Prodigal Summer: A Novel

by Barbara Kingsolver

  "Well, honey, you didn't ask the whole world to quit smoking. And by the way, they didn't."

  "I know. It's the only reliable crop around here you can earn enough from to live off a five-acre bottom, in a county that's ninety-five percent too steep to plow. I know why every soul in this end of three states grows tobacco. Knowing full well the bottom's going to drop out any day now."

  "They're trapped."

  "They're trapped."

  Jewel paused between jars and pointed the ladle toward the back window, the one that faced up Bitter Hollow toward the mountain. "You've got timber."

  Lusa shook her head. "I couldn't log this hollow."

  "Well, but you could. That hollow goes up half a mile or more before you get to National Forest land. We used to think those woods went on forever."

  "I will not cut down those trees. I don't care if there's a hundred thousand dollars' worth of lumber on the back of this farm, I'm not selling it. It's what I love best about this place."

  "What, the trees?"

  "The trees, the moths. The foxes, all the wild things that live up there. It's Cole's childhood up there, too. Along with yours and your sisters'."

  "That's so. Cole loved it best of any of us."

  "Cole did? He always acts like--acted like--the woods and the briar patches of this world were enemy number one."

  "Well, farming. You know. You've got to do what it takes."

  "Yep. And around here that's tobacco, I guess, if I want to keep this farm. I just wish I could be the one person to think of a door out of that trap."

  Jewel smiled. "You and Cole. He used to say that."

  "What?"

  "That he'd be the first one in this county to make a killing off something besides tobacco."

  "When did he say that?"

  "Oh, he was sixteen, maybe. Future Farmers of America and high school running-back star, what a combination. Much too interested in his good looks to smoke a cigarette, mind you, or grow plain old ordinary tobacco. He was going to set the world on fire. He tried red bell peppers one year and cucumbers the next, potatoes the next."

  "No. He never told me that."

  "I'm telling you. Right out here in Daddy's bottom field. Every year, whatever it was, it failed, and he had to eat a little more of his pride. He grew up in those three years, from dreamer to farmer. Gave up his pipe dreams and started smoking."

  Lusa shook her head. "I can't picture that. I know Cole was energetic, but I can't picture that he was ever so--what? starry-eyed." She laughed. "Plus, I figured he was born smoking. Like a fish, he was hooked."

  "No, I remember being shocked to see him smoking with the men at Mommy's wake. So it was right around then, when Mommy died. The very next year, Daddy cleaned out the barn and signed the farm over to Cole, and then he died, too. Seemed like he could trust Cole to be a man finally. He'd be able to handle anything that came along, after the red bell peppers, the cucumbers, and the potatoes."

  Anything but a steering column through his rib cage, Lusa thought morbidly, recognizing how self-pity could push its nose into any conversation like a tiresome dog. It took so much energy to keep Cole outside her thoughts for a single minute. And yet people still said, "I didn't want to remind you...."

  "What could go wrong with potatoes?" Lusa forced herself to ask. "It seems like such a sure thing. Good yielder, easy to transport, and you could spread out the harvest."

  "It was the funniest thing. They said he could make a profit if he could get them down to the potato-chip factory in Knoxville. But then when he did, it didn't work out. They liked the Idaho potatoes better. The ones that grow around here have too much sugar in them. It makes them slice ragged and burn around the edges."

  "Too much sugar?"

  "That's what they said. This bottomland's too rich. I mean, they're good potatoes, just not good for the market."

  "Jewel, my life sounds like a country song: 'My roof's a-caving in, my land's too steep to plow, and my bottom's got too much sugar.'"

  "Your bottom!" Jewel startled Lusa by smacking her with a dish towel. "Let's get your bottom to cleaning up this mess. You are not going to starve, Loretta Lynn."

  Jewel piled things up to carry to the sink while Lusa plunged her hands into soapy water so hot it prickled her skin. The hurt felt like a punishment that would clean the ache out of her chest. The rain was picking up again, starting to hammer a quiet roar on the tin roof, playing Zayda Landowski's music. Yesterday was the anniversary of her wedding, which nobody had mentioned all day, but Zayda had regaled her all through the rainy night playing klezmer tunes on his clarinet--the Jewish wedding she never had. She and Cole had made a small ceremony of it in the Hunt Morgan garden in Lexington, outdoors, to sidestep the issue of religion. That had been fine with Cole. He wasn't churchy like his sisters.

  "Jewel, I want to tell you something. Just let me say this. I loved my husband."

  "Well, sure you did."

  In her mind's eye Lusa pictured the lower field, back when he'd first set out to make it his own: a moving sea of leaves turning lightly in the breeze, the bobbing red bells of ripening peppers, a young man wading through them the way he would walk into a lake. Cole at nineteen. A man she never met.

  "We never got a chance to hit our stride, maybe. You all still think I don't really know who he was, but I did, I do. We talked a lot; he told me things. Just a few days before he died, he told me something amazing."

  Jewel looked up. "What? Can I ask?"

  Lusa crossed her arms over her stomach, holding her breath, transported by the scent-memory of honeysuckle across a field. Like a moth, here I am, we're here. She glanced over at Jewel. "I'm sorry, it won't make any sense to you. It's nothing I can say in words."

  "Well," Jewel said, turning away. She was disappointed, Lusa could see. Now she thought Lusa was withholding something important, some piece of her brother that would help bring him back.

  "Never mind. I'm sorry, Jewel, but really it's nothing that matters now. Just that we were right for each other, for sure. Just like you and Shel were in the beginning. Even though everybody's poisoned it now by taking a bad end and working backward."

  Jewel passed the sponge from one hand to the other while she studied Lusa. "Nobody's saying you didn't love him."

  "Nobody thinks they're saying that." She could feel Jewel's scrutiny but couldn't look up. She turned back to the sink and leaned in to the sticky preserve pot and scrubbed it hard to keep herself from crying or yelling. Her whole body pumped with the effort.

  "My Lord, honey. What's this about?"

  "That thing about changing my name back, for instance. My husband's hardly cold in the grave, and already I've run to the courthouse to erase his family name from the deed to your family farm? That's for shit. What kind of meanspirited lie is that, and who made it up?"

  Jewel hesitated. "Lois saw your signature on something at the funeral home."

  Loud Lois, she thought uncharitably, picturing that long face permanently puckered with worry that someone else was getting her share. "I always had the same name, before, during, and after Cole. Lusa Maluf Landowski. My mom's Palestinian and my dad's a Polish Jew, and never, before I came here, did I think that was anything to be ashamed of. I've had it since I was born. Not that I've ever heard anybody in your family say it. You talk about making somebody disappear? You think they put the vanishing act on Shel? Try living in a family that won't learn your damn name!"

  She and Jewel blinked at each other, shocked equally.

  "Nobody meant any harm, honey. It's just normal to take your husband's name around here. We're just regular country people, with country ways."

  "It never struck me as a regular thing to do, so we just didn't. God, Jewel, did you all really believe I'd take his name and then throw it back, a week after he died? Some carpetbagger, erasing your family name and stealing your homeplace, is that how you see me?"

  Jewel had her hand on her mouth, and tears were welling up in her eyes; they wer
e back where they'd started. Lusa had raised her voice at this timid woman who was probably the nearest thing she had to a friend in the family or this county. Jewel shook her head and held out her arms to Lusa, who stepped awkwardly into her hug. Jewel's body felt as bony and light as a bird's underneath her apron, all feathers and heartbeat.

  They clung to each other for a minute, rocking back and forth. "Don't pay any attention to me," Lusa said. "I'm losing my mind. There are ghosts here. There's one in this kitchen that stirs up fights."

  Over Jewel's shoulder she could look straight down the hall through the wavy antique glass in the front door to the outside, the yard and front pasture. This rain would never end, she thought. She could see the fresh beginnings of yet another storm coming: the leaves of the tulip poplar down by the barn trembling and rotating on a hundred different axes, like a tree full of pinwheels. Beneath it Lowell and Crystal orbited the barnyard in their dark, soaked clothes, laughing and galloping on a pair of invisible horses, traveling in circles through the infinite downpour as if time for them had stopped, or not yet started.

  {9}

  Old Chestnuts

  Garnett stood admiring the side of his barn. Over the course of a century the unpainted chestnut planks had weathered to a rich, mottled gray, interrupted only by the orange and lime-colored streaks of lichen that brightened the wood in long, vertical stripes where moisture drained from the galvanized tin roof.

  He was haunted by the ghosts of these old chestnuts, by the great emptiness their extinction had left in the world, and so this was something Garnett did from time to time, like going to the cemetery to be with dead relatives: he admired chestnut wood. He took a moment to honor and praise its color, its grain, and its miraculous capacity to stand up to decades of weather without pressure treatment or insecticides. Why and how, exactly, no one quite knew. There was no other wood to compare with it. A man could only thank the Lord for having graced the earth with the American chestnut, that broad-crowned, majestic source of nuts and shade and durable lumber. Garnett could recall the days when chestnuts had grown so thick on the mountaintops of this county that in spring, when the canopies burst into flower, they appeared as snowcapped peaks. Families had lived through the winter on the gunnysacks of chestnuts stored in their root cellars, and hams from the hogs they'd fattened on chestnuts, and the money they'd earned sending chestnuts by the railroad car to Philadelphia and New York City, where people of other nationalities and religious persuasions roasted them for sale on street corners. He thought of cities as being populated with those sorts of people, the types to hunker over purchased coals, roasting nuts whose origins they could only guess at. Whereas Garnett liked to think of his own forebears as chestnut people. Of chestnut logs the Walkers had built their cabins, until they had sons and a sawmill to rip and plane the trees into board lumber from which they then built their houses and barns and finally an empire. It was lumber sales from Walker's Mill that had purchased the land and earned his grandfather the right to name Zebulon Mountain. Starting with nothing but their wits and strong hands, the Walkers had lived well under the sheltering arms of the American chestnut until the slow devastation began to unfold in 1904, the year that brought down the chestnut blight. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.

  That was not Garnett's to question, the fall of his family fortunes. He didn't begrudge the sales of land that by the year 1950, when the last chestnuts were gone, had whittled his grandfather's huge holdings down to a piece of bottomland too small to support anything but a schoolteacher. Garnett hadn't minded being a teacher; Ellen certainly hadn't minded being married to one. He hadn't needed to own an empire and did not resent the necessity of close neighbors (save for one). But neither did he ever doubt that his own dream--to restore the chestnut tree to the American landscape--was also a part of God's plan, which would lend to his family's history a beautiful symmetry. On his retirement from the Zebulon County school system a dozen years ago, Garnett had found himself blessed with these things: a farm with three level fields and no livestock; a good knowledge of plant breeding; a handful of seed sources for American chestnuts; and access to any number of mature Chinese chestnuts that people had planted in their yards in the wake of the blight. They had found the nuts far less satisfactory, and of course the tree itself had none of the American chestnut's graceful stature or its lumber qualities, but the Chinese chestnut had proven entirely resistant to blight. This lesser tree had been spared for a divine purpose, like some of the inferior animals on Noah's ark. Garnett understood that on his slow march toward his heavenly reward, he would spend as many years as possible crossing and backcrossing the American with the Chinese chestnut. He worked like a driven man, haunted by his arboreal ghosts, and had been at it for nearly a decade now. If he lived long enough he would produce a tree with all the genetic properties of the original American chestnut, except one: it would retain from its Chinese parentage the ability to stand tall before the blight. It would be called the Walker American chestnut. He would propagate this seedling and sell it by mail order that it might go forth and multiply in the mountains and forests of Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, and all points north to the Adirondacks and west to the Mississippi. The landscape of his father's manhood would be restored.

  A loud buzz near his ear made Garnett turn his head and look up too fast, causing him to experience such a bout of dizziness that he nearly had to sit down on the grass. The Japanese beetles were thick as pea soup already, and it was only June. He noticed that his Concord grapevines, which he loved to see climbing lazy and lush up the slatted side of the old grain house with their leaves drooping like ladies' hands, were showing a rusty brown aura. From this distance it looked as if they'd been dusted with brown powder, but he knew it was really the brown skeleton of the leaf showing through. It was something he had pointed out to his vo-ag students time and again, the characteristic sign of Japanese-beetle damage. Something to add to his list for the hardware today: malathion. The Sevin dust wasn't killing them dead enough. Or it was washing off in all this rain.

  He glanced over toward Rawley's, whence came the plague. She had started several new brush piles along the line fence just to gall him. She called them "compost" and claimed they heated up on the inside to a temperature that would kill beetle larvae and weed seeds, but he doubted it. Any decent farmer who'd spent his life in Zebulon County learning thrifty and effective farming methods would know to set fire to his orchard trimmings, but she was too busy with her bug traps and voodoo to get rid of her tree-trash the normal way. Compost piles. "Laziness lots" would be a better name for them. "Stacks of sloth."

  Earlier in the week he had attempted to speak to her over the fence: "The source of Japanese beetles seems to be your brush piles, Miss Rawley."

  To which she'd replied, "Mr. Walker, the source of Japanese beetles is Japan."

  There was no talking to her. Why even try?

  He noted that her pitiful old foreign truck was gone from its usual spot between the lilac hedge and her white clapboard house. He wondered where she might have gone on a Friday morning. Saturday mornings she always went out with her produce to the Amish market, and Mondays to Kroger's (the Black Store wasn't adequate to her needs, according to Oda Black, who had spied Nannie in Kroger's purchasing soya sauce), and lately she went out on Tuesday afternoons also, for a purpose he hadn't yet discerned. Sundays she went to the Unitarian place; Garnett was not about to call it a church. That was just her cup of tea, he imagined: a den of coffee-drinking women in slacks making high-toned conversation along godless lines. Evolution, transcendentalism, things of that nature. Thank goodness it was over the county line, at least, in Franklin, where they had the college. They had more of that kind over there, and as Garnett understood it, the debauchery in this state just increased at a steady pace along an eastward line that wound itself up in Washington, D.C. It was Oda Black's opinion that the Unitarian women refused to wear proper foundation garments and dabbled in witchcraft. Oda was quick to
point out that she was not one to stand in judgment (though she was wide enough to stand anywhere she pleased, and no one would argue, save for the floorboards). She'd heard it from somebody firsthand, and furthermore two girls from the college had once wandered into her store talking right out loud to each other about witchcraft, not caring who heard them, while they reached into the cooler for their sodas. Oda reported that their flesh had jiggled under their T-shirts like jelly turned out of its jar.

  That was Franklin County for you. That college was asking for it when they let in women.

  Garnett stepped up onto his porch and pulled a folded square of paper from his shirt pocket. He had put a good day's work behind him, five hours already this morning hand-pollinating and bagging chestnut flowers. June was his busiest month, and this morning when the sun finally came out after its long confinement, Garnett had risen early and got out into his hybrid seedling fields to make up for lost time. There was still so much to be done: the grass in his yard was high, and weeds were springing up along the creek bank, but he could postpone the mowing and weed killing until later this afternoon. Now it was past eleven o'clock, and he had earned the pleasure of a trip to town. Not that he had any kind of a joyride planned. It was mostly errands: Black Store, Tick's Garage, and Little Brothers' Hardware. He unfolded the square of paper on which he'd made his list for the hardware:

  Hacksaw blade

  (The last time he'd used the saw on a stripped bolt, he'd noted it was dull.)

  2. Black plastic for mulching between the tree rows

  3. AA flashlight batteries (four)

  4. 3 PVC pipe fittings, L-shape, 1/2 inch (broken irrigation line)

  5. Paint markers for the hybrid trees

  (He resented this item, since he knew he still had some markers down in the barn, but he'd wasted nearly an hour yesterday looking for them and suspected they'd been taken. Maybe by a neighbor child. Maybe by a groundhog.)