Prodigal Summer: A Novel

by Barbara Kingsolver

  The yard she could take care of herself. He'd offered, but she'd said she wanted to do it. She'd awakened today with a deep desire to put the place in order. Not just to drag the downed branches out of the yard, but to cut back the brambles she'd allowed to creep in over the course of the summer. She couldn't explain why, but she felt closed in and needed to strike out, to take up her Weed Eater and pruners like weapons against the encroachment. She'd been working at it fiercely all day, taking a break only briefly in the afternoon, when the call came from her cousin in New York. Then she'd gone right back to it and continued working long into the evening, with the mountain's breath on the back of her neck and moth wings looping circles in the porch light.

  She knew, from Rickie and Crystal, that the family had begun to talk about how hard she worked with her hands. They seemed to respect her use of tools. Earlier in the day she'd showed Rickie how to use a sharpened spade instead of Roundup to cut out the field-apple saplings planted by accident in the lawn. After he left, she'd taken a pruning saw to the creeper vines that were trailing up the sides of the house and over into the boxwoods, getting into everything, the way creeper vines did. Then she ripped out every climbing vine from the row of old lilacs so they could bloom again.

  Now, in the gathering darkness, she turned finally to tearing out the honeysuckle that had overgrown the garage. There was enough moon reflected off the white clapboards that she could see what she needed to see. It was only honeysuckle, an invasive exotic, nothing sacred. She saw it now for what it was, an introduced garden vine coiling itself tightly around all the green places where humans and wilder creatures conceded to share their lives.

  She ripped the vine down from the walls in long strands, letting them fall in coils like rope on the ground at the foot of her ladder. Wherever she ripped the long tendrils from the flank of the building, dark tracks of root hairs remained in place, trailing upward like faint lines of animal tracks traveling silently uphill. Or like long, curving spines left standing after their bodies were stripped suddenly away. She worked steadily in the cool night, tearing herself free, knowing this honeysuckle would persist beyond anything she could ever devise or imagine. It would be back here again, as soon as next summer.

  {31}

  She paused at the top of the field, inhaling the faint scent of honeysuckle. It seemed odd for someone to be out down there, this late at night. She kept up her pace, walking quickly through the field at the forest's edge, where the moon found the long, silver part in the grass that had led hundreds of other animals along this field edge ahead of her. She was following a trail she couldn't be sure of, and she was used to being sure. But there was no threat here. She lowered her nose and picked up speed, skirting the top of the long field that lined this whole valley, ducking easily through the barbed wires of fences, one after another. She never strayed far out into those fiercely open places, with their dumb clots of moonlit animals, but was careful instead to keep to the edge of the woods with its reassuring scents of leaf mold and rotted fruit. She loved the air after a hard rain, and a solo expedition on which her body was free to run in a gait too fast for companionship. She could stop in the path wherever she needed to take time with a tempting cluster of blackberries or the fascinating news contained in a scent that hadn't been here yesterday.

  She was growing a little uneasy, though, this far down the mountain. She had never been able to reconcile herself to the cacophony of sensations that hung in the air around these farms: the restless bickering of hounds penned behind the houses, howling across one valley to another, and the whine of the perilous freeway in the distance, and above all the sharp, outlandish scents of human enterprise. Now, here, where this row of fields turned back up into the next long hollow, there was gasoline wafting up from the road, and something else, a crop dust of some kind that burned her nose, drowning out even the memorable pungency of pregnant livestock in the field below.

  She had reached the place where the trail descended into a field of wild apple trees, and she hesitated there. She wouldn't have minded nosing through the hummocks of tall grass and briars for a few sweet, sun-softened apples. That whole field and the orchard below it had a welcoming scent, a noticeable absence of chemical burn in the air, that always made it attractive to birds and field mice, just as surely as it was drawing her right now. But she felt restless and distracted to be this far from her sister and the children. She turned uphill, back toward safer ground where she could disappear inside slicks and shadows if she needed to. The rest of them would be coming up onto the ridge from the next valley over. The easiest way to find them from here would be to follow the crest of this ridge straight up and call for them when she got closer.

  She skirted a steep, rocky bank that was fetid with damp moss and hoarded little muddy pools along its base--a good place to let the little ones nose around for crayfish in the daylight, but not now--and then she climbed into the older, more familiar woods. Here was a nutty-scented clearing where years of acorns and hickory nuts had been left buried under the soil by the squirrels that particularly favored this place, for reasons she couldn't fathom. She'd had meals of squirrel here before, many times, but now it was dark, and they were nervous things, reluctant to leave shelter after a storm like that one. Still, she could hear the much bolder, needly nocturnal banter of flying squirrels high up in the hickory. She crossed back into the woods and then stopped again to put her nose against a giant, ragged old stump that had a garden of acid-scented fungus sprouting permanently from its base. Usually this stump smelled of cat. But she found he had not been here lately.

  She paused several more times as she climbed the ridge, once picking up the scent she'd followed for a while earlier tonight but then had lost again, because a rain like that erased nearly everything. It was a male, and particularly interesting because he wasn't part of her clan; he was no one they knew. Another family had been coming down from the north, they knew that; they'd heard them sing at night and known them to be nearby, though never right here before. She paused again, sniffing, but that trail wasn't going to reveal itself to her now, no matter how hard she tried to find it. And on this sweet, damp night at the beginning of the world, that was fine with her. She could be a patient tracker. By the time cold weather came on hard, and then began to soften into mating season, they would all know each other's whereabouts.

  She stopped to listen, briefly, for the sound of anything here that might be unexpected. Nothing. It was a still, good night full of customary things. Flying squirrels in every oak within hearing distance; a skunk halfway down the mountainside; a group of turkeys roosting closer by, in the tangled branches of a huge oak that had fallen in the storm; and up ahead somewhere, one of the little owls that barked when the moon was half dark. She trotted quickly on up the ridge, leaving behind the delicate, sinuous trail of her footprints and her own particular scent.

  If someone in this forest had been watching her--a man with a gun, for instance, hiding inside a copse of leafy beech trees--he would have noticed how quickly she moved up the path, attending the ground ahead of her feet, so preoccupied with her solitary search that she appeared unaware of his presence. He might have watched her for a long time, until he believed himself and this other restless life in his sight to be the only two creatures left here in this forest of dripping leaves, breathing in some separate atmosphere that was somehow more rarefied and important than the world of air silently exhaled by the leaves all around them.

  But he would have been wrong. Solitude is a human presumption. Every quiet step is thunder to beetle life underfoot, a tug of impalpable thread on the web pulling mate to mate and predator to prey, a beginning or an end. Every choice is a world made new for the chosen.

  Acknowledgments

  This novel grew from soil richly blessed by my Virginia friends and neighbors. I'm especially grateful to Neta Findley for a friendship that has brought me home, and to her late husband, Bill, and their son Joe, whose stories and humor have enriched my life and t
his book. A tithe of my future apple crop goes to Fred Hebard of the American Chestnut Foundation for all kinds of help and an education in trees; the foundation's chestnut breeding program--a far more systematic project than the one invented for this tale--will someday return the American chestnut to American woodlands. Thanks also to Dayle, Paige, and Kyla, our family's family. I'm grateful to Jim and Pam Watson for carriage rides, good humor, and good will; Miss Amy for peace of mind; Randy Lowe for good advice; and the Cooperative Extension Service for answering perhaps the strangest questions they've ever been asked. Bill Kittrell of the Nature Conservancy provided valuable insights, as did Braven Beaty, Kristy Clark, Steve Lindeman, and Claiborne Woodall. Finally, I'm forever indebted to Felicia Mitchell for laundrymat friendship and the poetry of yard sales, and for taking me to the farm that first evening when I almost didn't go.

  In the wider world I'm beholden to a network of friends and colleagues larger than I can ever thank by name, though some rise to the top: blessed thanks to Emma Hardesty for years of our lives; to Terry Karten for believing in literature in spite of everything; to Jane Beirn for graciously connecting the private me with the public world; to Walter Thabit for Arabic curses; to Frances Goldin for recipes, Yiddish syntax, infallible instincts, unconditional love, and, basically, everything--for more than you, who could ask. I'm grateful to the family of Aaron Kramer for their generosity in allowing me to use his exquisite poem "Prothalamium," from The Thunder of the Grass (International Publishers, New York); in discovering the beauty and breadth of his life's work as a writer of passion and social conscience, I feel I am finding a kindred spirit. I thank Chris Cokinos for his wonderful book Hope Is the Thing with Feathers; Carrie Newcomer for invisible threads; W. D. Hamilton (in memoriam) for boldness and brilliance; Edward O. Wilson for those things and also devotion. Dan Papaj brought to my attention many wonderful lepidopteran mysteries, and solved others. Robert Pyle also helped answer butterfly and moth questions. Mike Finkel's article "The Ultimate Survivor" (Audubon, May-June 1999) introduced me to a new way of looking at coyotes. Paul Mirocha turned my spare suggestions for the endpapers into a work of art.

  For their comments on various drafts of the manuscript I thank Steven Hopp, Emma Hardesty, Frances Goldin, Sydelle Kramer, Terry Karten, Fenton Johnson, Arthur Blaustein, Jim Malusa, Sonya Norman, Rob Kingsolver, Fred Hebard, Felicia Mitchell, and the enthusiastic chorus at HarperCollins; all of it helped. Any errors of fact that have persisted in the face of all this expertise are supremely my own.

  I'm pretty sure I owe my particular way of looking at the world, colored heavily in greens, to my parents' choosing to rear me in the wrinkle on the map that lies between farms and wildness, and to my brother, Rob, mentor and coconspirator in snake catching and paw-paw hunting. My sister, Ann, has expanded her soul for my support in ways that sometimes resemble wings. My daughters, Camille and Lily, are such experts in grace and wonder that they deliver me a world baked fresh daily. And for Steven, whose perfect ear and steady hand were beside me through this book as they are through life altogether, I offer up my thanks to the fates of mate choice and can't believe my luck.

  About the Author

  BARBARA KINGSOLVER's nine published books include novels, collections of short stories, poetry, essays, and an oral history. Her previous novel, The Poisonwood Bible, remained on the country's bestseller lists for more than a year and won literary awards at home and abroad. Her work has also appeared in numerous literary anthologies and periodicals.

  Ms. Kingsolver grew up in Kentucky and earned a graduate degree in biology before becoming a full-time writer. She and her husband, Steven Hopp, cowrite articles on science and natural history. With their two daughters they divide their time between Tucson, Arizona, and a farm in southern Appalachia.

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  By the Same Author

  FICTION

  The Bean Trees

  Pigs in Heaven

  Animal Dreams

  Homeland and Other Stories

  The Poisonwood Bible

  NONFICTION

  High Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now or Never

  Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona

  Mine Strike of 1983

  POETRY

  Another America

  Copyright

  PRODIGAL SUMMER. Copyright (c) 2000 by Barbara Kingsolver. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  EPub Edition (c) MARCH 2007 ISBN: 9780061839924

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