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Summary
Chapters 18-20
Chapter 18
The village prepares for the day of the Gathering. Matt hasn’t returned yet, but Kira isn’t overly worried because her scrap of cloth communicates reassurance and comfort when she wonders about Matt’s wellbeing. Kira regularly sets out during the night to visit Jo, who no longer cries and is looking forward to getting to sit up front during the Gathering. Jamison comes to Kira’s room to inspect the fully restored robe and the two of them discuss the Ruin Song, which contains the names of lost places from the past that are no longer recognizable to the people of the village. Jamison tells Kira that after the Gathering, it will be time for her to begin filling in the rest of the robe with the future. Kira is alarmed that she must begin so soon.
Chapter 19
The day of the Gathering finally arrives, and Thomas and Kira watch from Thomas’s window as the villagers file into the Council Edifice. When Kira enters the great hall, she remembers when she came for the trial and reflects on all the ways her life has changed for the better. Kira, Thomas, and Jo sit in chairs facing the rest of the audience, and the chief guardian introduces them, respectively, as the designer, carver, and singer of the future. When the Singer enters, carrying the staff and wearing the robe, Thomas and Kira hear a metallic scraping sound they can’t identify. Before they can figure out what it is, the Singer begins the Ruin Song.
Chapter 20
As the Singer performs the Ruin Song, Kira remembers the scenes from the robe that she spent days working to repair and restore. She is anxious about the task that lies ahead, to embroider the future on the blank sections of robe. Then, she thinks about how she has been able to learn how to read a little from looking at Thomas’s notes about the flowers and dyes. Thomas whispers to Kira to look down one of the aisles, and Kira sees that Matt has snuck into the Gathering and is crawling toward the first row. He shows her something she can’t see, and Kira is flooded with relief that he is safe. The Gathering breaks for lunch and Kira and Thomas invite Jo to join them for food. Kira finds Matt and Branch waiting in Thomas’s room. Matt says he brought Kira two gifts but that the larger gift won’t arrive until later. He gives her the smaller gift, a square of blue fabric. While Kira marvels at the blue, Matt tells her about his long journey through the woods in the direction that Annabella had pointed. According to Matt, the people who have blue live in a nice, quiet village and many of them are disabled like Kira. When it’s time for the Gathering to resume, Kira, Thomas, and Jo return to their seats. Kira hears the metallic dragging and scraping again, and for just a moment, sees the awful cause of it.
Analysis
The Ruin Song offers insight into the negative mindset that characterizes the village, as well as Kira’s uniquely positive perspective that presents an opportunity for change. In Chapters 18 through 20, the Ruin Song takes center stage, both before and during the performance at the Gathering. First, Kira has a conversation with Jamison about the Song in which he quotes verbatim from two different sections of it, both of which recount times of destruction and loss. In contrast, when Kira watches the Song’s performance in Chapter 20, she focuses on its moments of calm, quiet, celebration, and plenty. In her descriptions of the Singer’s robe throughout the book, Kira makes it clear that the Ruin Song contains stories of destruction and rebirth, chaos and peace, so the passages that she and Jamison each choose to emphasize reflect how they view the Song differently. Importantly, though, Jamison is a guardian on the Council, which means his understanding of the Song has historically been more influential in the community than Kira’s. Kira’s interest in the story’s moments of growth and rebirth, as well as her pursuit of the tranquility given by the color blue, suggest that she may be instrumental in redirecting the village away from fear and toward hope.
Jamison’s eagerness for Kira to start threading the future sections of the Singer’s robe is emblematic of how thoroughly the Council of Guardians misunderstands creativity and art. Though Kira has been aware for some time that her ultimate task will be to weave images of the future into the Singer’s robe, she is surprised and overwhelmed when Jamison tells her she is to begin as soon as this year’s Gathering is over. Until now, she has assumed that she will only thread the future after she has gained more skill and knowledge with age and experience. Gathering Blue has already hinted that people who lack artistic gifts see creativity as something supernatural that can be conjured on demand. In Chapter 14, the weaver Marlena had spoken of Jo’s singing with a mixture of awe and fear, saying that she seemed to have knowledge of the future. Here, too, in Chapter 18, Jamison implies that Kira’s skill with threads is not just a creative gift but also a prophetic one. As the actual artist, Kira knows very well that she has no foreknowledge of a predetermined future, but she is beginning to understand that, thanks in part to the Council’s misunderstanding, she may have the power to influence it.
Matt’s evolving understanding of gifts, culminating in his unexpected gift of blue cloth in Chapter 20, shows that even social change on a small scale can make a huge difference for a community. One common refrain throughout Gathering Blue is that things are the way they are because they always have been, or because it is the way or the custom. Almost nobody questions the customs and ways themselves, but more importantly, nobody questions the assumption that changing the customs is impossible. The fact that Matt grew up in a different part of the village from Kira means that his understanding of the world is slightly different from hers. As a result, it is easier for Kira to see flaws in Matt’s worldview than in her own. When Matt says he doesn’t know what a gift is, Kira is shocked. But as she explains it to him, rather than resisting this new information, Matt allows it to alter the course of his life. His newfound knowledge takes him outside of the village and finally brings Kira the blue she has been seeking for so long. This gift has the potential to alter the village’s future because it may allow her to weave scenes of peace and calm into the future on the Singer’s robe. Just as Kira comes from a community without the word artist, Matt comes from a community without the word gift, but once he learns what a gift is, he gives her one of incomparable value.
