51 pages • 1 hour read
Stacey LeeUnder a Painted Sky
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2015A 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 32-37Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 32 Summary
Sammy realizes that the man speaking is Cay and finishes the Biblical proverb for him. He has tangerines that he got from one of his paramours. Not only are tangerines rare on the trail, but they also symbolize good luck in Chinese culture. Sammy and Cay discuss West who has been emotional and unpredictable for days, even crying when he hears Sammy playing music. Andy decides that she will help Sammy find Mr. Trask. The group encounters a man dying of cholera on the trail.
Chapter 33 Summary
The terrain changes as they leave the plains for the foothills. Cay shows the group the “WANTED” bulletin for the Broken Hand Gang. On the same poster is the announcement of a bounty for Samantha Young, wanted for first degree murder and theft of an enslaved female. Fortunately, the picture is of a random Chinese woman who is considerably older than the teenage Sammy. Sammy and Andy decide to run off, but their plans are thwarted when Cay wakes up with diarrhea, a sign that he is now infected with the deadly cholera.
Chapter 34 Summary
Peety, Andy, and Cay are sick with cholera and Sammy does her best to care for them. However, they are gravely ill, and Andy thinks that she is dying. She is relieved, though, to be dying not enslaved but free. West leaves for a settlement to get medical supplies, and while he is gone, members of the Broken Hand Gang arrive. Sammy recognizes them from the “WANTED” bulletin.
Chapter 35 Summary
The fugitives are a man and a young boy with a bullet wound in his leg. The man talks to the young boy about the Bible. The bullet needs to be removed, and Sammy offers to do it as her fingers are smaller and more dexterous than the man’s fingers. West returns and he and the man (whose name is Badge) have a near-deadly standoff. However, with Sammy’s prodding, Badge resorts to the Old Testament’s “eye for eye” approach and decides to leave with his wounded friend rather than killing West (Leviticus 24: 19-21).
Chapter 36 Summary
West wants to connect with Sammy, but now she is the one who resists, fearing she “is in danger of falling for him again” (318). They describe the place in which they are camping as Eden. Cay regains consciousness and calls Sammy a “filly” which suggests to her that he thinks she is a gay boy. Finally, Andy and Peety begin to recover from their illness. West continues to draw closer to Sammy, but she doesn’t know if he is gay or knows that she is female. Andy tells Sammy that the scars on her arm were the result of the dead landlord branding her with his gambling dice. Andy sneaks off to meet her brother at Harp Falls after learning about the visit from the Broken Hand Gang.
Chapter 37 Summary
Sammy decides to follow Andy, knowing that she has gone to Harp Falls to find her brother. Sammy worries that Andy will encounter Badge, still not realizing that Isaac and Badge are one and the same. Sammy realizes that Yorkshire, the man who branded Andy and who tried to rape Sammy, also set the fire that killed her Father. Sammy leaves a thank you note for the cowboys and heads off for the falls.
Chapters 32-37 Analysis
Through the romantic subplot between West and Sammy, Lee explores the relationship between sexuality and Negotiating Gender Roles in the 19th-Century American West. In the aftermath of West having intimate relations with another woman, both Sammy and West remain unsettled. Andy tries to reassure Sammy that what West did was without meaning, and only a way for him to “test his rooster in the ring” (264), suggesting that the characters draw a connection between maleness (exemplified by the male term “rooster”) and heterosexuality in this context. Andy explains that he was confused by his attraction to Sammy and needed to reassure himself of his apparent manhood. While Andy and Sammy perform masculinity throughout the novel through their disguises, Lee hence also explores the performative negotiations of gender through West, too. While Andy seems to think it is homoeroticism that is troubling West, Sammy is still not sure if it is that or her Chinese ethnicity, emphasizing the intersections between race, gender, and sexuality in the novel.
The dangers of cholera, one of the most common killers of travelers at this time, come to fruition after much foreshadowing throughout the novel; earlier, Sammy remembers her father’s warning about the importance of boiling drinking water, and in Chapter 32, they come across a man dying of cholera. Even though their friends are gravely ill and in danger of dying, for Sammy and West, their enclave reminds them of Eden, the garden in the Bible that is set apart from human time and space. Like Adam and Eve, they feel uninhibited together, if even for a short time. However, Adam and Eve are canonically interrupted by a snake, so this moment in paradise cannot last. The much-foreshadowed meeting with the Broken Hand Gang is due. Even though Sammy had all the pieces of information, she was not able to put the pieces together to realize that Badge is actually Isaac. The romantic subplot is also diverted when the time comes for Sammy to choose between remaining with West or following her friend, and she leaves the cowboy without hesitation.
Lee further characterizes Sammy as innocent in this section despite the experience of each of the dramatic episodes in the novel. As well as her inability to realize that Badge is Isaac, Sammy also fails to realize West’s feelings. Lee hints to the reader that the cowboys realize that Sammy and Andy are not adolescent boys—Cay even goes as far as to call Sammy a filly, or a young female horse—but she does not realize. This characterization evokes pathos by emphasizing the contrast between Sammy’s lack of worldly experience and the vast journey that she is undertaking.
