67 pages • 2-hour read
Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology
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Stories 18-21Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Story 18 Summary: “The Prepper” by Morgan Talty
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of sexual violence, rape, child abuse, child sexual abuse, child death, death by suicide, graphic violence, sexual content, illness or death, physical abuse, emotional abuse, and racism.
Nelly sits in prison and contemplates how unwell he used to be. His sickness did not begin until he was 23, when he lived at home with his mother and grandfather. Nelly was very close with his grandfather and watched as he died from mesothelioma. Nelly’s struggles began with him waking up every night with pain in his chest, unable to swallow. Doctors said it was psychosomatic, but medications for anxiety and depression did not help.
When Nelly’s estranged father died, he left Nelly $40,000 from a lawsuit against Social Security. With this money, Nelly bought a PlayStation 4 and a zombie video game. The game made Nelly believe that a zombie apocalypse was coming. Nelly’s grandfather, however, frequently told Nelly that it would not happen. Nelly began ignoring his grandfather as punishment for his lack of faith.
As a way to earn Nelly’s trust back, Nelly’s grandfather told him a story about zombies in their culture, though now Nelly realizes he merely framed it as a zombie tale to appease him. In the story, two men were hunting and made camp for the night. In the middle of the night, one man saw the Nἁka, which means the “former living,” coming toward them. He fled, leaving the other man, and returned later with others. They did not find the man he had left behind—only blood and organs.
After hearing this story, Nelly planned for the apocalypse alongside his grandfather. He bought and hid supplies and guns and created escape routes. One day, Nelly came home to find his mother rushing to get the doctor. She told Nelly to stay with his grandfather, and when his grandfather said, “Death is coming, and I will not return” (269), Nelly believed he was referring to the zombie apocalypse. He therefore put a blade into his grandfather’s skull and, when Nelly’s mother and the doctor arrived, shot the doctor in the leg to stop him from calling 911. Nelly told his mother to help the doctor and then to meet him on an escape route.
Nelly waited, and when the police arrived, Nelly believed that they were there to hurt his mother and steal their supplies. He opened fire, killing nine people. Soon after, a tactical team arrived, and Nelly was wounded in the shootout. Nelly believes that he was sicker back then than he is now, but he also thinks that the world is sick.
Story 19 Summary: “Uncle Robert Rides the Lightning” by Kate Hart
Robert, a young Chickasaw man, touches a live wire at a construction site. The shock sends him flying back and melts the metal in his steel-toed boots.
Robert’s best friend is his nephew, Gregory, who is actually a year older than Robert and a kind man, always eager to help others. When the boys gave up on high school, they moved to Dallas for work. A year after Robert’s accident, they go to a party to celebrate Robert’s 21st birthday weekend. They get separated, and a few days later, Robert shows up dead in Grapevine Lake. It is possible that Robert fell in, but he is found without his boots, which he never takes off. The authorities do not want to investigate his death and close the case.
After Robert’s death, Gregory struggles. He moves around a lot and tells no one about his marriage or divorce. He dies in 1993, a decade after Robert.
Every night now, Robert crosses the Red River and brings thunder to Texas. He is different in the afterlife, bigger and more assured. He searches bar after bar, playing rock and impressing women, hoping to find the man who took his boots (i.e., who killed him). He wants to beat and kill this man. Gregory, meanwhile, follows Robert from bar to bar but is always too late to catch up with him. Gregory is patient, though, and as he waits to find Robert, he helps other lost souls find their way home.
Story 20 Summary: “Sundays” by David Heska Wanbli Weiden
Thomas Bear Nose wakes up from a nightmare in which he is again a nine-year-old student at the Holy Reward Mission residential school. A priest rapes him as he begs, “Please, it’s not my day! It’s not Sunday!” (283). Though Thomas has managed this trauma for decades, the death of his wife, Connie, has now stirred it back up.
Thomas enjoyed being at the school at first, but when Father Raubvogel, or Father R, made him stay after Sunday services, life changed for Thomas. The abuse stopped when Father R moved on to a younger boy. Thomas regrets never reporting Father R, especially because the other boy eventually hanged himself.
Wanting justice, Thomas calls his friend Harold, a tribal police officer. Harold and Thomas meet, and Harold listens to Thomas’s story. He explains that Thomas has no legal recourse, as the statute of limitations is passed. Disappointed, Thomas asks if Harold can help him find Father R instead. Harold warns against revenge, but when Thomas returns home, he finds an email from Harold with Father R’s address in Sioux Falls.
Thomas drives to Sioux Falls, taking his gun. He finds the address, and when Thomas mentions that he attended Holy Reward Mission, Father R invites him in. Father R and Thomas chat, but the old man does not recognize Thomas. When the conversation turns to religion, Father R says all sins can be forgiven through confession. Thomas asks if Father R ever confessed to raping students, but Father R denies doing so. He confesses his crimes only after Thomas hits him in the head with his gun. Even then, Father R insists that he worked to deliver the gift of Christ and save the students from their “heathen” ways. Thomas directs Father R to pull down his pants. He grabs a broom and threatens to show Father R how it felt, pointing the handle at him.
As Father R begs, Thomas remembers Connie’s last word to him: “wokintunze,” a Lakota word meaning, “forgiveness in the presence of the Creator” (303). He cannot forgive Father R, but he decides to forgive himself. He drops the broom and leaves. As he drives away, he feels peace as the city recedes and nature takes over.
Story 21 Summary: “Eulogy For a Brother, Resurrected” by Carson Faust
Callum bleeds out after being shot by a lover’s wife as he pumps gas. The ambulance is slow to get there, and he dies on the ground, alone. Della, his sister, is devastated to receive his ashes. She and Callum were close, supporting each other growing up while their parents fought. Now, Della is determined to resurrect Callum.
After Callum’s death, Della stops eating and loses her job. Kemly, her and Callum’s half-brother, looks after her and mourns with her. Della wants to bring Callum back and suggests they go see their aunt, Ina, a medicine woman largely shunned in their family whom Callum always went out of his way to interact with. However, Auntie Ina resists the idea of resurrecting Callum. Nevertheless, when Kemly tries to abandon their mission, Della reminds him that Callum deserves to be alive. She says they owe him because they both missed his calls as he bled out.
It takes two weeks to convince Auntie Ina to help. Ina misses Callum, as he was the person she hoped to pass her knowledge to. However, she warns Della that Della will pay the price for his resurrection. Following Auntie Ina’s instructions, Della begins learning the uses of roots and the proper words to remake Callum. She and Kemly haul mud from the river and mix it with Callum’s ashes into the shape of a new body.
When the mud body is ready, Auntie Ina shapes a mouth into its face. She combines the remainder of Callum’s ashes with water in a mug, and Della drinks it. Della feels sick and begins throwing up blood into mud-Callum’s mouth. Soon, Della hears a baby screaming and realizes it is Callum being reborn. She feels him as well as what it was like for him to die. Callum stands, looking as he always did. He and Della are connected, sharing their blood and breath. Auntie Ina gives them a garden. They tend to their plants, the roots of which will allow the siblings to absorb their loved ones when they die.
Stories 18-21 Analysis
“Uncle Robert Rides the Lightning” offers a complex view of the relationship between life and death through its two main characters. In depicting Robert and Gregory’s afterlives, the story considers The Intersection of Tradition and Modernity from another angle by combining traditional views of the afterlife with modern settings: “The White Dog’s Road is made of stars, and at its end are the ancestors. To join them, you must cross a slippery log, or else languish in the west as a ghost” (280). In Chickasaw folklore, the White Dog’s Road, the Milky Way, is the way to the afterlife for tribal members. Gregory is meant to take it but stays behind, searching for the spirit of Robert as Robert scours bars for his murderers. Robert’s adventures through the afterlife too are filled with modern items and settings: “Robert crosses the Red River on a Harley every night. He brings the thunder of Oklahoma across the Texas line, roaring into roadhouses and whooping up a storm” (279). The afterlife they inhabit demonstrates how modernity and tradition can coexist, yet it also suggests the gap between the two: Because of the violence they have experienced (an analog for colonialism), Robert and Gregory cannot travel to their ancestral afterlife, at least for the time being.
The bond between the living and the dead—and, relatedly, the connection between present and past—is also central to “Eulogy For a Brother, Resurrected.” Auntie Ina possesses knowledge about Edisto medicine that her family shuns her for in their aspirations toward Western modernity. However, when Della decides to resurrect her brother, bringing a bit of the past back to life, the significance of Auntie Ina’s Resistance Through the Preservation of Cultural Identity becomes clear. Della is disconnected from her ancestral language and medicine, but Auntie Ina’s tutelage makes the impossible happen: “It is Auntie Ina who guides us. We borrow her knowledge. Her knowing is what makes the difference between Callum being alive and staying dead. So, handful by handful, we gather the earth that would become Callum’s flesh” (308). To resurrect Callum, Della begins to learn new words and practices, connecting to a more traditional world and ultimately achieving what would be impossible in modern society. Moreover, Ina’s goal in helping Della is to ensure that there is someone she can pass her knowledge to, underscoring that the resurrection itself is an act of resistance and cultural preservation.
In “Sundays,” Thomas begins to understand the nature of Intergenerational Trauma as the Legacy of Colonization through his experiences at a residential school. The story associates the abuse and trauma inflicted upon students with the repeated messages about how Thomas and other Indigenous children were lesser and needed to be saved from their “savagery”; this ideology not only facilitates abuse but is itself abusive. Throughout his life, Thomas has tried to move past this experience, but after the death of his wife, he finally understands that the past is not dead and follows people through time: “Somebody once told me that the past is never over […] But now I understood—no matter how hard we try to create our own reality, we’re bound by the web of our ancestors, our family, ourselves. The decisions we make and the choices of others” (291).
Thomas’s realization is not simply that the trauma of Father R’s abuse still impacts him but rather that his time at the residential school was the culmination of hundreds of years of colonization: The genocide of first contact, the forced relocations, and the subsequent impoverished conditions in Indigenous communities create a situation in which Thomas’s mother sends him and his siblings to a residential school. Though grim, this recognition is key to healing, as it bolsters his ability to see through Father R’s assertion that abusing the children was a way of “saving” them.
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