Song connects the living and the dead

Song connects the living with the dead by carrying memory across time, distance, and loss. It is at once communal music and a private means of recognizing what has not disappeared: Step-and-a-Half finds the dead close enough to be reached through a song, while Delphine hears a German chorus against the past that shadows its performance. In both scenes, music makes remembrance audible without making history harmless or settled.

Remembrance and the Ghost shirt

Step-and-a-Half’s understanding of song is inseparable from the fragment of a Ghost shirt she has kept since the Wounded Knee Massacre. The scrap, made of yellowed muslin with tattered fringe, carries a painted crow and a white moon. She touches it as she lies beneath a quilt, preserving a material link to the people and events of her past. The shirt is not merely a keepsake: it holds an understanding of the dead as near to the living.

The Ghost dancers, Step-and-a-Half believes, were neither foolish nor deluded in their trust in the shirts. Their knowledge, she thinks, is liable to be forgotten, except as something the wind still carries. The cloth gave its wearer a way to visit the dead and draw comfort from their singing. This belief makes song more than a recollection of people who are gone. It suggests a continuing connection, in which the dead remain reachable through the music that survives them.

That connection also includes the voices heard before the massacre. Step-and-a-Half remembers soldiers’ drinking songs in the night before the guns sounded, including “Aura Lee” and “Auld Lang Syne,” and recalls a mother singing to her baby. The voices belong to different people and circumstances, but memory gathers them into the same soundscape. Songs therefore preserve ordinary human presence alongside the violence that followed; remembrance does not reduce the past to a single kind of voice.

A town made of many songs

In Argus, song exceeds any one singer or tradition. Step-and-a-Half hears women keening and men exercising their voices, then a succession of music moving through the town. German songs, American patriotic music, voyageurs’ paddling songs, Cree lullabies, sweat-lodge summons, ghost-dance songs, counting rhymes, and hymns to the snow all enter the same imagined current. The range matters: this is not a single community speaking in one idiom, but many histories and forms of life sounded together.

The music seems to travel through the physical landscape. It crosses fields, meets telephone wires and trees, passes through Argus streets, and moves over rooftops and down chimneys. The scene gives sound a route through the town, as though songs can pass between people and places without belonging entirely to either. Step-and-a-Half’s conviction that songs travel the earth and that no note is lost turns this movement into a principle of continuity: music is received, altered, and passed on, rather than originating in isolation.

Her own sleep draws those traditions into a personal mixture of fragments: courting verse, hunters’ wisdom, itinerants’ sayings, and words associated with grass, cloud, or a pig’s knuckle. The collection is untidy but not empty. It suggests that memory is made from borrowed and inherited pieces, and that a song can carry traces of lives beyond the person who sings it. Step-and-a-Half hums as she sinks into sleep, joining her own voice to that continuing store.

The butchers sing in Germany

During the visit to Germany, Delphine encounters singing in a public ceremony where the past and present press against one another. She first hears the butchers’ chorus beneath the surrounding German speech, as a low murmur that grows difficult to ignore. The men leave their seats and arrange themselves on a podium. Their voices rise together into a powerful body of sound, and Delphine watches their mouths open and close in unison.

The performance is beautiful to the ear, yet Delphine cannot hear it as a simple celebration. She thinks of what has happened in Germany—the burning and marching, and the scale of events she cannot comprehend—and sees her mother’s indistinct photograph superimposed on the scene. Her private memory interrupts the public occasion. The songs do not erase the history surrounding them; instead, their loveliness sharpens the tension between a cheerful ceremony and the violence that Delphine associates with the place.

That tension becomes an image of song as a vehicle for what a community does not openly acknowledge. Delphine imagines smoke and ash rising from the singers’ mouths and their bodies as smoldering, even while they continue to sing. The others around her do not react to what she sees. When the singing ends, they applaud, and Delphine joins in, exhausted, treating the dark plumes as an ordinary part of the scene. Her vision turns the chorus into an emblem of history carried within ordinary public life: the song sounds lovely, but its imagined source is marked by what has burned.

Songs, illness, and what remains

The connection between song and the dead also informs Delphine’s later awareness of Fidelis’s illness. While the couple is still in Germany, she wakes to knocking and understands it as Eva asking for Fidelis. The sound recalls an earlier dream in Argus, when Delphine had recognized the same knocking as a sign that Eva was dying. The remembered pattern makes the present sound bear the weight of an earlier loss.

Delphine then recognizes that Fidelis is hiding his own illness. She holds him while he sleeps, attentive to his breathing and troubled heartbeat, and thinks of time as an army marching onto a stage and as a singing club whose music is smoke and ash. In this image, song is not comfort alone: it belongs to the movement of time toward death and to the history that continues to mark the living. Music gives Delphine a way to perceive the connection, even as it cannot stop what is coming.

Across these scenes, songs do not restore the dead or resolve the past. They keep the boundary between absence and presence permeable: an old melody can recall a mother and child, the voices of soldiers, or the dead of Wounded Knee; a chorus can bring the history of a place into a present-day ceremony. The novel’s recurring music is thus an inheritance shared by singers and listeners, carrying memory forward while leaving its grief audible.