“As the uncle slapped the reins and the horse lurched forward, the boy tried to jump into the wagon, but his mother pried his hands off the boards, crying, Gego, gego, and he fell down hard.”
“She became a gray sky, stared monotonously at the walls, sometimes wept into her hands for hours at a time.”
“She was moody and sullen one moment, her lower lip jutting and her eyes flashing, filled with storms. The next, she would shake her hair over her face and blow it straight out in front of her to make her children scream with laughter.”
Capricious adjective \kə-ˈpri-shəs, –ˈprē-\
a: changing often and quickly; especially : often changing suddenly in mood or behavior
We survived off him as if he were a capricious and dangerous line of work. I suppose we stopped thinking of him as a human being, certainly as a father.
The Shawl paragraph 11
He was an unpredictable dangerous kind of person who was best avoided.
barge (v) : to move or push in a fast, awkward and often rude way
Definition from Merriam-Webster (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/barge)
From The Shawl by Louise Erdrich (Paragraph 9)
The kind where, when he came home, we’d jump out the window and hide in the woods while he barged around, shouting for us.
After the mother died, the father became alcoholic and came home drunk. And every time he came home drunk, the kids jumped out the window to hide in the woods, avoiding their father, and the father moved around and looked for the kids.
noun
tubercular of, relating to, or affected with tuberculosis
Tuberculosis -a highly variable communicable disease of humans and some other vertebrates that is caused by the tubercle bacillus and rarely in the United States by a related mycobacterium, that affects especially the lungs but may spread to other areas, and that is characterized by fever, cough, difficulty in breathing, formation of tubercles, caseation, pleural effusions, and fibrosis
The Shawl by Louise Erdrich
“His father’s chest was broad and, although he already spat the tubercular blood that would write the end of his story, he was still a strong man. It would take him many years to die. In those years, the father would tell the boy, who had forgotten this part entirely, that at first when he talked about the shadows the father thought he’d been visited by manidoog”
The narrator explain that Jackson father had a disease Called Tuberculosis and before he passed away he use to spit blood which was a part of the disease.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/
adjective
monotonously—used to describe something that is boring because it is always the same.
The Shawl by Louise Erdrich
“‘She became a gray sky stared monotonously at the wall, sometimes wept into her hands for hours at s time”
The narrator shows how the mother became depressed that she was in love with a man who lives else where. she was sad and just stared into the wall that was the same.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/
Exploit verb \ik-ˈsploit, ˈek-ˌ\
a: to make productive use of : utilize <exploiting your talents> <exploit your opponent’s weakness>
b: to make use of meanly or unfairly for one’s own advantage <exploiting migrant farm workers>
“He became, for us, a thing to be avoided, outsmarted, and exploited.”
The Shawl paragraph 11
Initially I thought of exploited as a noun and it didn’t make much sense since the other two words were verbs. The father was a thing for that was to be avoided, outsmarted and utilized.
Quizzical – adjective – mildly teasing or mocking via merriam-webster
The Shawl by Louise Erdrich
“He looked at me, steady and quizzical, as though he had never had a drink in his life, and I wiped his face again with that frayed piece of blanket.” – Paragraph 16, sentence 5
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