“And then one day you’re here, Eddie Bondo. And then one day you’re not. What’s that supposed to mean?”
He spoke slowly: “It’s not supposed to mean anything.”
“Damn straight it’s not.”
“I’m gone, then, no problem. Is that what you’re saying you want?”
She grabbed her shirt and put it on, dusting damp sawdust from her skin and feeling angry and pathetic. The shirt was inside out, she realized when she tried to button it, so she tied the tails in a knot instead and quickly pulled on her shorts. She hoped to God he wasn’t looking at her. She tried to slow down her breathing and remember what she used to be. She crawled to the end of the tunnel and sat there at the edge, facing out, right on the margin where old chestnut wood dissolved into leafy forest floor.
“Deanna. I said, do you want me to go?”
“No. And I’ll tell you straight, I despise you for it.”
“For what?”
She still didn’t turn around to look at him, didn’t need to see that face. Spoke to the woods instead. “For shit. For me wanting you to come back.”
When this day started, she’d been content. Finally, after fifteen days of heart-race and butterfly-stomach over any crackle in the woods that might have been his footstep, she’d stopped listening. She was sure of it. She could recall the even-keeled pleasure of hiking up the trail alone, thinking of nothing but this log, trying to picture how the forest had looked back when chestnuts were the dominant tree of the eastern forests. It was something she could see in her mind’s eye. This giant would have been the tallest, most immortal thing on its mountain—until the day a fungal blight stepped off a ship in some harbor, grinned at America, and took down every chestnut tree from New York to Alabama. A whole landscape could change, just like that.
She sat still, ignoring her own body and the one that breathed behind her. Out in the light she could almost see the calm air beginning to gather itself for the afternoon, the oxygen burgeoning between the damp leaves. These trees were the lungs of her mountain—not her mountain, nobody’s damn mountain, this mountain that belonged to scarlet tanagers, puffballs, luna moths, and coyotes. This shadowy, spirited world she lived in was preparing to exhale. It would be afternoon, and then it would be evening and then night. It would pour down rain. He would share her bed.
She wiped tears from the side of her face with the back of her wrist and reached out with her other hand to press her fingertips into the soft, crumbling wood. She touched her fingers to her upper lip, breathing that earthy smell, tasting the wood with her tongue. She had loved this old log fiercely. It embarrassed her to admit it. Only a child was allowed to love an inanimate thing so desperately or possess it so confidently. But it had been hers. Now the spell was gone, the magic of this place that had been hers alone, unknown to any man.
{8}
Moth Love
Lusa stood on the front porch, watching rain pour over the front eave in long silver strings. The gabled roof of the farmhouse—her farmhouse—was made of grooved tin that shunted the water into channels running down its steep sides. Some of the trickles poured over as clear filaments, like fishing line, while others looked beaded, like strings of pearls. She’d put buckets on the wide steps under some of the trickles and discovered that each string of droplets tapped out its own distinctive rhythm in its bucket. All morning, the rhythm of each stream never changed—it only grew softer as the bucket filled, then returned to its hollow rat-tat-a-rat-tat-tat! after she emptied the bucket.
She’d set out the buckets to collect a drink for the potted ferns on the porch, which were out of the rain’s reach and turning brown, even in this soggy weather, as brittle and desolate as her internal grief. She’d meant to return to her work, but the rhythms arrested her. It was a relief to stand still for a minute, listening, without anyone giving her pitying looks and ordering her to go lie down. Hannie-Mavis and Jewel had gone home finally, though they still came up several times a day to “check” on her, which mostly meant telling her to eat, even what to eat, as if she were a child. But then they’d go away afterward. Lusa could stand on her own porch in a pair of jeans and Cole’s work shirt and watch the rain and let her mind go numb if she felt like it. If she hadn’t had a gallon of cherries to pit and pack into canning jars she could have amused herself all morning out here, setting a bucket under each downspout and making up a song to go with it. Her grandfather Landowski’s game: he used to tap out unexpected rhythms with his fingertips on her bony knees, inventing mysterious Balkan melodies that he’d hum against the beat.
“Your zayda, the last landowner in our line,” her father used to declare sarcastically, because his father had had a sugar-beet farm on the Ner River north of Lodz, and he’d lost it in the war, fleeing Poland in possession of nothing but his life, a young son and wife, and a clarinet. “Your great zayda who made a name for himself in New York as a klezmer musician, before leaving his wife and child for an American girl he met in a nightclub.” Lusa knew, though it wasn’t discussed, that with his young mistress the old man had even sired a second family, all of whom perished in a tenement fire—her zayda included. It was hard to say which part of the story Lusa’s father held against him—most of it, she supposed. When they flew to New York to witness the burial of the charred remains, Lusa was still too young to understand her father’s feelings and all the ironies of the loss. Zayda Landowski hadn’t visited her mind for many years. And now here he was, in a syncopated string of water drops on a farmhouse porch in Zebulon County. He’d started out as a farmer before bending the rest of his life around loss. What would he have made of a rainy day in this hollow, with its rich smells of decomposition and sweet new growth?
Lusa smoothed her shirttail and composed herself to look busy and well nourished, for here came Herb and Mary Edna’s green truck bouncing up the drive. But it was not the Menacing Eldest behind the wheel this time. It was her husband, Herb, Lusa saw as he pulled up in front of the house, and Lois’s husband, Big Rickie, who got out on the passenger’s side. Both men tucked their heads down and held the bills of their caps with their right hands as they jogged toward her through the rain. They ducked through the beaded curtain of drips, carefully avoiding her buckets on the steps, and stomped their boots several times on the porch floorboards before taking off their caps. The scents rising from their work overalls put Cole right there with them: dust, motor oil, barn hay. She breathed in, drawing from strange men’s clothes these molecules of her husband.
“He needs a gutter put on this porch,” Rickie told Herb, as if they also agreed to the fact of Cole’s presence here—and Lusa’s absence. What mission required this delegation of husbands? Were they going to order her to leave now, or what? Would she put up a fight or go peacefully?
“Rickie, Herb,” she said, squaring her shoulders. “Nice to see you.”
Both men nodded at her, then glanced back out at the rain, the absent gutter, and the waterlogged fields where they seemed eager to return to work. She eyed the green cockleburs planted like tiny land mines on the cuffs of their khaki trousers.
“Another good hard rain,” Herb observed. “Too bad we need it like a hole in the head. One more week of this, the frogs’ll drown.”
“Supposed to clear up by Saturday, though,” said Rickie.
“’At’s right,” Herb agreed. “Otherwise we wouldn’t have bothered you, but it’s supposed to clear up.”
“To tell me it’s supposed to stop raining, you came up here?” Lusa asked, looking from one sun-toughened face to the other for some clue. It was always like this, anytime she got wedged into a conversation with her brothers-in-law. This sense of having wandered into a country where they spoke English but all the words meant something different.
“Yep,” said Herb. Rickie nodded to corroborate. They looked like a comedy team: stout, bald Herb was the front man, while tall, gangling Rickie stood mostly silent with his cap in hand and his wild black hair molded to the shape of the cap.
He had an Adam’s apple like a round oak gall on the stalk of his long neck. People called him Big Rickie even though his son Little Rickie had, at seventeen, surpassed him in many ways. Lusa felt some sympathy with Little Rickie’s fate. Life in Zebulon: the minute you’re born you’re trapped like a bug, somebody’s son or wife, a place too small to fit into.
“So,” Herb interjected into the silence. “We’ll be needing to set Cole’s tobacco.”
“Oh,” Lusa said, surprised. “It’s time for that, isn’t it.”
“I’ll tell you the truth, it’s past time. All this rain’s been keeping everybody’s fields mucked up, and now here it is June, perty near too late.”
“Well, it’s only, what, the fifth or something? June fifth?”
“’At’s right. Blue mold will be setting in here come July, if the plants aren’t up big enough by then.”
“You can spray for blue mold if you have to,” Lusa said. Tobacco pathology was not exactly her department, but she’d heard Cole speak of it. She felt desperate to know something in front of these men.
“Can,” they agreed, with limited enthusiasm.
“Have you both got your own tobacco plants in? You should go ahead and do your own first.”
Herb nodded. “I leased out my allotment this year, since them durn cows are keeping me too busy to mess with it. Me and him got Big Rickie’s in on Monday morning, when we had that break in the weather. That puts Cole next.”
And what about Jewel? Lusa wondered. Are they also running her life, since her husband ran off with a waitress from Cracker Barrel? “So what you’re saying is,” she interpreted cautiously, her heart pounding in her ears, “on Saturday you and your boys will be coming up here to set the tobacco.”
“’At’s right. If it dries out for a day first.”
“And what about me? Do I get a say?”
Both men glanced at her with the exact same eye: surprised, fearful, put out. But wasn’t it her farm? She looked away from them, inhaling the rich scents of mud and honeysuckle and listening to her childish project, her bucket on the step: Tat-tat-a-tat-tat-a-tat-tat-tat! She heard a song against the beat, distinctly, the trilling clarinet rising like laughter and the mandolin as insistent as clapping hands. Klezmer music.
“It’s my farm now,” she said aloud. Her voice quavered, and her fingers felt hot.
“Yep,” Herb agreed. “But we don’t mind helping Cole out like any other year. Tobacco’s a lot of work, takes a whole family. ’At’s how people around here do it, anyways.”
“I was here last year,” she said tersely. “I brought hot coffee out to you and Cole and Little Rickie and that other boy, that cousin from Tazewell. If you recall.”
Big Rickie smiled. “I recall you trying your hand at riding behind the tractor and setting a row of plants. Some of them ended up with their roots a-dangling up in the air and their leaves planted in the ground.”
“Cole drove too fast on purpose! We were just newlyweds. He was teasing me in front of you guys.” Lusa flushed pink up to the hairline, remembering her ride on the little platform attached to the rear of the tractor, grabbing the floppy young tobacco plants from the box beside her. Their disintegrating texture was like that of tissue paper; trying to plunge them into the chunky clay of the furrow as it passed beneath her seemed impossible. They had been married only two days. “It was my first time behind a tractor,” she contended.
“It was,” Big Rickie conceded. “And most of them plants was roots-down.”
Herb steered back to the business at hand. “We got no sets of our own left, but Big Rickie got up a good price on a batch from Jackie Doddard.”
“I appreciate that. But what if I don’t want to plant tobacco this year?”
“You don’t have to do a thing. You can stay in the house if you want to.”
“No, I mean, what if I don’t want tobacco planted on my farm?”
Now they did not glance at Lusa sideways; they stared.
“Well,” she said, “why plant more tobacco when everybody’s trying to quit smoking? Or should be trying to, if they’re not already. The government’s officially down on it, now that word’s finally out that cancer’s killing people. And everybody’s blaming us.”
Both men turned their eyes out toward the rain and the fields, where it was clear they suddenly wished they could be, rain or no rain. She could see them working hard not to finger the packs of Marlboros in their shirt pockets.
“What would you be wanting to plant, then?” Herb asked at last.
“Well, I hadn’t really thought. What about corn?”
Herb and Big Rickie exchanged a smile, passing the joke between them. “About three dollar a bushel, that’s how about it,” Herb replied. “Unless you mean feed corn, that’s more like fifty cents a bushel around here. But a-course you’d be talking about sweet corn.”
“Of course,” Lusa said.
“Well, let’s see. Cole’s got a five-acre tobacco bottom, so put it in sweet corn, that’d get you about five hundred bushels, maybe six in a good year, not that we ever have one of those around here.” Herb rolled his eyes up, counting on his fingers. “About fifteen hundred dollar. Minus your diesel for your tractor, your seed, and a whole bunch of fertilizer, because corn’s a heavy feeder. And some luck getting it sold on the right day. You might end up making near about…eight hundred dollars. On your corn crop.”
“Oh, I see.” Lusa blushed deeper. “We usually clear around twelve or thirteen thousand for the tobacco.”
“Yep,” said Big Rickie. “That’d be about right. Thirty-seven hundred an acre, minus your tractor costs, your sets, and your chemicals.”
“It’s what we live on.”
She’d said it softly, but the words we and live hung heavily in the air. She felt them pressing on her shoulders like the hands of a disapproving matron trying to get the message across to a selfish child: “Sit down, your turn is over.”
Tat-tat-a-tat-tat-a-tat-tat-tat. Grandfather Landowski’s rhythm section was fading out. She needed to empty the buckets and start them over again. She wished these men would go away. Just leave her to muddle through in her own way, however mistaken. She wished she could ask someone for advice without feeling skinned alive and laughed at.
“What else can people grow around here, on little scraps of land at the bottom of a hollow? What can earn you enough to live on, besides tobacco?”
Big Rickie warmed to the subject of bad news. “Turner Blevins up ’air tried tomatoes. They told him he could get ten thousand dollar an acre. What they didn’t tell him was if two other guys in the county try the same thing, they’ve done flooded the market. Blevins fed thirty-five hundred pound of tomatoes to his hogs and dished the rest under.”
“What about the other two guys?” Lusa asked.
“Same. They all three lost money. One of them was so sold on tomatoes, he’d put him in a ten-thousand-dollar irrigation system to water ’em with, is what I heard. Now he’s back in tobacco, and just hoping for a real dry year so he can turn on his fancy spanking hoses.”
“But that doesn’t make sense, that they’d all lose money. People need lots of tomatoes.”
“Not all on the same day they don’t, and that’s how tomatoes comes in. If you can’t get them suckers all into somebody’s grocery cart in five days or less, then you’ve got you some expensive hog food. And out here in the boondocks, no shipper’s going to touch you before he’s sure he can make his cut.”
Lusa crossed her arms, despairing of the depth of her ignorance.
“Your tobacco, you see, now,” Rickie continued, “you hang it in the barn to cure, and then it can just go on hanging there as long as it needs to, till the time’s good to sell. Everybody in the county can grow tobacco, but every leaf of it might get lit and smoked on a different day of the year, in a different country of the world.”
“Imagine that,” Lusa said, sounding sarcastic, though she was actually a little astonished. She’d never thought throu
gh these basic lessons before. Tobacco’s value, largely, lay in the fact that it kept forever and traveled well.
They stood silent for a while, all three of them staring out into the yard. The rain fell on the big leaves of the catalpa tree, popping them down like the keys on a typewriter.
Lusa said, “There’s got to be something else I can make decent money on. The barn’s got to have a new roof this year.”
Herb smirked. “Mary-jay-wanna. I hear that brings in about the same price per acre as tomatoes, and the market’s solid.”
“I see,” Lusa said. “You’re making fun of me. Well, I appreciate your offer to set this weekend, but I’d like to think about the tobacco. Can you still get the sets from Jackie if I let you know tomorrow or the next day?”
“I expect so. Jackie’s got that hydroponic setup. It didn’t work out too good last year, but this year he’s done growed more’n he knows what to do with.”
“Well, good. I’ll let you know, then, before Saturday. I’ll decide what to do.”
“If it stops raining,” Herb said, lest Lusa think she was in charge.
“Right. And if it doesn’t, then we’re all sunk together, right? I’ll make the same nothing off the tobacco I didn’t grow as you will off the crop you tried to get put in. And think of the time and money I’ll save!”
Herb stared at her. Big Rickie smiled out toward the garage. “That’s a smart lady, Herb,” he said. “I believe she’s got the right attitude for farming.”
“Well,” Lusa said, slapping her hands together. “I’ve got a gallon of cherries in there that are going to rot if I don’t get them canned today. So I’ll call you Friday.”
Herb leaned out toward the edge of the porch, looking up the mountainside toward the orchard. She was controlling her breathing, counting the seconds until these two got into the truck and lit their cigarettes and drove away and she could sob on the porch swing. Standing up to them took almost more guts than she had.
Prodigal Summer Page 11
