Prodigal Summer

by Barbara Kingsolver

  Beyond the doorway she could hear the people who waited in line, filling the long, narrow hallway like a glass pipette or medicine dropper that kept dispensing solemn visitors into the room, one stricken face at a time. Visitors just now arriving for the viewing would have to wait in line for an hour or more, Mary Edna had just announced (seeming pleased) after going out for reconnaissance. The line was out the door now that it was evening and people were getting off work. Most came in their work clothes, the clean jeans they’d worn underneath their milking overalls if need be; suits and ties would be saved for the funeral tomorrow. Tonight was a friendlier business, their chance to look at Cole and say their private good-byes. There was hardly a soul in the valley who had not turned out, it seemed. Cole was very well loved—Lusa had known this, of course. And also there was the handiwork of the undertaker to be admired, given the accident.

  Lusa hadn’t had to wait in the line. She was the end of the line, sitting near the head of the casket where people could come over and pay their respects if they wanted to, though most of them knew her only by name and hearsay and couldn’t manage much more than a stiff little nod. She knew they were sorry, though. To the rest of Cole’s family they were pouring out such a stream of condolences that Lusa feared she might drown in the backwash. She sat on a metal chair flanked by sisters-in-law—Hannie-Mavis and Mary Edna at the moment. When Mary Edna went out front to hold court she was replaced by Jewel or Lois or Emaline, interchangeable blocks in a solid, black-clad wall. Maybe not precisely interchangeable. She felt a little breathing room when it was Jewel, who was less overbearing than Mary Edna of the tree-trunk physique or Lois with her deep smoker’s croak. Or Hannie-Mavis with eyeliner à la Cleopatra, even for this somber occasion. In the beginning, when Lusa needed a secret mnemonic to learn their names, Mary Edna had been Menacing Eldest; Hannie-Mavis kept Makeup Handy; Long-faced Lois was Long-haired and Loud; Emaline was Emotional. But Jewel was just Jewel, an empty vessel with two kids and mournful eyes the exact color of Cole’s. Lusa couldn’t remember ever having had a conversation with Jewel, or having watched her do anything beyond handing Popsicles to the children out in the yard at family gatherings and, once, walking up the drive to ask Lusa if she’d seen their missing bobtail cat.

  Jewel’s and Hannie-Mavis’s five-year-olds were running underfoot, literally: one of the two had just climbed underneath Lusa’s legs and the strange black stockings someone had given her to put on. The persistent, spiraling path of these boys through their uncle’s wake made her ponder moth navigation: were the children sampling the air for grief in different parts of the room? If so, what would they find in the air around Lusa? She found it impossible to feel anything. Somehow her numbness seemed connected with the great din of noise. As the evening wore on and on, the noise seemed to rise like a tide. So many conversations at once added up to a kind of quacking racket that she could not begin to sort through. She found herself considering, instead, the sounds of nonsensical phrases that bounced into her ears. Mountain speech, even without its words, was a whole different language from city speech: the vowels were a little harsher, but the whole cadence was somehow softer. ’At’en up ’air, she heard again and again: “That one up there.”

  Hit’s not for sale. Them cows come over on Lawrence again. Wet’s it is, won’t be no more tobacco setting this week, Law, no. Hit’s a line fence. Why sure, I wouldn’t care to. Widener boy, old Widener place, Law, yes, I been up ’air.

  Why yeah, fishing, when I’s a kid. ’Air’s a pond up ’at holler. Bitter Holler.

  No, no bid’ness of hers. That’s Widener land and everybody knows it, you-all’s family place, what does she have to do with it?

  No, she won’t stay on it. Don’t hardly see how she could.

  This last, she realized with a start, was Mary Edna. Over near the door, speaking of her, Lusa. How could this have been decided already? But it was only natural, even a kindness, Lusa supposed, for them to release her so easily. What else could they expect but for Lusa to pack up her butterfly nets and her foreign name and go back to Lexington now? “Where she belongs,” was the end of the sentence she didn’t hear spoken aloud.

  She felt a strange lightness: Yes! She could walk away from Zebulon County. She’d been granted more than just the freedom to read in bed all she wanted, which would still mean hiding from sisters-in-law who disapproved of reading and probably the whole idea of being in bed. No, it was that she could leave this place, be anybody she wanted, anywhere at all. She put her hands to her face and felt a joyful urge to tell Cole: they could leave now! Oh, God, Cole. She ground her knuckles into her eye sockets and vaguely grasped how far gone she must be. Shock, two nights without sleep, and two days of people eating ham sandwiches in her kitchen had caused her to lose her mind. Her body, as if it belonged to someone else, began to shake with a dry, sharp rack she was helpless to stop, a strange weeping from her throat that sounded almost like laughter. Hannie-Mavis put an arm around Lusa’s convulsing shoulders and whispered, “Honey, I don’t know what we’ll do without him. We’re all just as lost as you are.”

  Lusa looked at Hannie-Mavis. Behind the fiercely curled and blue-mascaraed lashes, her eyes did seem helpless, truly as lost as she claimed. What was she trying to say? That Lusa had no prerogative to the greatest grief? First as mistress of their house, and now as Cole’s widow, Lusa was occupying a place she didn’t deserve?

  “You’ll be all right,” Lusa told her without feeling. As soon as I’m gone.

  The evening had the sensation of a dream she would not remember in the morning. Trapped in the endless repetition, she shook the callused palms of men who still milked cows by hand, and accepted the scented, too-soft cheeks of their wives against her own.

  “He was a good man. Only the Lord knows why his time came so soon.”

  “Called home. He’s with the Savior now.”

  “He looks real natural.”

  She hadn’t looked at the body and couldn’t contemplate it. She could not really think it was in there, not his body, the great perfect table of his stomach on which she could lay down her head like a sleepy schoolchild; that energy of his that she had learned to crave and move to like an old tune inside her that she’d never known how to sing before Cole. His hands on her bare back, his mouth that drew her in like a nectar guide on a flower—these things of Cole’s she would never have again in her life. She opened her eyes for fear she would fall into the darkness. A tiny old woman was there, kneeling in front of her, startling Lusa by putting both hands very firmly on her knees.

  “You don’t know me,” she whispered, almost fiercely. “I have an orchard a mile up the road from your farm. I’ve known Cole Widener since he was a little boy. He used to come play with my daughter. I’d let him steal apples.”

  “Oh,” Lusa said. “Thank you.”

  The woman looked upward and blinked as if she were listening for a moment. Her eyes were very deep brown, surrounded by pale lashes, and she wore her gray hair in a crown of braids wrapped around her head, like someone from another country or another time. “I lost a child,” she said, meeting Lusa’s eyes directly. “I thought I wouldn’t live through it. But you do. You learn to love the place somebody leaves behind for you.”

  She released Lusa’s knees and grasped her hands instead, holding them tightly for a few seconds before ducking away. Her grip had felt so cool and strong on Lusa’s listless fingers, and so fleeting. As the woman went out the door Lusa caught sight of her calico skirt swinging to the side, like a curtain closing.

  Sometime after nine o’clock, Mary Edna began to insist that Lusa go home. Herb could take her, she suggested, and then come back to wait out the evening with the rest of the family. Or someone else could do it—there was a volunteer, a Widener cousin, who would stay with her so she wouldn’t have to be alone in the house until the others got there.

  “But why should I go home if you’re all still staying?” Lusa asked, as muddled as a child. And then, like a mu
ddled child who senses she’s being wronged, she pushed her faltering will into a dogged single-mindedness. She told Mary Edna she would stay here till the end, until the last person had said good-bye to Cole and left this room. She would see the back of Herb Goins’s bald head and the hind ends of Mary Edna, Lois, Jewel, Emaline, and Hannie-Mavis pass through that door, and then she would kiss her husband good-bye. She didn’t think about Cole’s body or anything else as she declared her intention to stay. She just repeated it, more angrily each time, until she made it come true.

  Two days and two nights after the wake, Lusa still hadn’t slept. She couldn’t understand how her mind could fail to collapse over her body’s exhaustion. But it was the opposite: the more tired she felt, the more adamantly her mind seemed to want to keep vigil. Over what? Nobody’s going to steal the silver, she mused, not that she would give a hoot if somebody did—and well somebody might, the house was so jammed with visitors. On Friday afternoon, right after the funeral, she had dozed off for just a minute on the parlor couch in a room full of people dressed in their Sunday clothes. She could swear it was the quiet that woke her, the fact that their talk of crops and rain and beef prices and rheumatism suddenly ceased when they realized she was sleeping. Lusa had opened her eyes onto their sorrowful, silent stares, as if she herself were the occasion of a wake, and she’d felt the possibility of sleep frozen away from her ever since.

  Things at least quieted down after dark, when all the reasonable hours for eating or visiting were past. Even that nudnick the minister wouldn’t show up now. But nights were the worst for Lusa. She had to prowl the upper rooms, avoiding the bedroom where she and Cole had slept but effectively being trapped upstairs since Jewel and Hannie-Mavis still held the downstairs, for the fifth night in a row. Apparently they had moved in. It was Saturday now—Sunday morning, rather, could that be right? Didn’t they need to go home to their husbands and children? Lusa lay on top of the coverlet on the daybed in the spare room (her sisters-in-law called it the girls’ room), listening to the toneless mutter of their conversation. She wished for deafness—she had already overheard too much, too many suppositions about her fragility, her plans, her lack of religious faith or even her own kin to lean on. Mary Edna had said to the minister, sotto voce, “Now, you know, the wife isn’t Christian.” As though that explained, in part, her impossible bad fortune. All of them, sisters and neighbors, intimated to one another the mysteries of her father’s long-lost parentage (“that Jewish business, in the war”) and her mother’s more recent poor health (“back in the spring, sad—no, not all that old”), without understanding how life had left Lusa with two speechless parents. Ever since the stroke, her mother’s frantic eyes searched so desperately for words that Lusa could hardly bear to see it, while her father resigned himself to the silence as if it were his own death and he’d been waiting for it. When she called to tell him her awful news, his son-in-law dead, her father seemed slow to grasp how this new tragedy was connected with him. They hadn’t even discussed his coming for the funeral.

  Hannie-Mavis and Jewel were down there in the kitchen now, mousy, downcast Jewel playing foil to the more dramatic Handy-Makeup, whose tears invoked constant facial repair (though the emotive Emaline had outdone her earlier by letting out loud wails in front of Cole’s baby picture). Things seemed to calm down a lot when the visitors left, but Lusa could still hear them talking and handling food. Everything in the kitchen remained exactly as their mother had organized it. When Lusa had tried to rearrange the cupboards, they’d all treated it as a mistake to be repaired and forgiven. She could picture the two of them now, their hands uncrinkling and reusing squares of aluminum foil to cover the casseroles. The incessant opening and closing of the refrigerator—a whine and a hiss—had become the theme music to Lusa’s misery.

  If only she could sleep, only leave this place for a little while.

  When the Regulator clock downstairs chimed one o’clock, she gave up. Sleep would not come to her tonight. There were ghosts everywhere, even here in the neutral guest bedroom where Lusa had hardly spent an hour of her life before this. The bed had no memories in it, but there was Cole’s big bass fiddle standing up in the corner, spooking her with its presence as badly as if it were a man standing there in the shadows. She kept thinking of Cole’s hands on its neck sliding fluidly up and down, as if there were still some parts of him that hadn’t yet conceded to die. One more piece of the bottomless unfairness of this death: she’d never really taken the time to listen to him play. He’d let the music go in recent years, though she knew back in high school he’d been good enough to travel around the area with a bluegrass band. Out of the Blue, it was called. She wondered who the other members were—the fiddle, the guitar, the mandolin, all played by hands that probably had shaken hers in the last few days, though no one had mentioned it. Now Cole was permanently missing from their number, like a tooth knocked out, and his upright bass stood waiting in its corner. She stared at its dark, glossy curves, realizing that the instrument was old, probably older even than this hundred-year-old house. Other dead men had surely played it before Cole. She’d never asked him where it came from. How strange that you could share the objects of your life with whole communities of the dead and never give them a single thought until one of your own crossed over. Lusa had come only lately to this truth: she was living among ghosts.

  She sighed and got up. She would go back to her own bedroom and read Nabokov or something to shut off her mind. Sleep wouldn’t be possible in that bed, either—least of all there—but the bedroom at least had a reading light. A book would make morning come sooner. She thought of how Cole used to rise at five A.M., even earlier in the summer, and how she used to dread the break of day with its tangle of work and choices. That dread was nothing, now, compared to the unbounded misery of a sleepless night. At this moment she would give her soul for daybreak.

  She found her slippers and skated over the creaky floorboards, heading downstairs to look for the book she thought she’d left in the parlor. In her present state of mind, who knew? She could just as easily have left it in the refrigerator. Earlier today she’d poured the minister a glass of iced tea, stirred in the sugar, placed the sugar-bowl lid on the glass and set it back in the cupboard, then served Brother Leonard the sugar bowl. She hadn’t even noticed anything was amiss until Jewel silently got up to reverse the mistake.

  She couldn’t face any of them after that. Only now, finally, did it seem safe to go down and look for her book. The kitchen had been quiet for a while. Her sisters-in-law must be asleep at their posts on the parlor and living-room couches.

  But a fluttering white ascent startled her on the stairs: Jewel or Hannie-Mavis, one of the two, flying upstairs in her nightgown.

  “I was coming to check on you. I heard you moving around.” Jewel, it was.

  “Oh. I was just coming down to get a book.”

  “You can’t be reading now, honey. You need to sleep.”

  Lusa’s shoulders fell helplessly in the darkness. Tell Lazarus he needs to get up.

  “I can’t,” she said. “I’ve tried and tried, but I can’t.”

  “I know. I brought you something to take. I got these from Dr. Gibben when Shel went away. I had the same thing.”

  Went away. Jewel’s husband had left her three or four years ago, a fact so fully undeclared by the family that Lusa had fully forgotten it. And so, take what—poison? Lusa felt for Jewel’s hands, heard the clicking rattle of the little plastic bottle. Racked her useless brain for meaning. “Oh, a sleeping pill?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I don’t think I could.”

  “They won’t hurt you any.”

  “I hardly ever take anything, though. Not even aspirin for a headache. I’m kind of scared of pills. I almost feel like I’m scared of falling asleep right now, too. Does that seem silly?”

  Jewel’s white nightgown hung from the peaks of its ruffled shoulders, suspended in the air like a moth or a ghost. Her voice ca
me from the darkness above it. “I know. You want to just close your eyes on all of it, but at the same time you’re thinking there’s something you need to see, and you’ll miss it.”

  “That’s right.” Lusa leaned forward in the darkness, amazed, wanting to touch the face she couldn’t see to make sure it was really Jewel. She couldn’t reconcile this wise compassion with the woman she knew. The empty vessel, as she had called her.

  “After a while, you…I don’t know how to say it.” The voice paused, growing shy, and then Lusa could see in her mind’s eye that this was Jewel. “After a while you stop missing a man, you know, in a physical way. The Lord helps you forget.”

  “Oh, God.” Lusa let out a whimper, recalling a body so heavy to her touch, so much like congealed fluid, that she had recoiled from it, just grazing the forehead with her lips before running away.

  She sank onto the carpeted stair and began to sob. She couldn’t even feel embarrassed, didn’t have the energy. The white-winged apparition above her lowered itself down and hugged her tightly.

  After a minute they let go of each other. “What am I saying?” Jewel cried softly. “You’re so young and pretty. You’ll marry again. I know you can’t even think of it now, but you will.”

  Lusa felt emptied out. “You’re young, too, Jewel. The same as me.”

  “No,” she said. “Not the same. For me it’s done.”

  “Why?”

  “Shhh.” She put her hand gently across Lusa’s mouth and then stroked her hair. “You need to sleep. You have to give in sometime. You get to a point to where you just start wishing you wasn’t living, and that’s worse than being scared.”