Prodigal Summer: A Novel

by Barbara Kingsolver

  Lusa looked up the mountain. "Some lady lives up there? Are you sure? That's just supposed to be Forest Service land, above this farm."

  "Ask Uncle Joel. He'll tell you. He says she's a gol-dang wild woman."

  "I'll bet. I think I'd like to meet her." Lusa poked an inchworm out of the grass and let it make its way up her finger. "What does Uncle Joel say about me? Is he the one who thinks I should cut down my trees?" She felt only slightly guilty about exploiting this new source of inside information.

  "No. He's the one says you've gone plumb goat-crazy."

  "Him and everybody else. They're all just dying to know why, aren't they?"

  Crys shrugged and looked over at Lusa, a little guarded. But she nodded. "I guess you wouldn't tell, though."

  "I'd tell you," Lusa said quietly. She would love to give this child a gift that mattered. Her confidence, that would be something.

  Her face lit up. "You would?"

  "Only if it was just you, not Uncle Joel or anybody else. You couldn't tell them no matter what. Can you keep a secret, cross your heart?"

  With earnest solemnity, Crys drew a cross on her chest.

  "OK, here it is. I've got this cousin in New York City, he's a butcher, and we've made a deal. If I can get all those goats up there on the hill to have babies a month before New Year's, he'll pay me so much money for them your uncle Joel will keel over."

  The child's eyes grew wide. "You'll be rich?"

  Lusa grinned and hung her head. "No, not really. But I'll be able to pay the guy who's redoing all the plumbing in the house, and that friend of your uncle Rickie's who's fixing the barn right now."

  "Clivus Morton?" Crys made an awful face. "He's got B.O."

  Lusa tried not to laugh. "Well, that's no reason not to pay him, is it? If so, I just wasted nine hundred dollars, because I wrote him a check this morning."

  Crys seemed astonished by this figure. "Shit fire. I guess now he's rich."

  "It takes a bunch of money to keep a farm in one piece. Sometimes you don't make as much in a year as you have to pay out. That's why people moan and groan about farming. Just in case you were wondering."

  "What if your goats don't do that--have their babies?"

  "I'll still have to pay Clivus Morton a whole bunch more money when he's finished. Whether or not he takes a bath." Lusa lay down on her back in the damp grass, crossed her arms behind her head, and sighed. "It's risky. But the goats are the only way I could think of this year to make some money off a little patch of briar scrub and keep the farm in one piece." She glanced at Crys, who didn't seem to be listening, though it was hard to tell. "So that's what I'm doing with the goats. Just trying to keep my little piece of heaven from going to hail."

  "Uncle Joel said you was throwing the place away."

  "He's welcome to make a suggestion if he has a better idea--he and my vegetarian friends Hal and Arlie in Lexington, who've informed me I'm a sellout. There's not one crop I can put in the ground here that'll earn as much as it costs to grow. Other than tobacco."

  Crys looked at her. "Are you that?"

  "Am I what?"

  "Veg-arian."

  "No, I'm one of the other Christianities. As your cousin Rickie put it."

  Crys had taken up a stalk of long grass and was very lightly touching Lusa's skin in the spot where her T-shirt rode up and exposed her belly. It was the closest thing to intimacy she'd ever seen this child share with anyone. Lusa held her breath and lay very still, stunned by luck, as if a butterfly had lit on her shoulder. Finally she breathed out, feeling a little dizzy from watching the high, thin clouds race across the blue gap in the trees overhead. "Listen to me moan and groan. I guess I must be a real farmer now, huh?"

  Crys shrugged. "I guess."

  "If my goats don't work out, I'm what you call screwed. I hate to think about it. I'd feel like a murderer logging this hill, but I'm not sure how else I can keep this farm."

  Crys turned suddenly from Lusa and tossed the grass stem away. "Why do you have to keep it?"

  "That's a good question. I'm asking myself that question. You know what I come up with?"

  "What?"

  "Ghosts."

  Crys leaned over and peered down into Lusa's face. She looked puzzled, briefly, before her expression went neutral. "That's stupid."

  "Not really. You'd be surprised."

  Crys pulled a handful of grass out of the ground. "Ghosts of who?"

  "People who have lost things, I think. Some are your family, and some are from mine."

  "Real people? Dead people?"

  "Yes."

  "Like who?"

  "My zayda, my grandpa on my dad's side. Once upon a time he had this beautiful, beautiful farm, right? And people took it away from him. It was a long time ago, before I was born. My mother's grandparents had a farm, too, in a whole different country, and the same thing happened: gone. Now they've all wound up here."

  "Are you scared of them?" Crys asked quietly.

  "Not at all."

  "Do you really believe in ghosts?"

  Lusa wondered why on earth she was talking about this with a child. But she needed to speak of it, as badly as Crys needed to curse. They both had their reasons. She sat up and looked at her until at last she caught her eye. "I'm not scaring you, am I?"

  The girl shook her head rapidly.

  "Maybe I shouldn't even call them ghosts. It's just stuff you can't see. That I believe in, probably more than most people. Certain kinds of love you can't see. That's what I'm calling ghosts."

  Crys wrinkled her nose. "What do you do, then, smell 'em?"

  "I do. And hear them. I hear my grandfather playing music when it rains. That's how I know he's here. And your uncle Cole's here, too. I smell him all the time. I'm not kidding: three or four times a week. I'll open a drawer or walk into the corncrib in the grain house, and there he is."

  Crys looked truly unhappy. "He's not there for real, though. If you can't see him, he's not."

  Lusa reached out and rubbed her shoulder, a hard little point of bone beneath a tense little blanket of muscle. "I know, it's hard to think about," she said. "Humans are a very visual species."

  "What's that mean?"

  A monarch butterfly drifted into the shaft of light in front of them and batted lazily into the cleared path through the trees toward the fields below. Lusa said, "What that means is, we mainly love things with our eyes."

  "You mean like Rickie does with those girl magazines under his bed?"

  Lusa laughed hard. "That is exactly what I mean."

  They both watched the monarch, a bouncing orange dot receding downhill until it was nothing, just a bright spot melting into the light of day.

  "A lot of animals trust their other senses more than we do. Moths use smell, for instance. They don't have to see their husbands or wives at all to know they're there."

  "So? You're not a moth."

  "So. I guess you're right. Pretty stupid, huh?"

  Crys shrugged her shoulders. "When you die will you be a ghost hanging around here, too?"

  "Oh, yeah. A good one."

  "And who'll be here then, after you?"

  "That's the sixty-four-dollar question. The ghosts of my family and yours are having a big disagreement over that one. Mine say stay, yours say go, on account of who comes after me. I have no idea how to make everybody happy."

  Crys studied her. "Which side you figure to pick?"

  Lusa stared and shrugged back at her, the same quick, introverted jerk of the shoulders that Crys kept ready at hand to answer all questions. A stolen gesture.

  "Come on," she said then, jumping up and pulling Crys up by the hand. "We'd better go see if Lowell's awake."

  "He'll still be asleep. He'd sleep forever if you let him."

  "Maybe he's just a little sad about your mom. Sometimes people need to sleep more when they're sad." She reached over to give Crys a hand down the bank into the road cut, but the girl took the plunge by herself in one huge leap. />
  "Not me," she said, landing on her feet.

  "No? What do you do?" Lusa climbed more slowly through the daylilies down onto the road, feeling like the turtle trailing the hare.

  "Nothing. I don't think about it."

  "Really. Not ever?"

  Crys shrugged, then caught herself at it. They didn't speak for several minutes as they walked side by side downhill, through puddles of light in the road spilled by gaps in the forest canopy. Every fifty feet or so they scattered up another cloud of swallowtails--the choirboys turned out of church. Lusa liked the idea of butterfly church. Frankly, it was no more far-fetched than the notion of a communal sucking-up of sodium for sperm valentines. She wondered what would happen if she submitted a paper to Behavioral Ecology on the spiritual effects of swallowtail puddling. Lusa was still amusing herself with the idea when they rounded the corner above the house and she was stopped dead in her tracks.

  "Oh, no, look," she cried.

  "Shit, Aunt Lusa. The damn booger honeysuckles et your garage."

  Lusa could not think of a better way to put it. The mound of dark-green leaves was so rounded and immense, there was hardly any sign that a building lay underneath. An ancient burial mound, Lusa might have guessed. A Mayan temple crumbled to ruin. Could this really have happened in just one wildly rainy, out-of-control summer? She hadn't been up the cemetery road for as long as she could remember, and certainly hadn't looked at the garage from the back side since before Cole's death. Now she could only stare, recalling the exact content of their argument about honeysuckle before he was killed: the absurd newspaper column about spraying it with Roundup; her ire on the plant's behalf. How could she have gotten so sanctimonious about honeysuckle? It wasn't even native here, it occurred to Lusa now. It was an escapee from people's gardens, like the daylilies--like most weedy things that overgrew, in fact. No local insects could eat it because it was an introduction from someplace else--Japan, probably. Lonicera japonica, that would be right, like Japanese beetles and chestnut blight and the horribly invasive Japanese knotweed and the dreaded kudzu. One more artifact of the human covenant that threatened to strangle out the natives.

  You have to persuade it two steps back every day, he'd said, or it will move in and take you over. His instincts about this plant had been right; his eye had known things he'd never been trained to speak of. And yet she'd replied carelessly, Take over what? The world will not end if you let the honeysuckle have the side of your barn. She crossed her arms against a shiver of anguish and asked him now to forgive a city person's audacity.

  Her head filled with the scent of a thousand translucent white flowers that had yellowed and fallen from this mountain of vine many months before. Maybe years before.

  Crys was looking up at her so anxiously that Lusa touched her own face to make sure it was still intact.

  "Don't worry, it's nothing," she said. "I saw a ghost."

  {22}

  Predators

  Dog days. Deanna sat on her freshly completed bridge in the hemlock grove, nervously picking off splinters from the end of a pine plank and tossing them into the water, listening to the clan of red-tails screaming at one another up in the sky. Sometimes the birds dipped into the trees overhead, and their reflections glanced briefly across the surface of the water below her feet. She pulled her bandanna out of her back pocket and wiped sweat out of her eyes, leaving a trail of grime and sawdust across her forehead. A hawk goes blind in the dog days, people used to say. And her dad said different: Nothing about a hot summer day could make a bird lose its sight. They're pushing their young out of the nest in August, is all. The parents fly around crazy, diving into the treetops to try to get away from their full-grown young following them around screeching to be fed, unwilling to hunt on their own. Her dad didn't know the word fledge, but he knew what it meant. Look close, he always used to tell her. If it doesn't sound true, it isn't. There's always a reason for what people say, but usually it's not the reason they think.

  Deanna was at a loss to invent any more work for herself today. Nothing she'd be able to keep her mind on, anyway. She'd finished this bridge. She'd also collected four wheelbarrow-loads of firewood from the pile here, where they'd cut up the trees, and pushed them all the way up to the cabin. She'd cleared weeds and retrenched the steepest part of the upper mountain trail. She had run into a pair of hikers up there on the ridge, a young, very dirty couple who seemed delighted with the world and each other. They'd wandered over here as a side trip from the Appalachian Trail. Hiking the whole A.T. this summer from Maine to Georgia was their plan, as they'd eagerly relayed it to her. They had gotten this far, worn out a pair of boots each, and were looking forward to picking up a care package from one of their mothers, including new boots, down where the trail came out in Damascus, before continuing on south. They thanked Deanna, impressed with the upkeep of the trails here in the Zebulon Forest--as if she'd done all the work just for them. Which answered one of the two questions she'd been asking herself all summer, anyway. As she watched the pair hike away in their baggy, colorful shorts, she wondered how that would feel, to have a mother leaving you care packages when you ran out of boot leather. Or to hike hundreds of miles beside another person, always knowing which way the trail ahead of you ran, and exactly how far.

  He was sitting up there right now in the green porch chair, reading her thesis. She had not felt this nervous since the day of her final oral defense, when her committee made her go out in the hallway while it deliberated her case.

  This humidity had to break. There was a storm in the air, which was probably making the hawks act up even more. She didn't want to be down here when it hit. In her tenure on this mountain she'd been caught outside in a lightning storm exactly twice: once she'd made it into the shelter of the big chestnut log (back when it was still her own), and the other time she'd had to cower against the trunk of a hemlock in the lowest spot she could get to. Both times had been more awful than she liked to admit. He was right about her and thunder. She wasn't afraid of snakes, but thunder paralyzed her. There wasn't any reason, it just was. Even as a girl she'd dreaded loud noises, could not fire a gun without breaking a cold sweat, even just for target practice at a can on a fencepost. Her dad used to sit with her through storms. Eddie had done that, too, and almost the same way, though she didn't tell him so: rubbing her back as she lay with the pillow pulled over her head, counting out loud with her the distance between flash and boom. One fifth of a mile per second.

  If not for that, she thought, this would be easy. If not for those nights and early mornings and half minutes when he was suddenly kinder and truer than seemed possible, given everything. Given what he couldn't understand. What did she really think he would do now, when he finished reading the book of her knowledge and beliefs? Change? No. Tear his hair for guilt? No. Stay, or walk out the door? Which did she want him to do?

  That was the question. When a body wanted one thing wholly and a mind wanted the opposite, which of the two was she, Deanna?

  She leaned far forward from the bridge so she could see her face in the water. Her braid swung over her shoulder and hung down, nearly touching the water, swaying like a bell rope. Pull me in, she said silently to the girl in the water. Make up my mind for me. Take from me this agitation, the likes of which I have never known in all my life.

  This morning she had wept for no reason she could possibly name. The forest hadn't seemed large enough for her grief. She'd startled up a white-spotted, flag-tailed fawn and sent it crashing downmountain from the bed of leaves where its mother had carefully hidden it. Deanna curled herself into the spot it'd fled, and sensed the small body's warmth still there in the brown leaves. There was no loss here, she told herself; the fawn would bleat for its mother and be found. But she'd suddenly felt so despairing and tired, such an utterly lost cause, that she'd lain on the ground and put leaves in her mouth.

  Bang! A thunder boom hit now like a hammer on the back of her spine, jerking her up onto her feet on the ra
w wooden planks of the bridge. She was grateful for that, at least--one decision made for her. By the time the second boom hit, rolling up the hollow like a wave and crashing over her head, her feet were already headed up the mountain. They would get her to the cabin before the lightning arrived. What do I want, what do I want? her feet on the trail demanded, the rhythm of her breathing demanded. If she couldn't say what she wanted, she could say nothing--wouldn't look at him, would have to go on feeling trapped with him in that place, like predator and prey closed tight in a box, waiting for word on which was to be which.

  She was breathing hard by the time the cabin came into sight. Why had she been getting out of breath at the drop of a hat lately, was that age, too? Was she running faster than she used to? Through the trees she could just see the south face of her house, where the logs had been completely overgrown this summer by a single Virginia creeper vine. She'd pondered whether to rip the hairy little tendrils off the logs or just leave them there to protect the old wood from wind and rain, like a lively green skin.

  She angled up the hill, coming up on the cabin from the back. Her mind was running ahead of her and off to the side, but it snapped back when she saw something odd at the place where the roof gable butted against the uppermost log in the cabin's wall. The small hole there she'd noticed before, but now something was moving out of it, a dark loop. She approached slowly, catching her breath and keeping her eyes on the spot.

  She could see now exactly what it was: the cabin's summerlong resident guardian angel who kept down the mice, the devil who took the phoebes, the author of that slow sandpaper sound in the roof--her blacksnake. He was leaving. Deanna planted her feet and watched the entire, unbelievable length of him pour out the small hole in the side of the roof gable. He oozed down the log wall in an undulating, liquid flow like a line of molasses spilling over the edge of a pitcher. When most of his length had emerged, he suddenly dropped into the tall grass, which trembled and then went still. Then he was gone, for good. Just like that, today of all days, for reasons she would never be able to know. Whether she had loved or hated this snake was of absolutely no consequence to his departure. She considered this fact as she watched him go, and she felt something shift inside her body--relief, it felt like, enormous and settled, like a pile of stones on a steep slope suddenly shifting and tumbling slightly into the angle of repose.