Prodigal Summer: A Novel

by Barbara Kingsolver

  He turned his acute gaze on Deanna. "That's why you live up here by yourself, isn't it? You can't stand how people are."

  She weighed this, feeling its truth inside herself like damp sand. "I don't want to feel that way," she said finally. "There's people I love. But there's so many other kinds of life I love, too. And people act so hateful to every kind but their own."

  He didn't reply. Was he taking her judgment personally? She'd been thinking of people who refused to be inconvenienced for the sake of an endangered fish or plant or owl, not of coyote killers per se. She forced her next words, knowing that each one had its own cost. "You said I could ask you a question, and now I'm asking it."

  "What?"

  "You know."

  He blinked but didn't speak. Something in his eyes receded from her.

  "What brought you down here to the mountains?"

  He looked away. "A Greyhound bus."

  "I have to know this. Was it the bounty hunt?"

  He didn't answer.

  "Just say no if the answer is no. That's all I want."

  He still said nothing.

  "God." She let out a slow breath. "I'm not surprised. I knew. But I will never, ever understand who you are."

  "I never asked you to."

  No, he hadn't, and she would refrain from trying if she was capable of it. But here he was, naked beside her with his left hand lying above her heart. How could she not need to know who he was? Were male and female from different worlds, like the indigo bunting and his wife? Was she nothing but mud-colored female on the inside? She who'd always been sure she was living her life bright blue?

  "Where does it come from?" she asked. "I can't understand that kind of passion to kill a living thing."

  "Not just a living thing. An enemy."

  "Tell me the truth. How many times have you seen sheep killed by coyotes?"

  "Enough."

  "A hundred?"

  "On my own family's ranch? No. A hundred would wipe a man out, even if it was spread out over four or five years."

  "On your own family's ranch, in your lifetime, how many? Fifty? A dozen?"

  He was still looking up at the roof beams. "Maybe a dozen," he conceded. "We've got sheepdogs, we've got good fences, but even so. Probably that many. You can't always tell what got them, especially if it was a lamb and whatever got it just hauled it clean away."

  "So in one or all of those cases it could have been anything. A neighbor's dog. A barn owl. A damn bald eagle."

  Eddie Bondo grimaced, declining to agree or disagree.

  "A coyote is just something you can blame. He's nobody's pet; he doesn't belong to anybody but himself. So, great, put a bullet in him."

  He turned to look at her full on, propping himself up on an elbow. "What you don't understand is that ranching's not like farming. It's not a vegetarian proposition."

  She shook her head but said nothing, beginning to feel herself recede in her own way. What was it about the West, that cowboy story everybody loved to believe in? Like those men had the goods on tough. She thought of her soft-spoken father, the grim line of his mouth stretched pale as a knuckle while he worked the docking tool and she held the bawling head end. Working to castrate the bull calves.

  The moth on the window grew restless again, fluttering against the sheer curtain and the bright outdoors behind it. He saw her watching it and reached up to tug her hair gently. "Miracle of miracles, I do believe I'm in bed with an animal lover."

  She looked at him, surprised. If he only knew she'd been reminiscing about castration. It bothered her a lot, his being so sure he had her number. She opened her mouth, closed it, then opened it again, a little startled at what she chose to say. "I'll tell you something. If a feral cat wandered up here from some farm and started wrecking nests and killing birds and having babies in the woods? I'd trap it and drown it in the creek."

  He made a face of exaggerated dismay. "You wouldn't."

  "Maybe I would. I'd want to."

  "Why?"

  "Because cats like that don't belong here. They're fake animals, introduced, like the chestnut blight. And just about that destructive."

  "Not a cat person," he decided. Once again, sure he knew.

  "I had cats as a kid. But people won't be bothered to fix them, so they breed in the barns and prowl the woods, and they don't have any sense about what things to take. They're not natural predators, except maybe in a barn. In the woods they're like a firebomb. They can wreck a habitat so fast, overrun it in a season, because there's no natural control. If there were still red wolves here, the place could hold its own against a stray cat. But there aren't." Or enough coyotes, she thought.

  He studied this new Deanna, potential murderess of tabby cats. She met his gaze for a second, then rolled over and rested on her elbows, twirling the end of her hair into something like a paintbrush and touching its tip to the palm of her other hand.

  "I don't love animals as individuals, I guess that's the way to put it," she said. "I love them as whole species. I feel like they should have the right to persist in their own ways. If there's a house cat put here by human carelessness, I can remedy that by taking one life, or ignore it and let the mistake go on and on."

  "How much damage could a cat really do?"

  "You wouldn't believe how much. I could show you a list of species that have been wiped out because of people's laziness about cats. Ground-nesting birds, especially."

  "Not the kitty's fault."

  "No," she said, amused that her hunter seemed to be pleading the kitty's case. "And it's also not a cat's idea that every life including its own is sacred. That's a human idea, and I can buy it for humans. But it's some kind of weird religion to impose it on other animals that have already got their own rules. Most animals are as racist as Hitler, and a lot of them practice infanticide. Cats do--lions. A lot of primates, too."

  "Yeah?"

  "Yep. And I support their right to go on murdering their babies in the wild if that's how they do it, unpestered by humans. That's the kind of animal lover I am."

  He raised his eyebrows and nodded slowly.

  "It's not like you thought, is it?"

  "Heck, now I'm thinking maybe you'll go hunting with me."

  She rolled onto her back. "Forget it. I'd never kill just for fun. Maybe to eat, if I was hungry, but never a predator."

  "So a deer but not a fox? Plant eaters matter less than carnivores?"

  She thought about this. "They don't matter less. But herbivores tend to have shorter lives, and they reproduce faster; they're just geared toward expendability. They can overpopulate at the drop of a hat if nobody's eating them."

  He lay on his back next to her, at ease with this kind of talk. "Like rabbits do, sure. But it's complicated. Up north, the lynx go in these cycles. Every ten years, boom, there're thousands, and then they crash."

  "All the more reason to leave them alone," she insisted. "There's something going on there you don't want to mess with. Maybe there'd be some plague let loose on the Arctic." She wondered if he'd seen lynx. She'd probably never see one herself.

  "I know what you're saying," he conceded. "It's been messed with already."

  "What are they like, lynx?" She tried not to sound like a jealous child.

  "Oh, baby, there's a cat you'd love. They're just like you."

  "How's that?"

  He grinned, thinking about it. "About three parts pissed off to four parts dignified. They're gorgeous. If you find one caught in a trap line and let it go, it won't scramble around and run, nothing like that. It'll just stand there glaring at you for a minute, and then turn around real slow and just strut away."

  She could picture it. "Don't you get it? To kill a natural predator is a sin."

  "You've got your rules, I've got mine."

  She sat up to look at him. "Right. But then there's the world, which has got these rules nobody can change. That's what's wrong with people: they can't see that."

  "And what rule of the wor
ld says it's a sin to kill a predator?"

  "Simple math, Eddie Bondo, you know this stuff. One mosquito can make a bat happy for, what, fifteen seconds before it starts looking for another one? But one bat might eat two hundred mosquitoes in a night. Figure it out, where's the gold standard here? Who has a bigger influence on other lives?"

  "OK already, I get it," he said. "Chill."

  "Chill yourself," she said. "I didn't make up the principles of ecology. If you don't like them, go live on some other planet." Doing my best to run this guy off, she thought. But she couldn't go on biting her tongue. She needed this conversation.

  "Fine," he said. "But if I'm a bug rancher it's my right to shoot the bats off my ranch."

  She leaned back against the pillow. "What you're thinking about coyotes doesn't make a lick of sense. They're way more important to their natural prey than they are to livestock. I bet there's not one rancher in the whole American West who's gone under because of coyote predation."

  "Maybe not gone under," he said.

  "It's just fear, looks to me like. A bunch of macho ranchers scared of a shadow."

  "You've got no idea how tough ranching is."

  "I don't see you ranching sheep, Eddie. I don't think I can give you the high ground here."

  "I'll inherit fifteen hundred acres one day," he said, sounding unconvinced, and she wondered what divides of kinship were concealed in that flat statement, what dreads and expectations, what it was costing him to hold his place in his family. As the daughter of a farmer who'd lost his land, she felt only measured sympathy.

  "Right," she said. "You'll settle down with the little wife, raise up sheep till you're old, that's the plan? Just this one little thing, you need to run around and shoot every coyote in the world first?"

  He shrugged, refusing to absorb her irony. "I've still got some time. I like to get around, see a lot of country."

  Shoot every coyote, screw every woman, see the world, she thought: the strategy of prolonged adolescence. But that wasn't fair; he was also kind. He'd worked hard this morning to provision her nest, bringing armloads of firewood like bouquets. She tried to put aside the misery of thinking too much. "Well, you're being true to your school," she said. "Willing to travel great distances to make the world safe for Wyoming sheep."

  "You make fun, but you don't know. Sheep ranching needs all the help it can get. You're right on the edge of busted all the time."

  "What don't I know? You start down that mountainside and you'll come to the edge of a field, OK? From that point on, you can't walk right or left without stepping on some family that's lost its farm to bad luck, bad weather, chestnut blight, change, economics, the antitobacco lobby. You name it, there's some farmer I know who got eaten by it. But they're not bitter. They go to work at Toyota and forget about it."

  "They don't forget about it," said Eddie Bondo. "They just don't have an enemy they can look at through a rifle sight."

  She looked at him for a long time. Thought of her father, drinking to diffuse his grief in the last year before they sold out. If he'd had something to shoot at, what would he have done?

  "I can't say you're right," she said finally. "You don't know that."

  "If there's coyotes moving into this country now, they'll get shot at."

  "I know that. I think about it all the time."

  "So they're here. You know where they are."

  She returned his clear-eyed gaze. "Is that why you're hanging around me? You're trying to get information?"

  His green eyes went dark, a turmoil under the surface briefly revealed. "If that's what you think, I'll get my boots on and leave right now."

  "I don't know if it's what I think. I've never known what to think since the first day you showed up here. But if that's what you're after, you should go."

  "If that were what I was after, I'd be a fool. I know there's coyotes denned up around here someplace where I can't get a bead on them, and not for love nor money are you going to give me a clue."

  "That's the story."

  "Deanna, don't you think I know that?"

  "If I trusted you I would show you where they are, but I don't. Not in that way, not that kind of trust."

  "You already told me that. The first day up there on the mountain when I found you tracking that bobcat. You told me what the deal was. I accepted."

  "I did?"

  "You did."

  "So what are we doing here?"

  "Having breakfast in bed," he replied. "Trying to catch a moth without harming one scale on its fuzzy little head."

  She examined his beautiful face and the exquisite planes of his body, wishing she could look inside him to see what mixture of love and anger and deception resided there, in what proportions. "How old are you?" she asked him.

  He seemed surprised. "Twenty-eight. Why? How old are you?"

  She hesitated, surprised at herself. Sat forward and drew the covers close around her. It was the first time in her life she'd felt uneasy owning her age. Nearly twenty years older than this man--it made no sense.

  "I don't want to say."

  "Damn, girl, get over that. Look at you. It takes more than thirty years to tune an engine to run like that."

  "Way more than thirty," she said. "More than forty."

  "Really?"

  "Yeah, really."

  She thought she saw a flicker of surprise, but he covered well. "So, you're ninety-seven. You're my grandma. Come here, Granny, I want to rub the rheumatism out of your bones." As he pulled her down close to him the fire cracked again, flaring brilliant orange in the stove's small, round window. She could see the flame reflected in his eyes.

  "I want to tell you something," she said, holding his stare. "You're a good tracker, but I'm a better one. If you find any coyote pups around here and kill them, I'll put a bullet in your leg. Accidentally."

  "That true?"

  She knew it wasn't, but maybe he didn't. "Absolutely. I might even follow you a ways to do it, if I had to. That's the kind of accident I'm talking about."

  "A leg. Not between my eyes?"

  "No."

  He smiled and rolled away from her onto his back, clasping his hands behind his head. "OK, then, I'm fairly warned."

  "Fairly warned," she agreed.

  She got out of bed, trembling internally from the effort of acting so tough. She slipped her long flannel gown over her head and shook it down over her body like a cocoon. She took a widemouthed plastic cup from the kitchen cupboard and an envelope from the stack of papers on her desk. She turned it over: an old letter from Nannie Rawley, the only person who still wrote her here. She went to the window and pulled back the curtain gently, sending the disturbed moth back into its frenetic charge at the glass. On the curtain it had left a double row of tiny eggs, as neat as a double-stitched seam. It made Deanna sad to see such a last, desperate stab at survival. She'd read that some female moths could mate with many different males, save up all their sperm packets, and then, by some incomprehensible mechanism, choose among them after the boys were long gone--actually deciding whose sperm would fertilize the eggs as she laid them. Deanna studied this little moth's earnest work on the curtain. Maybe she'd been holding out for some perfect guy she believed was still out there. Too late now.

  "You poor thing," she said quietly, "quit bashing your brains out, you've earned your freedom." Carefully she placed the cup over the moth, then slid the letter between the cup's mouth and the glass. The trapped creature clicked against the hard plastic, but it wasn't human hands, so the scales shouldn't rub off. Deanna stepped barefoot into her unlaced boots and clumped outside, negotiating the door with her elbow, feeling Eddie Bondo's eyes on her as she went. A lynx, was that really how he saw her? She didn't feel that elegant or self-contained. He made her talk too much.

  The day was gorgeous. This was summer, surely. These morning chills would soon be gone for good, dissolved into the heat of breeding season. She inhaled: even the air smelled like sexual ecstasy. Mosses and ferns wer
e releasing their spores into the air. Birds were pressing the unfeathered brood patches on their breasts against fertile eggs; coyote pups, wherever on earth they lived, were emerging for their first lessons in life. Deanna stood at the edge of the porch and raised the paper from the lid of the cup, giving the cup a gentle heave to send the moth on its way. It tumbled and struggled in the bright air, then swerved clumsily upward for several seconds, grasping at sudden freedom.

  A phoebe darted out from the eaves and snapped the moth out of the air. In a vivid brown dash she was gone again, off to feed her nestlings.

  {12}

  Old Chestnuts

  Dear Miss Rawley,

  I have been greatly troubled by a suspicion that occurred to me last Friday, June 8, in the Little Bros. Hardware. I could not help but overhear (though I did not wish to, but the conversation was quite unavoidably audible) your remarks to the Little bros. concerning a "snapper." I was wondering whether this conversation referred to your lawn mower, since I am aware this is a brand of mower commonly used in this region and sold by Little Bros. Or is it possible you were discussing a certain event, previously known only to the two of us, involving a snapping turtle?

  I write to ask you this, Miss Rawley, not because it is a matter of any great concern to me, but because in keeping with the Lord's counsel I feel I should advise you it is a sin that does not rest lightly on any soul, to slander the good name of a neighbor who has worked long and hard these many years to serve with wisdom and dignity his county (vo-ag teacher for 21 yrs, 4-H adviser more than 10 yrs) and his Lord.

  Sincerely,

  Garnett S. Walker III

  P.S. On the matter of setting free the "lizards" sold at Grandy's bait store on the grounds that some of them belong to species that are vanishing from our region, having given it some thought, I propose three questions:

  1) Are we humans to think of ourselves merely as one species among many, as you always insist in our discussions of how a person might live in "harmony" with "nature" while still managing to keep the Japanese beetles from entirely destroying his trees? Do you believe a human holds no more special authority in this world than, say, a Japanese beetle or a salamander? If so, then why is it our duty to set free the salamanders, any more than it is the salamander's place to swim up to the state prison in Marion and liberate the criminals incarcerated there?