Prodigal Summer: A Novel

by Barbara Kingsolver

  "No, now, the eighty-one dollars and twelve cents, that was Joel."

  "Come on," Joel said, suddenly excited. "Let's go shoot."

  "Hold your horses, Mr. Sexton. We can't start till it gets good and dark." But Joel was already walking back uphill. They all watched him go, observing as his path intersected with that of the starred-and-striped Hannie-Mavis, who had broken free of Lois and was headed in her husband's direction carrying a hot dog on a bun. Lusa started to make a remark about her outfit also looking better in the dark, but she thought better of it as Hannie-Mavis stood on tiptoe in her little gold shoes, letting Joel give her a kiss before he took the hot dog from her. There was such a wealth of simple fondness in his hand as it touched her back, in her stretched calves and her head turned to receive his kiss. A vast loneliness crept over Lusa. She needed Cole to negotiate this family. With him it had made sense. Or could have, maybe, eventually.

  Joel began poking into the paper bags, holding the hot dog high in his other hand as he bent over. Rickie seemed nervous about letting him do it alone. "I hate to leave such pleasant company," he said, making a courtly bow and giving Lusa a look in the eye that shocked her with suggestion. "But I have to go keep an eye on my brother-in-law. He is not to be trusted."

  "I don't think you are, either," she said.

  He winked. "I believe you may be right."

  Lusa turned her face away to hide a blush, pretending to look uphill toward the food table. She felt incensed--here she was not six weeks a widow, and her brother-in-law was flirting. Although he may have just been trying to cheer her, and the alcohol muddled everything, of course. Just for a minute, she herself had forgotten to be sad. She felt guilty and hopeful both, realizing that beyond these numb days lay an opposite shore where physical pleasure might someday surprise her with its sharp touch. Where she would see colors again.

  "Gentlemen. I'd better go act like a decent hostess and see if we're going to have any ice cream," she said. Frank reached out to snag the empty bottle out of her left hand and press a full one into it.

  "We are sinking deep in sin," she sang quietly as she walked past Mary Edna with a Serpent in each hand, heading down toward the barn to check on the progress of the ice cream crankers. She felt a tightness in her lower abdomen, not from the elderberry wine but from something else, a body sensation she recognized but couldn't place. She'd been feeling it all day--a fullness, not really unpleasant but distracting, and a constant small twinge on the left side of her belly. And then it came to her, just as she spied the bald pate of an enormous whole moon rising above the roof of the barn. Of course. What she felt was her cycle coming back. She'd been on the pill for years, since college, but she'd tossed out the pink dial-pack several weeks ago when she finally made herself clear Cole's toothbrush and shaving things out of the bathroom. Now, after years spent suppressed in hibernation, her ovaries were waking up and kicking in. No wonder the men were fluttering around her like moths: she was fertile. Lusa let out a rueful laugh at life's ridiculous persistence. She must be trailing pheromones.

  Halfway down the hill, Jewel's five-year-old flew into her legs, causing her to spill wine on herself and nearly lose her footing.

  "Good grief, Lowell, what is it?"

  "Crys made me cut my leg!" he wailed, pointing frantically. "It's bleeding! I need a Band-Aid."

  "Let me see." She sat down on the ground, set both her bottles firmly into the grass, rolled up Lowell's pants leg, and scrutinized the unbroken skin for damage. "I don't see anything."

  "It's the other leg," came a weary voice through the darkness. It was Crys, trudging up the hill after her brother. "He scratched it on a nail in the barn cellar."

  Lusa was flustered by the child's hysteria. To calm both him and herself she held him in her lap while she examined his other leg. She found a scratch on the ankle, but it hadn't even broken through the second layer of epidermis. Definitely no blood. "You're OK," she said, hugging him tightly. She picked up his leg and kissed it. "This will heal before your wedding."

  Crys flopped onto the ground beside Lusa. "Did he say it was all my fault?"

  "No, he did not."

  "Well, he will. That's what he'll tell Mama. But I didn't ask him to climb under the barn with me. I told him not to. I told him he's a tattletale sissy and he always gets hurt and cries."

  "I am not a tattletale sissy!" wailed Lowell.

  "Shhh," Lusa said, putting an arm around Crys's shoulders while Lowell quieted to an occasional racking sob in her lap. He clung to Lusa endearingly, clutching her around the waist with his small hands. "Nothing's anybody's fault," she said. "It's hard to have a big sister who can do everything in the world. Lowell just wants to try to keep up with you, honey."

  Crys shrugged off Lusa's arm without a word.

  "Lordy, is that my Lowell hollering?" It was Jewel calling out from behind them, sounding worried.

  "We're OK," Lusa called back. "Down here by the barn. Wounded in action but headed for recovery, I think."

  Jewel appeared and sat down heavily on the grass, reaching out to stroke Lowell's forehead. He practically leapt from Lusa's lap into his mother's embrace. Crys stood up and disappeared.

  "He just got a little scratch," Lusa reported. "He was trying to climb around in the barn with his sister. No B-L-O-O-D, but I've got Band-Aids in the bathroom upstairs if you think that would help the patient's morale."

  "Who wants ice cream?" a female voice beckoned through the darkness--one of Lois and Rickie's teenaged daughters, Lusa guessed. The two of them had taken over supervising the kids after Hannie-Mavis washed her hands of it.

  Lowell took a deep breath, heaved himself up, and struck out with a loping limp in the direction of the ice cream. Jewel leaned against Lusa's shoulder for just a second. "Thanks, hon."

  "I didn't do anything."

  "You didn't smack them, that's something."

  "God, Jewel, don't say that. I like your kids. They're something else, both of them."

  "Something else, all right." Jewel tilted her head and chanted, "The boy's a girl, and the girl's a boy."

  "Maybe that's what I like about them."

  "They've had it tough. Poor kids. I wish I could have done better for them."

  "Every kid has it tough," Lusa said. "Being a little person in a big world with nobody taking you very seriously is tough. I can relate."

  Jewel shook her head, giving Lusa to know there was a much larger sadness here that she should not try to explain away. Lusa went silent. She'd borne enough of people's do-goodnik consolations lately that she knew when to stop. For a minute they sat staring at the moon, which was now an astonishing bronze disk hanging above the barn. No words seemed pure enough to touch it. Out of the blue darkness, from the depths of her memory, she heard Zayda Landowski's voice say, "Shayne vee dee levooneh." A song, or maybe just a compliment to a beloved child: "Beautiful like the moon."

  "Jewel, I want to ask you a weird question. This house where you all grew up. Has anybody ever seen ghosts in it?"

  "Stop that! You told me that time that Mommy was hainting the kitchen, and it gave me the all-overs."

  "This is different. I'm talking about happy ghosts."

  Jewel waved her hand, as if to chase away gnats.

  But Lusa persisted: "When it rains, I hear children running on the stairs."

  "That'd be the roof, I expect. That old house is noisy as the dickens in the rain."

  "I know what you're talking about. I hear music and words sometimes when it's raining; that's the tin-roof noise. I've been having whole conversations with my grandfather, who used to play the clarinet. But this is different. Sometimes even when it's not raining, I hear children climbing the stairs, really fast, in a kind of a tumble, the way several kids would come up the stairs all at once. I've heard it a bunch of times."

  Jewel just looked at her.

  "You think I'm nuts, don't you?"

  "No-oh."

  "You do, too. Too much time alone, a wid
ow losing her marbles. Which is true, I am. But if you heard what I'm talking about you'd be amazed. It's so real. Every time I hear it, I swear I have to stop my work and go to the steps, and I absolutely expect to see real children coming up. I'm not saying it's 'kind of like the sound of footsteps.' It is the sound of feet on the steps."

  "Well, who is it, then?"

  Lusa looked at Jewel, really examined her. Even in the dark she could see steep lines carved into her face that hadn't been there a month ago. It was as if some wires had got crossed, and all the grief Lusa felt inside were showing on Jewel's exterior. "Are you all right?" she asked.

  Jewel gave her a guarded look. "What do you mean?"

  "I mean you don't look so hot. Too tired, or something."

  Jewel adjusted the flowered scarf tied over her hair, a sort of babushka that didn't help any. "I am tired. Sick and tired." She sighed.

  "What of?"

  "Oh, honey. It's all right. I'm managing. Don't ask, because I don't want to talk about it tonight. I just want to come up here and eat ice cream with you all and watch the fireworks and have fun, for once." She sighed deeply. "Ask me tomorrow, OK?"

  "OK, I guess. But you've got me worried."

  "I better go see if Lowell's going to need hospitalized. He's probably forgotten about it, but if I don't put a Band-Aid on it now he'll wake up at three in the morning thinking he's going to die." She tried, slowly, to push herself to her feet. Lusa jumped up and helped her, then scooped up her two bottles off the grass. One was still full.

  "Did you see me parading around here with a bottle of booze in each hand? I expect Mary Edna's praying for my eternal soul."

  "Mary Edna's praying for her husband's eternal soul, because those jeans fit you like the bark on a tree, and Herb Goins hasn't taken his eyes off your bottom all night."

  "Jewel! Herb? I thought Herb was a gelding."

  "You'd be surprised. He's not the only one, either."

  Lusa grimaced. "Get out of here, you're embarrassing me. Go check and make sure there're enough plates and stuff for the ice cream, would you? And make sure they put the peaches and blackberries in it, there're fresh peaches in that cooler already cut up. You put the fruit in last thing."

  "We'll figure it out."

  "OK. I'll be up in a minute. I just want to walk down to the pond for a second and look at this moon."

  The grass laid a cool dampness between the soles of her feet and her rubber thongs. She moved herself along the bank until the moon's reflection hung dead center in the pond, a white, trembling promise as old as night. She felt the enormous sadness inside her waking up. Sometimes it slept, and then she could pretend at life, but then it would rise and crowd out anything else she might try to be, hounding her with the hundred simple ways she could have saved him. He'd had a cold that day. He could have laid off, declined to take that trip over the mountain. If she'd been a better wife she would have kept him home.

  "Cole," she said out loud, just to put the round word in her mouth, but then she regretted it because it summoned his presence so fully that her heart began bleeding out wishes: I wish you were here tonight. I wish I could have back every minute we wasted being mad at each other. I wish we'd had time to make a baby together. I wish.

  "Ssssst."

  She turned her head. The wall of the barn that faced the moon was whitewashed in light, but she couldn't see anything else. She smelled smoke, though. Then saw the red bouncing ball of a cigarette's lit tip.

  She wiped her eyes quickly, though it was quite dark. "Who is that?"

  "Me," came a whisper. "Rickie."

  "Little Rickie?" Her coconspirator. She walked toward him, navigating carefully around the marshy spots at the edge of the pond. "Did you see what I got?" she asked him, trying to be glad about this distraction from her self-pity. "Did you check out my field up above the tobacco bottom when you drove in?"

  "Shhh!" His hand closed around her wrist in the darkness and he pulled her around the corner of the barn, into deep moon shadow.

  "What are you doing, being a bad boy, smoking behind the barn? Here, look how bad I'm being." She held out the bottles, which he refused to sample.

  "Pew, that hooch of Uncle Frank's is nasty."

  "You think? I was just about to decide I liked it."

  "That means you're skunked."

  "Possibly. Who on earth are you hiding from?"

  "Mom."

  Lusa laughed a little. There was no end to family charades. "Your mom, the Queen of Camels--from her you're concealing your evil habit?"

  "Not mine, yours," he said, lighting a cigarette and putting it in her hand. Lusa frowned at it for a few seconds, then put it to her lips and inhaled. After a few seconds she felt a pleasant, tingling rush running through her arms and under her tongue.

  "Uh-oh," she said. "I'm liking this. You are a very bad influence. Did you see my goats?"

  "Yep. Looked like about forty or fifty up 'air."

  "Fifty-eight, I'd like you to know, and not one of them previously pastured with a buck. They've got one now, though, you better believe. If he gets busy and does his job I'll have fifty suckling kids in time for Id-al-Fitr, and my new barn roof paid for."

  "Dang, that's something. All from just that one ad in the paper?"

  "My telephone ringer broke, Rickie. I swear I'm not kidding, that's how much it rang. Have you ever heard of a telephone wearing out? I was in the pickup pretty much dawn to dusk all last week."

  "Yeah, Aunt Mary Edna said she seen you coming in and out. She prolly knows how many trips. How much you have to pay out, total?"

  "A dollar sixty-five for the ad is my total investment so far. Goose-egg for the goats. You wouldn't believe how thrilled people were to give me these animals. You'd think I was hauling toxic waste off their land."

  "You can thank Mr. Walker for that. He's like the granddaddy of all the goats in this county."

  "I do thank him--I did. I called him up on the phone. He was very nice."

  "Nice, huh? That's not what they used to call it up at school."

  "Well, I think he's a swell old guy. Totally helpful. You know what he told me? Sometimes you have to rub the buck with a rag and then dance around waving it in the girls' noses, to turn them on."

  "O-oh...yeah," Rickie said, nodding slowly. "I believe I heard about that down to Oda Black's. Somebody said they seen you up here doing naughty things with goats."

  Lusa got elderberry hooch in her nose when she laughed. "They did not."

  "Oh, OK. My mistake." He smoked and gazed out at the field. The grass looked white in the moonlight, as if touched with hoarfrost. "Would that really help, you think? I mean, why would it?"

  "Pheromones," she said.

  "What's that?"

  "Smells. A whole world of love we don't discuss."

  "Huh," he said. "So. Fifty-eight does. Think you'll get fifty kids out of 'em?"

  "You bet. And you know what else? You won't believe what else."

  "What?"

  "Over in the little pasture where I used to keep the calf? Three bucks--my backup men. And in the old pasture, the one behind the orchard that's gotten way overgrown with briars? Guess."

  "What, more goats?"

  "Seventy-one does."

  "Shit, girl! You're in business."

  "Looks like it. Those are all does that have been pastured with a buck at some point recently, or that people couldn't be sure of. Mr. Walker said not to take them since I couldn't make them come into season right away. But I thought, why not just take them and keep them over there? In October I'll turn my boys loose on them, and then I'll have my second batch of kids born and fattened up in time for Greek Easter and Id-al-Adha."

  Rick whistled. "You've done your math."

  "A regular goat-breeding genius." She tapped her head. "You're not supposed to count your chickens before they hatch, but I talked to my cousin already, the butcher. He's so excited you wouldn't believe it. He's going to start taking orders in September. He thi
nks we can make a killing."

  "Yeah? How much?"

  "Well, not a killing. Enough. Enough to cover the big stuff--the barn repairs I need to get done right now, for instance."

  "Per pound, what are we talking about?"

  "A dollar sixty, maybe a dollar seventy-five?"

  She had no real frame of reference for this price, but Rickie evidently did because he whistled approvingly. "Man. That's good." He grinned at her. Her eyes were fully adjusted to the darkness, and she could see him clearly: not exactly a carbon copy of his father, but with exactly the same gleam in his eye. She turned up her bottle and let the tail end of the Serpent bite her tongue.

  "Look," he said, pointing up toward the moonlit hillside. She could see the pale, hump-backed shapes of her goats spread evenly over the pasture, the way a child would put them in a drawing. Eventually her eyes made out something else: the movement of the dark billy. He was working his herd, methodically mounting one doe after another. Lusa watched in awe.

  "You go, boy," she cheered solemnly. "Make me a new barn roof."

  Rick laughed at that.

  She looked up at him. "Have you ever noticed what goats do in the rain?"

  "Yeah. They get all hunkered up into a horseshoe shape."

  "It's the funniest thing. I never knew that before. Yesterday morning when it was pouring rain, I looked out my window and thought, This I need, all my goats have come down with polio or something. But then as soon as the rain stopped, they all straightened out again."

  "Just goes to show you. You never pay much attention to a goat till he's fixing your barn roof for you."

  "How right you are, my friend."

  The moon was high now, and smaller, and she felt her grief shrinking with it. Or not shrinking, never really changing, but ceding some of its dominance over the landscape, exactly like the moon. She wondered why that was, what trick of physics made the moon appear huge when it first came up but then return to normal size after it disentangled itself from the tree branches. In its clear light she watched her goats hard at work increasing themselves. She felt that Cole would approve of her ingenuity. But for the first time in all her plotting she also now felt a twinge of sadness for these mothers and for their babies who would all come to naught, at least from a maternal point of view. Yes, it was food, and people needed food and their merry feasts, but from this end it seemed like so much effort and loss just to repair a barn and pay off some debts on an old, sad farm. For the hundredth time Lusa tried and failed to imagine how she was going to stay here, or why. When she tried to describe her life in words, there was nothing at all to hold her in this place. And words were all she could offer over the phone to her father, to Arlie and her other friends, to her former boss: "Less than a year," she was starting to say, "I'll be out of here."