Prodigal Summer

by Barbara Kingsolver

  Then at last he was lying on his back on the grass underneath her winesaps. She knelt over him, peering down with concern, and he gasped at the sight of her red-bandanna-crowned head reeling wildly through space. He quickly turned his head to the side; this wasn’t the stroke—it always made him dizzy to lie flat on his back looking up.

  “Miss Rawley,” he said weakly once the spinning of the world had ceased, “I don’t like to trouble you. You go on with your business, but maybe if you get a chance directly you could call up the ambulance. I think I’ve had a stroke.” He closed his eyes.

  When she didn’t answer, he opened his eyes and saw that she was staring down at his left leg, in apparent horror. He felt confused—would there be blood, with a stroke? Or some kind of deformity? Surely not, but he couldn’t make himself look.

  “Mr. Walker,” she said, “you haven’t had any stroke.”

  “What?”

  “You haven’t gotten a stroke. You’ve gotten a turtle.”

  “What?” He struggled to sit up. Suddenly his chest felt better and his head was perfectly clear.

  “Look! You’ve got a snapping turtle hanging on to the side of your boot. I’ll bet that thing weighs fifteen pounds.”

  Garnett was embarrassed beyond speech. He stared down at the monster in its dark, humped shell, a slime-green creature that had sprung from some other part of God’s mind, certainly, than most. It had gotten hold of the edge of his leather sole with the vise grip the snapping turtle is famous for, and true to its fame, it appeared to have no plans on letting go until Zebulon County got thunder. Although it did seem to Garnett that its dark little beady eyes were looking up at him fairly sheepishly. Poor thing, thought Garnett, to have to commit yourself so hard to one moment of poor judgment.

  In a springtime as rainy as this one, snapping turtles strayed from their home ponds into wet ditches, looking for new places to find their hideous mates and breed their hideous children. Of course there would be one waiting for him in that weedy ditch under all those briars—that swamp that had been created by Nannie Rawley—and if he happened to have a turtle on his foot now, it was entirely her fault.

  “Well I knew that,” he said, waving offhandedly at the giant turtle. “I just wasn’t feeling well, of a sudden. But I’m better now. I’ll just go home by the road, I think.”

  She screwed up her face, shaking her head. “Not till I get that dinosaur off your heel. Let me go get a stick and whack it to make it turn loose of you.”

  “No, really. You don’t have to.”

  “Oh, Mr. Walker, don’t be ridiculous.”

  “Well, Miss Rawley,” he snipped, “I can’t feature it. Knowing what a soft spot you have in your heart for pests and vermin.”

  “You don’t know the half of it. I’ve had a grudge against snapping turtles ever since that big monster in my pond ate the feet off one of my ducks. There’s nothing I’d rather do than bang this old bastard’s brains out.” She peered down at Garnett, who winced, both at her foul language and at her manner. “But you’d better take off your boot,” she added. “I couldn’t be held responsible.”

  “No!” he cried, gaining control of the situation. Her hands had felt so strong, guiding him up the bank like the grip of destiny itself. Like the claws of a she-bear! Having those hands on him once was enough for today. He wasn’t going to undress for her. “No, now,” he told her sternly, “there isn’t any call to take out your grudges on this old fellow. He and I will just head back home now.”

  “You will,” she said.

  “Yes. Thank you for your help.”

  Garnett got to his feet as gracefully as possible, considering, and limped down Nannie Rawley’s gravel drive toward the road. The lopsided scrape of his walk sounded like a car with a flat tire. Now he would have to hike one hundred yards up the road to get to his own driveway, and pray to the Lord no one came driving along at that moment to see Garnett Walker transporting fifteen pounds of turtle up Highway 6 in a previously unheard-of fashion.

  He turned sideways to cast a glance back. She just stood there in her bandanna and rolled-up dungarees, frowning, with her pale, skinny little arms crossed tightly against her blouse. She was quite put out with him, it seemed, or else she was making her mind up that he was crazy as a loon—one of the two. It made no difference either way to Garnett Walker.

  “Oh!” he said suddenly, for he’d nearly forgotten the whole business. He turned back toward her again, tilting his head a little to the side. “I’m afraid your No Spray sign landed somewhere down there in the weeds at the bottom of the road cut.”

  Her glare dissolved to a happy beam he could see plainly, for it lit up her face like sunshine on Groundhog Day. “Don’t you worry, Mr. Walker. The spray truck went by at seven o’clock this morning.”

  {7}

  Predators

  Hey there,” he said, as if Eddie Bondo himself standing in the trail were no more unexpected a find on this warm afternoon than the cluster of puffball mushrooms she’d paused just a minute before to admire.

  “Hey yourself,” she answered quietly. As if her heart were not pounding at its cage like a sudden captive. “How’d you find me up here?”

  “I sniffed you out, girl. You’re a sweet, easy trail for a man to follow.”

  Her abdominal muscles tensed. He might have thought he was joking, but she knew some truths about human scent. She’d walked down city streets in Knoxville and turned men’s heads, one after another, on the middle day of her cycle. They didn’t know why, knew only that they wanted her. That was how pheromones seemed to work, in humans at least—nobody liked to talk about it. Maybe excepting Eddie Bondo. “I’m fertile, that’s what got to you,” she said frankly, testing him out, but he didn’t flinch. “Just so you know, this is the day.” She laughed. “That’s what called you down from Clinch Peak.”

  Eddie Bondo laughed, too, shining that high-beam smile at her through the late-morning drizzle. Could she pretend not to rejoice? How could she not want him back?

  “How can you know a thing like that?” he asked.

  “What, that my body’s talking to yours?” She stomped her boot down on the puffballs, releasing a cloud of spores that rose and curled like golden brown smoke, glittering in the sunlit air between them. Sex cells, they were, a mushroom’s bliss, its attempt to fill the world with its mushroom progeny. “Or how can I know about my timing? Which do you mean?”

  He stomped the puffballs, too, squashing the leathery white skins like empty baseballs, releasing more puffs. The supply seemed endless. Deanna wondered if these tiny particles would cling to their damp skin or enter their bodies on an inhaled breath.

  “Both, I guess,” he said finally.

  She shrugged. Was he serious? A woman knew both those things if she was paying attention. Deanna turned and headed up-mountain, confident he would follow. “I sleep outside a lot,” she said. “I’m on the same schedule as the moon.”

  He laughed. “What are you, a were-lady?”

  She stopped and turned to look at him. It amazed her, the obvious animal facts people refused to know about their kind. “Any woman will ovulate with the full moon if she’s exposed to enough moonlight. It’s the pituitary gland does it, I guess. It takes a while to get there, but then you stay.”

  Eddie Bondo seemed amused by this information. “So back in the old days, when they slept on the ground around the fire, wrapped up in skins or however they did, then what? You’re saying all the women in the world came into heat at the same time?”

  She shrugged again, not really wanting to talk about it if he thought it was funny. It felt like betraying a secret. “Convenient, if you think about it. Full moon, plenty of light.”

  “Damn,” he said. “No wonder that sucker drives men crazy.”

  “Yep.” She turned uphill again, feeling his eyes on every muscle in her long, rain-slick thighs and calves, her gluteus maximus, and the small of her back as she mounted the slope. She was wearing cutoff jeans, a
thin cotton shirt, and no bra. She’d had no thoughts of Eddie Bondo when she dressed that morning, only a rush of spring fever and, evidently, a body that wanted to be seen.

  “Where you going?” he asked.

  “Out for a walk in the rain.”

  “It’s just about let up,” he contended. “Finally.”

  “Don’t get used to it. We’re in for more.”

  “Don’t tell me that. How can you tell?”

  How? About six different ways: first, a wind just strong enough to make the leaves show their white undersides. “I don’t know,” she said aloud, shutting that door out of habit. Although it occurred to her that this might be the one man she’d met since her father died who would be interested to hear all six.

  “You hillbillies around here must have gills like fish. Last few weeks I’ve been thinking I was going to melt.”

  “You didn’t, I see.”

  “Turns out I’m not made of sugar.”

  “Turns out.” She smiled to herself.

  “So. Where you going?”

  “Nowhere—a place I like to go.”

  He laughed. “That sounds mighty unambitious.”

  “No, I mean, nowhere important. From a wildlife-management point of view.” From anybody’s point of view, probably.

  “Well now, pretty lady. Does that mean you’re off duty?”

  She caught her breath, wondering at his power to manipulate her desire. She wanted to stop and tear him apart on the trail, swallow him alive, suck his juices, and lick him from her fingers. “It’s just a place I like,” she said evenly. “More a thing than a place. It’s right up here at the top of these switchbacks.”

  The trail was extremely steep from this point on to where it lay, the great old friendly hollowed-out shelter she was headed for, a hundred more feet up the mountain. She could hear his footsteps and breathing right behind her, synchronized with hers.

  “Animal, vegetable, or mineral?” he asked.

  “Vegetable. Dead vegetable. Since way before we were born.”

  “Is it…a big old hollow tree?”

  She froze but didn’t turn around.

  “About ten feet long and yea tall, so you just have to duck your head when you walk into it? Nope, never seen it.”

  She wheeled to face him, her braid flying. “That’s my place!”

  “Don’t you think a few other people might have run across it? It’s been lying there about a hundred years.”

  “No! Nobody else ever comes up here.” She broke into a run, but he overtook her from behind, a little faster than she was at an uphill sprint. With his hands on her hips he pulled but mostly pushed her, and before she could dodge him they had reached the tunnel tree, there was no turning back from it now. There it was, and lodged in the shadows inside of it, stashed neatly away from the rain, were his things: his pack, his tin cup and coffeepot, his whole Eddie Bondo life.

  “I can’t believe you’ve been here,” she said, still denying it to herself.

  “Lots of critters been here, don’t you think?”

  “No,” she said, and nothing more because his mouth was on hers and his body was pushing her inside. He moved his pack aside, moved her backward into the delicate darkness toward the tunnel’s very center, the safest place.

  “It’s mine,” she whispered.

  “Who cut it down, then?”

  She could see nothing but his face, feel nothing but the exquisite grain of his skin against her cheek and his hands on her buttons. “Nobody. It’s a chestnut. Blight killed all the chestnuts fifty years ago.”

  “Nobody chopped it down?”

  She knew it was possible. Her dad had told her how people had watched the chestnuts mysteriously dying and rushed to take what was left standing since they needed the lumber so badly. But no, if somebody had gone to that trouble he’d have taken the wood, not left it lying here for dead. She started to say this, “No,” but found she couldn’t form the word against Eddie Bondo’s lips. It became nonsensical beside the fact of her naked back pressed against the soft black crumbling curved inside wall of this womb she had never shared with any twin. He held her breasts in his two hands, looking down at her. She couldn’t bear how much she loved that gaze and that touch, those palms on her nipples and those fingertips tracing her ribs and enclosing her sides, pulling her against him as if she were something small and manageable. He kissed her neck, then her collarbones. Stopped briefly then and stood up on his knees to fish for the crinkling packet in his jeans pocket, that premeditation. Of course, he knew she was fertile. He’d be careful.

  She sat curled with her back to the wall and her chin on her knees. The tunnel was wide enough that he could kneel in front of her, facing her, to untie her boots and slide off her shorts and his own clothes. It was warm enough for nakedness, a rich, dark warmth full of the scent of sweet old wood. He pressed his face against her knees.

  “The full moon?” he asked, against her skin. “That’s the secret of everything?”

  She didn’t say yes or no.

  His hands climbed her like a tree, from ankles to knees to waist to shoulders until he cupped her face and looked into her eyes like a Gypsy trying to read the future in tea leaves. He seemed so happy, so earnest. “For that, men write stupid poems and howl and hold up liquor stores? When all they really want is every woman in the world, all at the same time?”

  She held his eyes but couldn’t speak to tell him how far she’d left all that behind her, so far that even her obedient ovaries sometimes failed to be moved by the moon these days, these years in her middle forties. Some months, no heads turned. She’d been so sure that was what she wanted. How could this be, Eddie Bondo looking in her eyes, taking hold of her braid, and wrapping it around and around his wrist until he had her cheek pinned to his forearm and turned gently away from him? She lay facedown with her head on her hands and the full length of his body against her, his penis gently pressing her solar plexus and his lips touching her temple. Between the skin of her back and his chest she could feel small, prickly islands of chestnut dust. “Deanna,” he said in her ear, “I wanted you all the way from West Virginia. I was going to want you from here to Wyoming if I didn’t come back.”

  He breathed on the skin beneath her earlobe and her back arched like a reflex, like a moth drawn helpless to a flame. She had no words, but her body answered his perfectly as he slid himself down and took the nape of her neck in his teeth like a lion on a lioness in heat: a gentle, sure bite, by mutual agreement impossible to escape.

  By late morning the rain had stopped completely, setting free a moment of afternoon sun. It stretched into the tunnel’s mouth to lap at their naked feet and ankles as they lay side by side. The sensation roused Deanna from where she had been drifting, someplace near sleep but not quite in its full embrace. It was late, she realized with a start. She opened her eyes. This day was going. Was gone already, she might as well say it: to him, her time and all the choices she thought she’d made for good. Her gut clenched as distant thunder rumbled and echoed up the hollow, threatening more rain.

  She stared at the man who lay flat on his back beside her, sleeping the untroubled sleep of a landlord. Flecks of soft wood and crumbled leaves, shreds of her forest, clung to his body, freckling his cheek and shoulder and even his limp penis. She filled up with loathing for his talkative cockiness, those placid eyelids and the dead careless arm slung across her, heavy as lead. She threw it off of her and rolled away from him, but he moved from sleep to partial wakefulness and reached to draw her back to him.

  “No,” she said, shoving him, hard. “Just no, get off me!”

  His eyes flew open, but Deanna couldn’t stop her fists from lashing out hard at his chest and shoulders. A bile rose up in her gut, a rush of physical rage that might have branded him black and blue if her arms had found the strength for it before he gathered back his hunter’s wits. She nearly spit in his face when he restrained her with a grip like handcuffs on her forearms. This fury had tak
en her like a storm and left her trembling.

  “God, Deanna.”

  “Let me go.”

  “Not if you’re going to kill me. God, woman!” He held her forearms upright on either side of her face and studied her like a bad mistake. Like some mountain lion he’d accidentally caught in a leghold trap for squirrel.

  “Just let me go,” she said. “I want to get my clothes on.”

  Carefully he opened one hand, then the other, watching her arms as she moved away from him. “What?” he asked.

  “Why did you come back?” She spat the words.

  “You seemed pretty happy about it an hour ago.”

  She shook her head slowly, breathed out through her nose, pressed her lips together so hard they turned white.

  He persisted. “You didn’t want me to come back?”

  She hated that, too, his not knowing. She couldn’t look at him.

  “Christ almighty, Deanna, what?”

  “I didn’t need you here.”

  “I know that.”

  “You don’t know anything. You never saw me alone.”

  “I did, though.” There was a hint of that grin in his voice.

  She turned to face him with an animal glare. “Is that it? You were watching me like some damn predator and you think you have me now?”

  He didn’t answer this. She turned her back on him again. “I was just fine here before you showed up. For two years, while you were doing whatever you did all that time, I was right here. Not missing people or all the chitchat about the stuff they think they need to have or wear or make happen. For sure not pining for a boyfriend.”

  He didn’t respond. A scarlet tanager broke the silence with his song. She thought of the bird hidden in leaves somewhere, unseen by any human eye but nevertheless brilliant red. Nevertheless beautiful.