ENCW 101 Spring 2019

“Everything in This Country Must” is a coming of age story, about a fifteen year old girl. In the story this young lady and her father tried to save their beloved draft horse from drowning. In the heat of their trial, three men from the army showed up on the scene to offer help. That is when her father exclaimed, “drop it, please, Katie, drop it, let her drown!” Using the POV of first person reflective, the author invokes the concept of a fifteen year old girl not understanding, then coming to understand, why her father would rather let their beloved horse drown than accepting help from willing, able young army men. At the end of the story the girl realized her father had extreme hatred for soldiers because they had killed his wife and son. Her father’s hatred ran so deep that he would not want to keep something that he loved dearly purely for the fact that soldiers preserved it for him. The last sentence in the story read, “What a small sky for so much rain.” It pointed to the fact that just one life can have so many complexities.