Prodigal Summer: A Novel

by Barbara Kingsolver

  Lightning hit then, so close to the cabin that she could actually hear its crack above the rain's roar. The sound and light were simultaneous; that was here. Probably one of the tall poplars on the hill above the cabin. Just what she needed now, a tree falling on her. Her fingers trembled as she turned over the radio and pried open its back to fish out the old batteries and pop in new ones. "Plus, minus," she said aloud, lining up the poles, her voice completely inaudible to her ears. Even that was terrifying, like a darkness so dark it looked the same with eyes open or shut. She'd had moments of panic in that kind of darkness, wondering whether she'd gone blind, and now it occurred to her that this might be what deafness was like. People assumed it was silence, but maybe it was this, a solid white roar.

  She tried the radio again. If she held the little holes against one ear and covered the other, she could hear sounds. Just static at first. It was a tedious business to adjust the tuning, listen, and adjust again, trying to find the Knoxville station, but at last she heard a faint, tinny music of a type she couldn't categorize. She waited awhile to let her ear adjust to this kind of sound. It had been a long time since she'd heard anything other than bird music. Music was something she'd have to relearn, she decided, like learning to speak again after a stroke. There were so many things to bewilder her lying ahead. Electricity, with all those little noises it made inside a house. And people, too, with all the noises they made. Labor and childbirth would be the least of her worries.

  She tried to think about Nannie. No worries there; she knew how that would be. To take her mind from this frightening high isolation, she pictured herself within the genuine shelter of Nannie Rawley's place, the kindness of that leafy orchard. Longing for comfort and rest, she forced her thoughts through the rooms of Nannie's house, out into the familiar trees and even up into the long grass of Nannie's wilding field, where she'd first learned about the connection between sex and God's Creation.

  She'd been half listening to the tinny music for longer than she realized when a different, louder sound brought her attention back to the radio: the long, discordant drone of a weather-service warning. She shifted on the bed and listened as hard as she could for what came next. Tornado watch. Oga County, Ing County, names she couldn't make sense of--Bin, Din, Fin, Hinman, that was it: Logan and Hinman counties, heading northwest. She dropped the radio to her lap. This was it, then, a real end-of-summer hellbender, the tail of the season's first hurricane coming this way. She sent out one small, final hope for Eddie Bondo, the last she would ever allow herself: that he'd had time to get out of these mountains before this storm came down.

  She got up and walked around the room, trying to find spots where the reception improved. She discovered it was better in the doorway, even better out on the porch. The roar on the roof wasn't as bad out there, either. She stayed close in under the eave to avoid getting drenched and settled cautiously into the old green chair with her head held stiffly, just so, like a patient in a neck brace, to keep the sound of human speech in her ear. She'd gone two years without news but now couldn't bear another minute without it. It was music now, though. Yes, that was right, that was how they did it: "Emergency, urgent, all life must stop!" and then back to the commercials and corny love songs. The world was coming back to her. She put the radio on her lap and shut it off to save the batteries, which she might need later. Then jumped up and went inside to make sure she had candles where she could find them and the kerosene lamp trimmed and ready to light. Why? She stopped herself, trying to reason a way out of this panic. It was going to be dark, storm or no storm, like every night of the year. Why did she suddenly need four candles laid out side by side with matches at the ready? She wished she could laugh at herself; it would be so much better than this bleak knot of panic in her stomach. What had changed, when she used to be so fearless? But she knew what had changed. This was what it cost to commit oneself to the living. There was so much to lose. She went back outside to the green chair and put the radio to her ear again, leaned her head back, tried to listen. Still music. She turned off the radio, then leaned forward, opened her mouth, and screamed a long, fulfilling howl she could hear pretty well:

  "DAMN YOU, EDDIE BONDO!"

  Why today, of all the days there were? Did he have a built-in barometer that told him when the weather ahead was getting stormy? She put her arms around herself and leaned back, letting herself be embraced by this dear old broken-down chair. Today or tomorrow or yesterday, it was all the same, she had to believe that was true. She had weathered storms on her own before and could weather this one. She considerately retracted the damnation. Truly, she had needed for him to go before the air got any denser between them. Her secret was getting hard to keep, and keep it she must, there had never been any question about that. Better for this child, better for everybody, that he not know what he'd left behind--and so he never would. She would tell people in Egg Fork, because they sure would ask, that the father of her child was a coyote.

  Deanna smiled. She really would. And Nannie would stand by her story.

  He'd left with his mind unchanged. If anything hurt Deanna, it was that she'd made no dent, had never altered his heart to make room in it for a coyote.

  She'd gone out this morning before dawn for one of her restless walks and had come home at last to the startling absence she'd been waiting for. His pack, his hat, his gun, everything gone this time, she knew in an instant. He'd touched nothing of hers, had left the cabin exactly as it had been three months ago--yet it seemed it must have enlarged, to hold such significant emptiness.

  It was several hours later when she opened her field notebook and found his note inside, her only memento of Eddie Bondo--or so he would always believe. A farewell with just enough sting to let her know she needn't wait for his return. On the empty page she'd marked with this date, he had recorded his own observation:

  It's hard for a man to admit he has met his match. E.B.

  She'd wondered for most of the day whether he meant her, Deanna, or the untouchable coyotes. Which one of them had been too much for Eddie Bondo?

  Finally she decided it didn't matter. She tore the page out of her book so she wouldn't have to see it again, then ripped it into tiny pieces that she piled in a corner of her sock drawer for the mice to use when they lined their winter nests. Only then, closing the drawer, did she understand. In his young man's way, he was offering up his leaving as a gift. Meeting his match was a considerable concession. He was leaving them both alone, Deanna and the coyotes. No harm would come to anything on this mountain because of him.

  A fierce crack of lightning shot her eyes through with a momentary electric blindness. "Oh God, oh God," she sang, withdrawing further into her chair, blinking the rain-blurred landscape back into focus. That was close. That was fifty feet away, or less. She could smell its aftermath in the ionized air. Now it was time to pray that there would be something left of this mountain after the storm passed over. She turned the radio back on and listened. It wasn't music now; it was the names of counties being repeated over and over. They'd gone to full-time emergency mode, listing counties, all of which she knew well. Franklin, Zebulon. The eye of the storm was here. She flipped the radio over and eviscerated it, slipping the batteries into her pocket. Better to save them for her flashlight. She would have laughed at herself if she could. If ever there was a piece of news she did not need a radio to receive, this was it. The eye of the storm was here.

  She got up and tried to look through the sheet of water that flowed over the eave like a translucent shower curtain. She walked to the end of the porch and found she could see better out the gable end, where less water came off the roof. The rain seemed a little less dense now. An hour ago the air had been so solidly full of water it looked as if fish could jump the stream banks and swim into the treetops. She'd never seen rain like that. There was less of it now, but an ominous wind was rising. While she watched, in the space of just a few minutes, the rain died back drastically and the lightning seemed to have m
oved past the ridge top, but a wind came howling like the cold breath of some approaching beast. It blew the rain horizontal, straight into her face. Now frightened to her bones, she went inside and put on her boots and raincoat, and walked a few more circles around the room while she was at it. Every instinct told her to make a run for it, but there was nowhere to go. She felt vulnerable and trapped in the cabin. Standing on the porch seemed a little better, but once outside again, she was shocked by a wind that blew her backward against the cabin wall so hard she felt the humps of its logs against her back. The cold wind hurt her teeth and her eyes. She held both hands over her face and looked out through the small space between them, transfixed by the impossible menace of this storm dancing on her forest. The solid trees she'd believed in were bending unbelievably, breaking and losing limbs. Trunks cracked like gunshots, one after another. Up where the forest met the sky she watched the poplars' black silhouettes perform a slow, ghostly tango with the wind. They moved in synchrony, all the way around the top of the ridge surrounding the hollow. There is no safety here, they seemed to be saying, and her panic rose into pure, dry nausea. The trees were falling. This forest was the one thing she'd always been sure of, and it was ripping apart like a haystack. Any of these massive trunks could crush her between one heartbeat and the next. She turned her face against the wall of the cabin, unaware that she was holding her braid in her teeth and both hands protectively over her abdomen. Unaware that she would never again be herself alone--that solitude was the faultiest of human presumptions. She knew only that she was standing with her back to the storm in a sheer blind panic, trying to think what to do.

  It was dark as night now, but she could make out the alternating dark and light stripes of the horizontal logs and the pale chink-mortar in between. She counted logs, starting at the bottom, to give herself a task she might be able to complete. Surprisingly, she'd never counted the logs before. Eleven, there were in this wall, an odd number. That meant either twelve or ten in the end walls. She ran her eye down the knobby length of one to its end, where all the logs of this wall articulated with those of the next, like fingers of a person's clasped hands. She attached her terrified gaze to that corner, a stack of twenty-one stout tree trunks neatly interlocked.

  Shelter, was what dawned on her as she stared. This was the very principle of genuine shelter, these twenty-one interlocked logs. No single falling oak or poplar could ever crush this cabin. This cabin was made of fallen trees. She closed her eyes, pressed her forehead to the rounded trunk of an old, quiet chestnut, and prepared to wait out the storm.

  When the rain and thunder died and the wind had gone quiet, coyotes began to howl from the ridge top. With voices that rose and broke and trembled with clean, astonished joy, they raised up their long blue harmony against the dark sky. Not a single voice in the darkness, but two: a mated pair in the new world, having the last laugh.

  {30}

  Moth Love

  The males of the giant Saturniid moths have imperfect, closed mouths and cannot feed. Their adult lives, poignantly brief, are devoted fully to the pursuits of locating and coupling with a mate.

  That was the passage she'd been thinking of vaguely for a long time before finding it last night, paging with desperate distraction in the middle of the storm through the same book she'd been reading on the night of Cole's death. It was under the bed; the book hadn't moved at all. Lusa wasn't even sure why she'd wanted to read it again, but when she came across that passage she recognized something in it that explained her life.

  People outside the family had begun to ask about her plans. It had happened just lately. Some change in the weather or in Lusa herself had signaled to them that it was now safe to speak, and they always said the same thing: It was a shame about Cole, and had she made up her mind what she meant to do now?

  There was no shame about it, she wanted to tell them. She imagined quoting that passage from Darwin at them, explaining that there was room in this world even for certain beings who could not eat or speak, whose only purpose was to find and call out the other side of their kind. She had been called here. There was no plan to speak of.

  Of course, she said no such thing. It was always in bright, normal places like the cereal aisle at the Kroger's or in Little Brothers' Hardware that people asked her about her plans, and so she always said only this: "I've made up my mind to finish what I started."

  And this was what she had started: in the absence of Cole, in the house where he'd grown up, she was learning to cohabit with the whole of his life. It was Cole who'd broken out the top rail of the banister as a rambunctious child, Cole who'd built the dry sink in the pantry for his mother the first year he took shop in school. He'd planted every one of the lilacs in the yard, though that seemed impossible because they were thirty feet tall now. His father had made him plant them for his mother the summer he was nine, as reparation for cursing in front of her. Lusa was making progress toward understanding. Cole was not to be a husband for whom one cooked, with whom one sat down to meals. He would be a second childhood to carry alongside her own, the child becoming the man for all the years that had led up to their meeting. She could coax stories about Cole even from people outside the family: women in town, strangers, Mr. Walker. Country people seemed to have many unwritten codes about death, more of them than city people, and one was that after a given amount of time you could speak freely of the dead man again. You could tell tales on him, even laugh at his mild expense, as if he had rejoined your ranks. It seemed to Lusa that all these scattered accounts were really parts of one long story, the history of a family that had stayed on its land. And that story was hers now as well.

  In the afternoon she'd learned she was going to get a dollar eighty a pound for her goats, if everything went according to plan. It was a price unheard of in the county, apparently, for any animal. She considered this now, happily taking a minute to let her success sink in while she rested on her ladder in the darkness and rubbed the tired muscles in the back of her neck. This was like winning the blue ribbon. By her wits she had made something succeed here, where there seemed to be no hope. It didn't even matter that no one would ever properly admire her canny ingenuity. Nobody would realize that the major holidays of three of the world's major religions coincided in the week she sold her goats, like stars aligning for a spectacular horoscope. Only a religious mongrel like Lusa could have seen it coming and hitched her fortunes to it. Probably the real facts of her coup would be transformed into the sort of wild rumor that ran barefoot through Oda Black's and the hardware store, and that nobody believed: Lusa had a cousin with connections to rich Italian gangsters. Lusa had illegally gotten her goats sold to the king of Egypt. In a place like this, some secrets kept themselves, out of a failure to stand up to the competing rumors.

  She knew her goat success wasn't any kind of permanent answer; there was no cure-all for the predicament known as farming. She'd have to be resourceful for the rest of her life. At Southern States she'd noticed the native bluestem grasses the government was now paying people to plant in place of fescue, and had been shocked to see what the seed went for. Twenty-eight dollars a pound. That seed had to be grown somewhere; a grass farm, imagine the gossip that would generate. Next year she might raise no goats at all, depending on the calendar, though many other people surely would, after they heard what she got for hers. And they would discover they couldn't give their goat meat away. Lusa was beginning to see how she would live out her life in Zebulon County. She was going to be a woman men talked about.

  This morning after her terrible night Lusa had awakened feeling shucked out and changed altogether, shaken but sound. As if she'd passed through some door into a place where she could walk surely on the ground of her life. The storm had washed the world clean and snuffed out the electricity in the whole county. Here, it shattered the windows on the north side of the house and rattled every ghost out of the rafters, from both sides of the family. She'd spent the night saying prayers in the languages she knew, fee
ling sure some kind of end was near, before finally falling asleep curled up on Cole's side of the bed with Charles Darwin in her arms and a candle burning on the night table.

  And awoke resurrected. She walked out into the yard, astonished by the downed catalpa branches everywhere and the twinkling constellations of broken glass. Those windows had been the antique, wavy glass original to this house. It was amazing. After all the years this place had known, something new could still happen.

  In the first confident act of her new life, she called up Little Rickie and hired him to be her part-time assistant farm manager. Over the phone they agreed on ten dollars an hour (the rule of neighbors and family notwithstanding) and a starting date as soon as he could get the parts from Dink Little to fix the baler. He would mow her hay and help her get it in the barn, then take on the task of clearing the multiflora roses out of any field edges her goats couldn't reach. She would not let him spray any weed killer. They'd argued about it briefly, but she'd won, because this wasn't a marital feud as it had been with Cole. It was a condition of employment. Rickie could clear with the bush hog and a hand scythe or not at all, and he was not to touch the woods, not to hunt squirrel or deer or coyote or ginseng. It would be Rickie's job, too, to find tactful ways of keeping the other men in the family from hunting up in the hollow. This was still the Widener farm, but the woods were no longer the Widener woods, Lusa explained. They were nobody's.