40 pages • 1 hour read
Saints at the River
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Part 2, Prologue Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2
Part 2, Prologue Summary
In the Prologue to Part 2 (italicized like the Prologue to Part 1), we return to the night Maggie and Ben were left alone while the father went to the nearby convenience store to buy cigarettes. It is near dinnertime, and there is a large pot of beans simmering on the stovetop. When little Ben goes to the kitchen for something to eat, before Maggie can do anything, he accidentally pulls down the pot of boiling water. The searing water burns Ben’s face and splatters on Maggie’s arm and leg. Despite their pain and fear, they do nothing—it does not even occur to Maggie to use the telephone. They wait for the father to return. Ben can only whimper. Maggie feels like her entire body is on fire. They wait more than 20 minutes—Maggie counts off the minutes on the kitchen clock. When the father finally returns, he rushes the two children to the nearest hospital. Ben stays—his burns are severe and life-threatening. When Maggie and her father drive home (their mother stays with Ben), Maggie feels the mountains closing in on her and feels that they “would keep on moving closer until they finally suffocated me” (130).
Part 2, Prologue Analysis
This opening section of Part 2, which serves as the centerpiece of the novel, inevitably recalls the Prologue to Part 1, in which we watch helplessly as Ruth Kowalsky enters the Tamassee River, loses her footing, and drowns. In this Prologue, another child, Maggie herself, drowns, at least symbolically.
We revisit the critical event in Maggie’s childhood, the past she cannot forget. Much like the girl’s drowning recorded in the opening Prologue, the tragedy here begins harmlessly enough. It is dinnertime. The mother is out on errands, and the father needs a pack of cigarettes. He leaves the two kids playing in the front room.
When little Ben gets hungry and toddles off to the kitchen, it seems as innocent as Ruth heading down to the river. What happens reflects how little a child understands the concept of risk and the consequences of behavior. Like Ruth, Ben is an innocent, off on his own, caught up in an understandable, if poor, decision. Like the girl trapped by the river’s whirling hydraulics, Ben is seared by the pot of beans he reaches up for. It is an accident, certainly, but one that happens at the end of a series of a parent’s and a child’s miscalculations. Everyone is to blame, and no one is to blame. As with Ruth, however, the father bears a heavy burden of responsibility. Ruth’s father was helpless to rescue his daughter as she struggled in the river—he had never learned to swim. Maggie’s father left two kids alone just to get a pack of cigarettes.
Ben survives and goes on to a heroic recovery that includes spacious and compassionate forgiveness for his father whom he recognizes as only partly to blame. It is Maggie who perishes that night, at least metaphorically. This event—the disfigurement of his brother and her sense of a father who did not care enough about his children—becomes the hydraulics that she cannot pull out of. In this Prologue’s closing image, as Maggie returns from the hospital with her father, she feels suddenly claustrophobic, as if the mountains themselves were drowning her.
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