Foreshadowed Singing

"Archie McLaverty had a singing voice that once heard was never forgotten. It was a straight, hard voice, the words falling out halfway between a shout and a song. Sad and flat and without ornamentation, it expressed things felt but unsayable" (49).

I found the way Archie sang while on his land to be particularly important in this story because his voice so closely echoes his life and land. The way that Proulx describes his singing as "straight," "hard," and "flat" are particular adjectives that reflect more on his land than possibly his singing. Proulx doesn't really describe the land other than the immediate surroundings of their cabin and the nearby mountain. Using these words to describe Archie's singing voice seems to create a deeper connection between the land and its owner. It even seems to foreshadow his life on his land as being "sad and flat." Sad because his wife and child die while on the land and flat because everything he dreams of doing with the land falls flat with his and his family's death.

Another interesting word choice here is how his voice expresses "things felt but unsayable." I really like this because when you apply it to the story, there are a number of things that go unsaid for a long time. When the story switches from Rose to Archie after she has buried her baby, we don't really know what has happened to her, possibly because it was unsayable until Tom discovered her body rapped and murdered by Indians. I found this scenario hard to believe. It seemed more likely that the injurious Tom noted where left over from child birth and she had simply bled out. Either way, Tom only mentions it once and after that he pushes it into the unsayable and remembers Archie and his wife in song.

I wonder if singing to the land in this story is the way the characters express the landscape?