution.
Their mother's flesh becomes woody; her arms stiffen and stretch out; her eyes, nose, and mouth recede into her face until it is featureless and flat. On warm afternoons, Wenna sits between Nora and their mother and closes her eyes, feeling what they feel—the worms in the humus, the fungi questing after tree roots, the earth knitting together, the bog becoming forest. Eda's chest hurts when she sees this, but neither sister speaks of it. At night, they sit in the yard and read the romance of Perceval aloud, the only one of Nora's romances they managed to recover from her room.
The last clumps of their mother's amber hair fall out and lie on the ground around her. Wenna gathers them, braids them, and hangs them around their mother's woody neck. The black spruces regain their waxy needles. Mathilde the goat labors for fifteen hours and delivers a stillbirth. Wenna and Eda bury it among the birches, where the soil is becoming rich and hungry. The nanny goat wails deep, grief-stricken wails. They rub her inflamed skin with a warm wet rag, release the milk from her heavy teats, and she lies with her head in Eda's lap like a human child. Eda sips hot goat's milk and holds her belly, not saying she is terrified of labor. Wenna tells her,