How we cite our quotes: (Section.Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #4
I got to thinking. What if some gravediggers dug up Wristwatch's casket in two hundred years and that watch was still going? I thought what question they would ask and it was this: Whose hand wound it? (13.1.63)
In this snippet, Lipsha is thinking about a Lamartine cousin known as "Wristwatch," who had died wearing his father's old watch. Even though the thing had never worked, Wristwatch had worn it faithfully his whole life. Strangely, when he died, people noticed that the watch had suddenly started keeping perfect time. When they buried him with it, it was still ticking. As you can see from this and other moments (for example, all the talk of "love medicine"), Lipsha is totally willing to admit the supernatural into his everyday life and give it a role in how he thinks about people.
Quote #5
Nobody knows this. When I was seven, I found the body of a dead man in the woods. I used to go out there and sweep my secret playhouse, clean my broken pots with leaves, tend to my garden of rocks and feathers. (15.1.15)
When Lulu was younger, she apparently found a corpse near her playhouse. She didn't tell anyone about it, as she basically says here, but she was totally fascinated by him and even poked around on his body a little bit to check things out.
Quote #6
He had been staring into it. I mean the dark bowl of his little brown cap. And now he stared into an endless ceiling of sky and leaves. I knew how wrong it was. My body slacked before my mind made up the right words to describe him. Death was something I had never come upon until then, but let me tell you, I knew it when I saw it. Death was him. (15.1.17)
Even though Lulu's childhood memories don't really advance the plot too much, they do highlight how big a theme death is in the novel. The young Lulu had never confronted death, and here she was with a corpse right in front of her playhouse. It sounds like it was a bit of a shock, prompting Lulu to be pretty reflective about death and its meaning.