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Your guide: Miss RabiaReads every story twice: once for fun, once for the paper.
It is 97 °F in the shade. An old man with a weak heart has seen eight doctors since January. One told him not to walk even the length of a city block. So what does he do? He walks five miles home across the mountain.
Now he wants to take his son Jess up the steepest path to the top of the mountain, to show him something. Jess, the narrator, expects a new plant or a rare tree. What he finds is a small garden, and a story about his father's whole life.
On the way up, Jess sees several gentler paths circling the slope. “All paths go to the same place,” says his father. “I'll explain later.” Keep that promise in mind: it is the key to the story.
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It is 97 °F in the shade. An old man with a weak heart has seen eight doctors since January. One told him not to walk even the length of a city block. So what does he do? He walks five miles home across the mountain.
Now he wants to take his son Jess up the steepest path to the top of the mountain, to show him something. Jess, the narrator, expects a new plant or a rare tree. What he finds is a small garden, and a story about his father's whole life.
On the way up, Jess sees several gentler paths circling the slope. “All paths go to the same place,” says his father. “I'll explain later.” Keep that promise in mind: it is the key to the story.
Author: Jesse Stuart. The narrator is the author himself, Jess, and the old man is his father. Theme (from your book): the father's deep love of nature and the strength of the human spirit.
Q1. Why didn't the old man follow the advice of the doctors?
He could not sit still; he loved hard work and the land. A doctor had warned him forty years earlier, yet he had lived to raise five children.
Q2. Why did the old man take the steep path?
Climbing the steep path showed him that he was getting better. When he was weak last spring, he had made a longer, easier path.
Q3. Why had the old man planted his secret garden on the mountain top?
It was the only land left as God had made it. Farming it took him back to his youth, and its new ground gave vegetables a better flavour.
✗ Mixing up the story's numbers: “Twenty years ago a doctor told him to rest.”
✓ Forty years ago: the first warning. Twenty times: how often doctors warned him. Thirty years: to improve the alfalfa land. Seventy: his age now.
✗ Writing that he took the steep path because it was a shortcut.
✓ All paths go to the same place. The steep path was his test: if he could climb it, he was getting better.
✗ Exercise 5: “I carry a basket of dishes to Mom.”
✓ The story is told in the past, and this happened before the walk: “I had carried a basket of dishes to Mom.” Likewise: “I knew how hot it was.”
1. How many years ago did a doctor first advise the old man to take rest?
(d) Forty years ago a doctor told him the same thing, and he still raised a family of five children.
2. The clearing on the top was not more than:
(d) Jess describes a small clearing of not more than three-fourths of an acre, right on the mountain top.
3. Why did the father make steeper and steeper paths?
(b) In his words, making steeper paths “was one way of knowing I was getting better all the time”.
4. What type of special tree had the old man once found in his woods?
(d) Jess remembers the coffee tree his father found, the only one of its kind he knew of in their country.
5. In the story, “loam” means:
(a) Your book's reading notes define loam as a rich soil of clay, silt and sand. A young tree is a sapling; a steep headland is a bluff.