Holes Plot Summary

Holes

By Louis Sachar

Summary

Stanley Yelnats IV is an out-of-luck teen who suffers constant misfortune as a result of a curse placed on his no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing, great-great grandfather. When sneakers suddenly fall from the sky and hit Stanley, he finds himself in a whole new type of bad luck as the sneakers were a special donation to a charity from a popular athlete, and the police decide Stanley stole them. With the choice between jail or a juvenile correction camp, Stanley chooses the latter, and thus arrives at Camp Green Lake. There, Stanley and the other boys are forced to dig holes five feet deep, and five feet wide in the now dry bed of the camp's eponymous lake every day. Stanley eventually realizes that they are digging these holes because the Camp Warden is searching for something likely hidden in the lake bed. As Stanley continues to dig holes, he befriends the other boys at the camp, and learns to adapt to this new misfortune.

In a separate plot, Stanley's great-great-grandfather, Elya Yelnats, (as a young man) receives a pig from the Gypsy Madame Zeroni to use as trade for the hand in marriage of a local maiden, Myra Menke. Acting on Madame Zeroni's instructions, Elya carries the pig each day to a certain spring and has it drink the spring's water while he sings it a particular song. When the pig is fully grown, he offers it to Myra's father, who is unable to decide whether Elya's pig or that of his rival Igor Barkov is the better. When Myra is unable to choose either of her suitors as a husband, Elya becomes disgusted and leaves for America. As he is leaving, he realizes that he has failed his promise to Madame Zeroni, who had wished that Elya would carry her to the spring and sing to her.

After his arrival in America, he marries a local named Sarah Miller, to whom he teaches the song. The song thereafter becomes an heirloom of their family. However, every generation including Elya himself suffer diverse misfortunes, and it is assumed that Elya's broken promise has become a curse upon them.

One hundred and ten years before Stanley arrives at Camp Green Lake, the town of Green Lake is a wonderful place where peach trees bloom throughout the spring. In this Texas town, the beautiful young schoolteacher, Katherine Barlow, falls in love with Sam, the onion seller. Sam sells onions to eat and to use for medicinal purposes. While Katherine and Sam are alive, racism is institutionalized in the United States and it is against the law for a black man to kiss a white woman. Because Sam is black and Katherine is white, the people in the town become irate when they find that Katherine and Sam have kissed. Charles, or Trout, Walker, the richest man in town has always wanted to marry Katherine, and when he finds out that she is in love with Sam, he gathers the townspeople to burn the schoolhouse and attack Sam. Katherine seeks help from the local sheriff but instead finds that the sheriff, who makes lewd advances towards her, also wants to kill Sam. Katherine and Sam attempt to escape but their boat is destroyed while only half way across the lake and Sam is killed. After the day that Sam is killed, rain stops falling on Green Lake and the lake dries up.

Katherine is driven mad by her grief and becomes an outlaw known as Kissin' Kate Barlow. Her name refers to the fact that she kisses the men she kills, leaving a lipstick imprint of her lips on their faces. In her twenty years of robbing people in the west, she happens to rob Stanley's great-grandfather while he is on his way from New York to California. Since Green Lake dried up, the citizens of the town all moved away, and Kate buries her loot somewhere around the lake, only to be later captured by Charles Walker and his wife Linda (a former student of Katherine's). They try to torture her into revealing its location, but Kate has the final laugh as she is bitten by a poisonous yellow lizard, and dies with the loot's location secret.

Since her death, the Green Lake has been virtually deserted, until later, when Camp Green Lake is founded for juvenile delinquents. As expected, Stanley has a hard time digging holes, due to the incredible heat and the tough, dry ground. The other boys at the camp have been toughened by the labor, and Stanley becomes friends with a boy nicknamed Zero. At one point, Stanley digs up half of a lipstick tube that has the initials K.B. on it. The Warden is interested in anything the boys find, and awards a day off for the person who finds something. One of the boys, X-Ray, asks Stanley to give him the tube, because he desperately needs a day to relax. As the boy takes the credit for the find, far away from where it was originally found, Stanley wonders if the Kate Barlow used to live in the area. Stanley finds out that Zero can't read or write and that his real name is Hector Zeroni. Zero starts digging a part of Stanley's hole every day so that Stanley can teach him how to read. But before Stanley finishes, the Warden finds out about the deal and, along with the other counselors, insults him and calls him stupid because he can't spell a word correctly.

Zero runs away from camp and Stanley, in an effort to save him, follows after a few days later. He finds Zero under Sam's old boat with "Mary Lou" painted on it. Zero and Stanley drink some liquid in bottles under the boat that Zero calls sploosh. Zero later vomits, presumably because of bacteria in the sploosh. The two help each other to reach the top of a big mountain, which turns out to be Sam's old onion field. Because Zero is very weak, Stanley carries him up this mountain and finds a spring. While Zero drinks, Stanley sings the family's song to keep his spirits up. They survive on onions for more than a week and then return to camp, planning to search for Kate Barlow's treasure, in the hole where Stanley found the lipstick tube.

Stanley and Zero find an old suitcase, which they believe is loaded with Kate's loot. The Warden finds them, and attempts to take the suitcase from them. The warden explains that she's the descendant of Trout and Linda, and that her family has been vainly digging in search of the treasure for years. The camp isn't truly to help juvenile delinquents, but rather to use forced labor to search for the loot. Stanley's lawyer, Ms. Morengo, luckily happens to arrive to pick up Stanley, as he has been proven innocent back in civilization. As the warden begins to argue that the suitcase is hers, Zero points out the fact that the suitcase has "Stanley Yelnats" printed on it. It turns out, Kissin' Kate used Stanley's grandfather's case to store the loot. As the lawyer states that the case is rightly Stanley's, the warden watches, dumbfounded, as they leave the camp, and expose the truth to its real intent. Stanley discovers that the suitcase contains many valuable items, and the once poor Yelnats are suddenly rich.

At the end of the book, Stanley's newfound luck is explained, as Zero is really Madame Zeroni's great, great, great grandson, and because Stanley carried him up the mountain, and fed him the spring water, the curse was broken. Zero is reunited with his mother, from whom he was separated many years ago, and Stanley's father finally succeeds in inventing something: a cure for foot odour. While fate has so often seemed against Stanley, in the end it serves to help him, his family, his new friends of Camp Green Lake, and Zero.