Walt

Walt is presented as one of the children in Ish’s community, distinguished by physical participation and, above all, an exceptional gift for carving. His scenes set practical, improvisational skill beside the limits of formal teaching: he can barely read, yet shapes wood with a confidence and inventiveness that win the other children’s admiration.

Play and Practical Errands

During a game of bull in a former park, Walt backs up a fifteen-year-old boy, taking the position the children call “playing halfback.” The phrase is a piece of jargon carried over from the Old Times, even as the game itself unfolds in a landscape where cattle and elk have eaten down the tall grass. Walt’s part is brief but places him among the older children taking part in the community’s outdoor life.

In a classroom lesson prompted by the children’s curiosity about native walnuts, Ish sends Walt outside to find stones for cracking the hard shells. Walt returns with two half bricks. The episode records a practical difference in vocabulary: bricks and stones are not distinguished in his usage. It does not prevent him from carrying out the errand, but it shows how the children’s everyday terms reflect a world in which familiar Old Times materials and categories are no longer necessarily kept separate.

Carving and Literacy

Walt’s strongest distinction is his woodcarving. The children lose interest when Ish introduces geometric designs made with a steel square: straight lines are too easy, circles feel mechanical, and the finished patterns seem like poor imitations of machine work. They return to freehand carving, which is more enjoyable and produces work that looks better to them.

Walt is the best carver among them, although he cannot read except in a halting stammer. On a smooth plank, he carves a frieze of cattle without measuring or laying out the composition in advance. When three cows do not fill the available space, he adds a calf at the end; the completed row looks as if it had been planned from the beginning. He works in low relief, three-quarter relief, and, at times, full round carving. The children admire both the work and Walt himself.

Place in Ish’s Teaching

Walt’s success exposes the limits of Ish’s attempt to use a hobby to awaken intellectual interest. The structured exercises fail to hold the children, while Walt’s freehand work thrives through an intuitive response to the material and the space available. His skill is distinct from the abstract interest in line and angle that Ish finds in Joey: Walt’s strength lies in making a composition work as he carves it, adjusting it rather than imposing a prior geometric plan.

The contrast does not make Walt’s achievement lesser; it shows that ability in the community takes forms that Ish’s lessons cannot neatly measure. His cattle frieze transforms an unplanned adjustment—the added calf—into an apparently deliberate design, while his barely fluent reading coexists with remarkable visual and manual command. In these glimpses, Walt represents a kind of knowledge preserved through practice and invention rather than literacy alone.