47 pages • 1-hour read
A Year Down Yonder
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 6-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 6 Summary: “A Dangerous Man”
Spring arrives, as well as Mary Alice’s 16th birthday. Her parents, who are still struggling financially, send her a dollar. Bootsie has gotten fat from her cobhouse diet of mice. However, the sporadic thumping noises from the attic spook her, and she runs whenever she hears them. One day, she leaves a present on Mary Alice’s bed: a newborn kitten. Mary Alice names her April, hoping to keep her as a pet in her bedroom, but Bootsie soon takes her back to the cobhouse.
One exceptionally warm Saturday, Mary Alice and Grandma are washing their sheets in the yard when a stranger approaches. He says that he’s been going door-to-door looking for a room and that Grandma’s is the last house in town. He’s an artist from New York City, he explains, and has been hired by the Works Progress Administration to paint a social-realist mural in the town’s post office. Unexpectedly, however, the post office (a “one-room shanty”) is much too small for a mural.
Annoyed that the government will be paying him $4 a day for no work, Grandma agrees to rent him a room for a month, plus use of the attic for his painting, for $2.50 a day, not including meals. Mary Alice is surprised since the best hotels in Chicago don’t charge that much, but the stranger, whose name is Arnold Green, has no choice. Grandma considers this a “fair” way to recoup some of her tax dollars, though Mary Alice doubts she even pays taxes.
With Arnold sleeping upstairs, Mary Alice is forced to give up her bedroom and sleep in a cot at the foot of Grandma’s bed. She rarely sees Arnold, who spends most of his waking hours painting in the attic or dining at the Coffee Pot Café. Grandma, however, notes that unmarried men are in short supply and that the local women will try to snap him up, particularly Maxine Patch, the postmistress.
Mary Alice, on the other hand, has her “cap set” for Royce McNabb, the handsome new boy at school, whose rumored prowess at math could also help her with her grades. She makes plans to invite Royce over for a study session but is worried that her unruly grandmother might scare him away. When she asks Grandma to give them some privacy, she treats Mary Alice’s concerns with coy “astonishment.”
Mary Alice conquers her shyness and hands Royce an invitation to study at her house the next Sunday, when most townspeople (including Grandma) will be napping. When Royce arrives that day, he is friendly but soon hears Grandma’s loud snoring from the next room and seems “wary” when Mary Alice tells him who it is. Just as they both start to relax, however, there is a “bloodcurdling scream” from directly over their heads.
Another scream joins the first, along with crashing sounds, and then Grandma, awakened by the noise, bursts into the living room in her bathrobe, holding her shotgun. Maxine runs down from the attic, completely naked, a huge snake draped over her body. Grandma flings the front door open.
As Maxine lunges outside, Grandma says, “That’s too good a show to keep to ourselves” (107), and follows her out, firing both barrels of her shotgun into the air. Half the town, roused from their naps, sees Maxine sprint all the way back to the post office, stark naked. After recovering from her “mirth,” Grandma tells Mary Alice that the snake has been a welcome resident of her attic for years, keeping down the bird population. To Mary Alice’s dismay, Royce leaves, mumbling that the afternoon was “interesting.”
Arnold emerges sheepishly from the attic, still holding a paintbrush. He had been painting Maxine in the nude when the snake dropped down on her from the rafters. After that, Arnold nails shut the attic door and paints only in his bedroom.
Mary Alice, mortified by the scandal, is relieved when Royce catches her eye in class and winks. Arnold, now regarded as a “dangerous man,” becomes interesting to the single women in town, including Miss Butler, Mary Alice’s teacher. When Grandma hosts them both for dinner, they quickly bond over their shared interests (art and Shakespeare). As for Mary Alice and Royce, their nascent romance stalls out.
Chapter 7 Summary: “Gone With the Wind”
Deep into spring, the countryside explodes with lush greenery and lilac, making Mary Alice miss the concrete sidewalks of Chicago even less. She realizes that she now knows this little town and its people in a way that she’ll never know Chicago. Soon, school will be out for the summer, and only four students are set to graduate: three girls and Royce McNabb. Student committees are already planning the all-school party that will end the term.
One gloriously warm day, Mary Alice is sitting in class when the sky turns a strange shade of yellow. The tornado siren on the water tower wails. Miss Butler, now wearing an engagement ring from Arnold Green, herds the students into the school basement, but Mary Alice rushes home, worried about Grandma. As the sky grows dark, she sees Grandma inching her way toward the house through the wind, carrying something in her apron.
Shocked to see her, Grandma leads her into the house and down the cellar steps, to the southwest corner—the safest spot to avoid debris since tornados usually come from that direction. Grandma, she sees, has rescued Bootsie and April from the cobhouse, carrying them in her apron. She claims that she was in the cobhouse by coincidence when the siren went off, but Mary Alice doubts this.
Mary Alice and Grandma huddle in the cellar as the tornado goes through. After a final roar, like a “Wabash locomotive,” all grows quiet, and eventually, the siren sounds the all-clear. Venturing out, they see fallen branches, chimney bricks, water pipes, and other wreckage littering the ground as far as the eye can see. Old Man Nyquist’s house has gaping holes, and Grandma and Mary Alice find him trapped upstairs, pinned to the floor by a ton of ceiling plaster but still breathing. After they free him, he calls Grandma a “busybody buzzard,” and the two exchange insults. As they leave, Grandma tells Mary Alice that Nyquist has such a mean reputation that no one else in town would’ve checked up on him: If not for them, he’d have been buried under that plaster forever.
Next, they pick their way through the rubble to Effie Wilcox’s house. Most of the front has been torn away, but there’s no sign of her inside. Grandma notes grimly that her house has no cellar to hide in. Suddenly, Effie enters the house by the front door, safe and sound. When they ask her where she was, she explains that the tornado blew her privy away, so she went to use Grandma’s. On the walk home, Grandma denies giving “two hoots” about Effie, but her granddaughter doubts her words, having gained a deep knowledge of her and the way she hides her affections.
With the start of summer, Mary Alice notices a change in Grandma. Refusing to be helped, she gives the house and the cobhouse a thorough cleaning and fixes up the bedroom that was recently vacated by Arnold, who is back in New York awaiting his fiancé, Miss Butler. At graduation, Royce serves as valedictorian and wins a scholarship to the University of Illinois.
There are not enough boys for a prom, so the all-school party is scaled down to a wienie roast and hayride. The latter proves a “disaster” for the snobbish Carleen Lovejoy since Mary Alice and Royce find themselves sitting together. Royce, fascinated by Mary Alice and her grandmother, asks if he can write to her from college.
When Mary Alice gets home, she tells Grandma that she would like to keep living with her instead of going back to Chicago. Her father is working again, and her family expects her back, but she feels that her grandmother needs her more. Grandma says that there’s no room for her, as she’s decided to turn her home into a boarding house to bring in much-needed money.
Now, Mary Alice sees why Grandma has been keeping so busy: to prove that she doesn’t need anyone’s help. Mary Alice asks if she was too much “trouble,” and Grandma softens, saying that her mother wouldn’t like it if she “kept” her. Giving her Bootsie’s kitten, Grandma says that Mary Alice can visit anytime she likes.
Chapter 8 Summary: “Ever After”
Mary Alice gets married in Grandma’s house in 1945, the last year of World War II, when she is 23. The war has “scattered” many of her loved ones: Her brother, Joey, is flying B-17 missions over Germany; her parents are in Seattle, where her father works for Boeing; and Mary Alice’s “soldier” (her fiancé) has rushed home to marry her on a three-day pass.
It would have been easier, she admits, to be wed in Chicago, where she now has her own apartment and a job as a cub reporter at the Tribune. However, she wanted to be married in this house, with Grandma giving her away. Grandma bakes the wedding cake herself and makes the bridal bouquet from wildflowers from her yard. Mary Alice marries Royce McNabb and lives “happily ever after” (130).
Chapters 6-8 Analysis
In these chapters, although Mary Alice has begun to find her place in town, the narrative shows that she still has moments of homesickness, as with her 16th birthday. Her parents’ gift of $1 adds to that and also brings the theme of The Effect of Societal Upheaval on Families to the fore again. Bootsie, whom she hardly sees anymore, turns up in her bedroom with a newborn kitten but soon takes it away again, intensifying Mary Alice’s loneliness. Meanwhile, the eerie thumps in the attic continue to unnerve her, emphasizing how the environment still feels foreign to her.
The town’s late-spring lushness, with its flowers and heady scents, offers some consolation for Mary Alice’s loneliness, making her miss Chicago considerably less. However, the warm spring weather also heralds incoming storms, and one afternoon, a big tornado deals a “glancing blow” to the town. Mary Alice shows her love and concern for Grandma by running home to her at great risk; in turn, Grandma has risked her own life to save Mary Alice’s cat and kitten, emphasizing The Power of Intergenerational Relationships. Afterward, Grandma continues to coach Mary Alice in the defense of underdogs, as the two of them rescue Old Man Nyquist from his collapsed roof and check up on the friendless Effie Wilcox. True to her nature, Grandma downplays her affection for these two misfits, even as her actions demonstrate her deep concern.
The narrative continues to develop the theme of The Challenges of Feeling Out of Place with the introduction of Paris-educated painter Arnold Green, who has come all the way from New York to decorate a building that does not exist. Always a soft touch for misfits, Grandma warms even more to his generous stipend, pocketing over half of it for rent, while cautioning him about the town’s “man-hungry” women.
The narrative takes a comic turn in these chapters as chaos ensues at Grandma’s house. Mary Alice makes the bold move of inviting Royce McNabb to her house on a Sunday, ostensibly to study math, and feels that she’s making progress when he does finally acknowledge that they may be birds of a feather: “We’re a couple of foreigners here” (105). It is just the sort of intimacy she has been hoping for, and the warm afternoon inches closer to romance and perhaps the end of her loneliness. Then, at the worst possible moment, a “bloodcurdling scream” shatters the delicate mood. Maxine Patch thunders down the stairs, clad only in a large rat snake, as all the chapter’s threads come together in a climax: the lonely artist, the “man-hungry” postmistress, Grandma’s shotgun, Mary Alice’s study date, and the thumps in the attic. Characteristically, Grandma takes the opportunity for mischief, rousing the neighbors with her gun to see the spectacle; however, also characteristically, she later tamps down any future scandal by pairing off Arnold with Mary Alice’s teacher, Miss Butler.
In these closing chapters, Mary Alice finally completes her character arc, and with this coming of age comes a fuller understanding of her grandmother and a true love for the community. With her year in the country almost over, Mary Alice feels a new kind of trepidation; she has grown so attached to her grandmother and to the town itself that it has become like home to her: “I knew this town as I’d never know Chicago” (116). Though her parents are expecting her back, she asks Grandma if she can stay. Grandma, however, who has “eyes in the back of her heart” (128), selflessly knows what is best for Mary Alice and her family. She knows that now that Mary Alice has grown and matured, it is time for her to go back to Chicago. Mary Alice shows that she now knows her grandmother well enough to see through her mask of stoic nonchalance and understands that Grandma’s burst of activity in June and her stated aim to take on boarders were merely her way of easing Mary Alice away from the town. Mary Alice’s understanding of Grandma’s hidden motive contrasts with her ignorance in earlier chapters, highlighting how their relationship has grown and changed over the year. Mary Alice’s return seven years later shows her lasting connection to both the town and Grandma, who has become the unlikely anchor that holds her life together.
Unlock all 47 pages of this Study Guide
Get in-depth, chapter-by-chapter summaries and analysis from our literary experts.
- Grasp challenging concepts with clear, comprehensive explanations
- Revisit key plot points and ideas without rereading the book
- Share impressive insights in classes and book clubs