Prodigal Summer

by Barbara Kingsolver

  “I’m surprised you got cherry one off them trees this year,” Herb pronounced. “As many durn jaybirds as we’ve had. Last spring I come over here and shot the birds all out of there for Cole, but I never got around to it this year. So you got you enough for a pie or two anyways, did you?”

  Lusa managed to grimace a smile, wide-eyed and fierce. “Miracles happen, Herb.”

  That would be Jewel at the door, Lusa thought. Jewel thumping her umbrella out in the front hallway (they’d always come in without knocking, all of them, even when Lusa and Cole were newlyweds stealing sex in the afternoons), Jewel’s tired voice telling the kids to wipe their feet and hang up their raincoats on the pegs. Then they poured through the kitchen doorway, the older child carrying a box of canning jars on his head, balancing it with both hands. Lusa had called Jewel when she ran out of canning jars.

  “Come on in,” she said. “You can set the box right down there on the counter.”

  “Lord, call the police,” Jewel cried. “They’s been a murder in here!”

  Lusa laughed. “Looks like it, doesn’t it?” Her apron and the countertops were smeared garishly with the blood of hundreds of cherries. The hand-cranked pitter was clamped to the counter, a mass of dark pits glistening in the bucket underneath like something from a slaughterhouse. She’d been relieved when Jewel offered over the phone to come up and help her finish the canning. Lusa could recognize objectively, without really feeling it, that she needed company or she’d go crazy.

  Yet here was her sister-in-law with her hand to her mouth already, mortified by her slip, a joke about death. Lusa had hoped for a sturdier kind of company than this.

  “It’s OK, Jewel. I know Cole’s dead.”

  “Well, I didn’t…stupid me. Didn’t think.” She looked anguished.

  Lusa shrugged. “It’s not like you’re going to remind me of something I’ve forgotten about.”

  Jewel stood a minute longer with her hand to her mouth and tears welling, staring at Lusa, while her ten-year-old slowly circumnavigated the kitchen island, balancing the cardboard box of jars one-handed. The younger child, Lowell, reached up to steal a handful of cherries off the butcher block. Jewel gently swatted his hand away. “Aren’t people awful?” she asked Lusa, finally. “I know what you’re saying. When Shel—” But she stopped herself to shoo out the kids. “Go play outside.”

  “Mo-om, it-’s pouring down rain!”

  “It’s pouring down rain, Jewel. They can play on the back porch.”

  “OK, the back porch, then, but don’t bust anything.”

  “Hey, wait a sec, Chris, here.” Lusa scooped a pile of cherries into a plastic bowl and handed it to the older boy. “If you run out of stuff to do, there’s a broom and a dustpan out there.”

  “To sweep with?” “To play hockey with, you’re asking? Yes, to sweep with.”

  Jewel waited for the door to close behind them before she spoke. “When Shel left me, everybody just stopped saying his name or word one about him, like I’d never even been married. But we were, for some of those years—I mean, married. Even while we were still just dating, if you know what I mean. We ran off to Cumberland Falls two months before the wedding and called it our test-drive honeymoon.” For just a few seconds she stared at her hands with a faraway satisfaction, the most womanly expression Lusa had ever seen on Jewel. But then it vanished.

  “I swear it’s sad,” she finished, matter-of-factly. “Pretending that part of my life never happened.” She began to unscrew the clamp that held the antique steel cherry pitter to the counter. Lusa had spent half an hour solving the puzzle of that clamp, but of course the pitter had been their mother’s. Jewel would know it with her eyes closed.

  “This family’s intimidating, no doubt about it,” Lusa said. She wished she could say how hard it really was—how it felt to live among people who’d been using her kitchen appliances since before she was born. How they attacked her in unison if she tried to rearrange the furniture or hang her own family pictures. How even old Mrs. Widener haunted this kitchen, disapproving of Lusa’s recipes and jealous of her soups.

  “Oh, it’s not just the family,” Jewel said. “It’s everybody; it’s this town. Four years it’s been, and I still see people at Kroger’s go into a different checkout line so they won’t have to stand there and not say something to me about Shel.”

  Lusa mopped red juice from the counter with a sponge. “You’d think in four years they could come up with a new subject.”

  “You’d think. Not that it’s the same, Shel’s running off and Cole’s being…”

  “Dead,” Lusa said. “It’s the same. Around here, people act like losing your husband was contagious.” Lusa had been amazed at how quickly her status had changed: being single made her either invisible or dangerous. Or both, like a germ. She’d noticed it even at the funeral, especially among the younger ones, wives her own age who needed to believe marriage was a safe and final outcome.

  “Well, at least everybody knows you didn’t do anything to run your husband off.”

  Lusa took a pinafore apron out of the drawer and put the neck strap over Jewel’s head, then turned her around to tie the back. “What, and you did? God knows hand-to-mouth farming is a life anybody would run from. I considered leaving Cole a hundred times. Not because of him. Just because of everything.”

  “Lord, I know, it’s a misery,” Jewel said, though just then they were both gazing out the kitchen window at a drenched, billowy mock orange in full bloom in the backyard—and it was beautiful.

  Lusa took up her sponge again. “Don’t you dare tell your sisters I thought about leaving Cole. They’d chop me up and hide the pieces in canning jars.”

  Jewel laughed. “You make us sound so mean, honey.” She donned an oven mitt and lifted the huge, flat lid of the water-bath canner, holding it high in the air like a cymbal. “You want me to put the jars in to sterilize?”

  “Go ahead. What do you think I’ve got here, about eight quarts?”

  Jewel appraised the mound of pitted cherries on the stained cutting board, doing some form of math in her head, Lusa realized. She understood with some chagrin that she’d accepted the family’s judgment of Jewel as a child and not a woman, simply because she was manless.

  “Are you doing preserves, honey, or pie filling?”

  “Preserves, I guess, if I don’t run out of sugar. I already made eighteen pints.”

  “Of preserves?”

  Lusa felt foolish. “It’s a lot, I know. When I was up the ladder out there in the tree I was proud of myself for filling up buckets. But now I’m stuck with them.”

  “Oh no, you’ll be glad to have that jam. They’re the sweet cherries, aren’t they, off that double-trunked tree above the apple orchard? Boy, those are the best cherries. Daddy must have planted that tree before him and Mommy married. It was already big when we were kids.”

  “Really?” Lusa took in her gut the familiar pang of guilt for owning this tree that Jewel had grown up loving.

  “Yeah. They always said it got hit by lightning the winter Cole was born. That’s how it got split in two that way—lightning.”

  A lightning strike and a jackknifed truck, two unexpected events circumscribing a life—Lusa knew how far down that road her mind could go, so she made herself stop. She wondered instead how old Jewel had been that winter of his birth, whether she’d grown up as Cole’s playmate or his keeper. She’d never asked him these things about each of his sisters. She’d expected to have years to untangle those threads.

  Jewel must have sensed her gloom, because she spoke up brightly. “Eighteen pints is enough preserves. Let’s can the rest for pie filling.”

  “I can’t see myself making pies anymore, for just me. Since nobody seems to want to come here for dinner.”

  “Mary Edna was a stinker to you over that. There wasn’t any reason for her to get so high and mighty. Emaline thinks so, too; she told me. We both wish we still could have Thanksgiving up here at the
house.”

  Lusa’s head swam with this news. She’d never suspected she had allies at all, much less the support of a faction. How had she gotten here, stranded in this family without rhyme or reason? Suddenly she felt so exhausted by grief that she had to sink into a chair and put her head down on the table. Jewel let her be. Lusa could hear the jars clinking gently together, settling into the boiling water bath. Finally Jewel whispered, “I think you’ve got about six quarts to go, no more.”

  “That’s still a lot of preserves.”

  “Let’s make pie cherries, then. And if there’s any left over we’ll make some pies today. You make the best pie crust of anybody. Better than Mommy’s, I hate to say it.”

  “God, don’t say it out loud. Your mother haunts this kitchen. She used to stand in here stirring up fights between Cole and me.”

  Jewel gasped in mock dismay. “Now why would Mommy do that?”

  “The usual thing. Territorial jealousy.”

  The boys banged in through the screen door, preceded by their empty bowl like a pair of cooperative beggars. The minute Lusa re-filled it, though, want ceded to possession, and they started to slap and fight. “Ow, Chris won’t share!” Lowell howled.

  “Goodness, we’ve got no shortage of cherries in this kitchen. Here, I’ll get you your own bowl.” Lusa was careful to find another one the same size and to fill them both equally. When they retreated again to the back porch she felt a flush of pride at having satisfied them, however briefly. Children were not Lusa’s element. That was how she’d always put it to Cole, that babies made her nervous. Since moving here, though, she’d had glimpses of how the indulgence of adult despair could yield to children’s needs.

  “Five and a half quarts, like I was saying.” Jewel laughed. “Excuse me for having pigs instead of children.”

  “I think I can bear the loss.” Lusa sat down at the table again, facing the army of jars she’d already put up this day, little glass soldiers stuffed with their bright-red organs. Who would eat all this? When she left, would she take her preserves back to Lexington in a U-Haul? “What am I doing this for?” she asked suddenly in a dull, hard voice.

  Jewel was behind her at once, rubbing her shoulders. “For later,” she said simply.

  “I should live so long.”

  “What on earth do you mean by that?”

  “Nothing,” Lusa said. “I just can’t picture later. Spending my nothing of a life in this kitchen cooking for nobody.”

  “I wish you’d make a pie for my kids once in a while. When I get home from work I’m so tired, I practically feed them hog slop on a bun.”

  Lusa wondered whether this was a real request or an attempt at redeeming her empty life. “I could make a pie and bring it down sometime.”

  Jewel sat down, brushing a strand of mouse-colored hair out of her eyes. “That’s not what I was asking for. I don’t know if this is, well, polite to ask. But could they come up here and eat dinner with you sometimes?”

  Lusa studied her sister-in-law’s face. She seemed so tired. The request was genuine. “Well, sure. You could, too, Jewel, if you didn’t feel like cooking. I could use the company.”

  “But I mean, if I wasn’t here?”

  “What, like if you had to take the late shift at Kroger’s? You know you can ask me that anytime. I’m glad to help out.”

  “You wouldn’t care to have the kids up here sometimes, then?”

  Lusa smiled. “Of course not.” It had taken her a year to learn that when mountain people said “I don’t care to,” they meant the opposite of what she thought. They meant “I wouldn’t mind.”

  Jewel held her eye, shy and bold at the same time. “But they said you’re going back to Lexington pretty soon.”

  “Who did?”

  She shrugged. “I can see why you would. I’m just saying I’d miss you.”

  Lusa took a breath. “Would you get this house and the land then?”

  “Oh, no. Mary Edna would, I guess. She’s the oldest. I don’t even have a man to farm it.”

  “So Mary Edna wants the place.”

  “It’s yours, honey; you could sell it or whatever you want. Cole didn’t have any will, so it goes to you. She said they have that law now, a success statue or something where it used to be the family would get a farm back, but now it goes to the wife.”

  Lusa felt a rush of adrenaline through her limbs. Only one thing could account for Jewel’s acquaintance with “success statues”: they were consulting lawyers. “I haven’t made up my mind about anything yet,” she said. “I haven’t been able to think straight since everything happened.”

  “You seem like you’re doing good, honey.”

  Lusa looked at Jewel, longing to trust, knowing she couldn’t. She felt dismayed by the complexities of even the simplest of things, a conversation with a sister—not her own—in a kitchen, also not her own. “Probably you all think I’m not behaving like a decent widow,” she said, surprised by the anger in her chest.

  Jewel started to protest, but Lusa shook her head. “You see me pushing right along, canning cherries like everything was normal. But when nobody’s here, sometimes I have to lie down on the floor and just try to keep breathing. What am I supposed to do, Jewel? I’m twenty-eight. I’ve never been a widow before. How does a widow act?”

  Jewel offered no advice. Lusa took one of the jelly jars in her hand and stared at its ruby redness, that clear, proud color that she knew she loved, theoretically, but that couldn’t touch her just now. “I grew up in a family where suffering was quiet,” she said. “My father is a man who’s lost everything: his family’s land, his own father, his faith, and now his wife’s companionship. All for unfair reasons. And he’s just kept working, all his life. I was always more of a complainer, but I’m learning to be quiet. It seems like the only grownup way to face this brutal thing that’s happened.”

  Jewel’s eyes were so much like Cole’s, so earnest and perfectly blue, that Lusa had to look away from her.

  “I may look like I’m doing all right, but I don’t know if I’m coming or going. Whoever told you my plans knows more than I do.”

  Jewel put her hand on her mouth—a nervous habit, apparently. “It’s none of my business, but there wasn’t any life insurance, was there?”

  Lusa shook her head. “Cole wasn’t planning on dying this year. We’d talked about insurance, but with everything so tight, it just seemed like one extra payment we didn’t need. We thought maybe we’d do it after we had kids or something.”

  “I’ll tell you something. Mary Edna and Herb could help with the burial. I would if I could, but they can. Herb and his brother are doing good with their dairy over on Six. That’s Herb’s family’s land, paid off. So they’re set up pretty good right now.”

  “I can cover the burial, it’s done. That was our savings. Mary Edna didn’t offer, and I sure wasn’t going to ask.”

  “Mary Edna’s bark’s a whole lot worse than her bite.”

  “It’s not that. You know why. I’m not stupid, Jewel, I know what everybody’s saying: here I am living in this house you all grew up in, on your family’s land. The so-called Widener place, and there’s no longer any Widener on the premises. Do you think I’d feel comfortable asking your family for anything?”

  Jewel gave her an odd look. “Is that true? Lois told me that—that you were going to take your maiden name back now.”

  “What? No, I never did…” Lusa wondered how far the misunderstandings went, and whether any of it would be possible to untangle, after a point.

  “Well, anyway,” Jewel said, “having a house and a farm’s not the same as having money.”

  “Tell me. When I hear people hinting I’m a gold digger, I feel like publishing my damn debts in the newspaper. I’ve got a barn to reroof before winter, and this house, too, probably in the next year or two. And something’s wrong with the spring box; I’m just waiting for the day I wake up and have no water. What else? Oh yes, Cole’s brand-new Kubot
a, twenty-two thousand dollars, which won’t be paid off for another four years.”

  “I didn’t know he’d financed the tractor.”

  Was Jewel spying? What difference would it make if they knew she was destitute? None, Lusa decided. “He didn’t want to. But we had to have a tractor, and he deserved new. That John Deere of your daddy’s was older than Cole, I think. He’d been fighting with it his whole life, holding it together with baling twine and fence wire.”

  “That tractor was older than Cole. Come to think of it.”

  “And now I’ll have to pay somebody to mow hay and put it in the barn, and fix the fences and round up the cows when they get over on the neighbors’, and mess with the baler, which breaks down every single time you use it. And run and repair the bush hog and the side-arm mower—or am I supposed to learn to do all that myself? I’m sure there are other costs, too; I just don’t know enough to see them coming.”

  “Lord, Lord,” Jewel said softly. Her face was the saddest thing Lusa had seen in a stretch of many sad days. Her forehead was deeply creased, and her eyes looked like an old woman’s. At close range she looked much older than Lusa had thought she was.

  “No man to farm it,” Lusa summarized. “As you put it.”

  “Herb and Big Rickie will help you out.”

  “Oh, they’ve been up here. I guess they’re in charge now. Cole’s grave isn’t yet healed over, and already I’m nobody.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, I need help, sure. But help. It would be nice to be asked, instead of bossed around like a child. Do they do that to you?”

  “They don’t have any business with me. I don’t even plant a garden anymore. I praise the Lord for my job at Kroger’s and beg Him to strike Shel dead if that check should fail to keep coming for the kids.”

  “What about Emaline and Frank?”

  “Emaline and Frank are officially out of farming for good, they say, and I think they’re just as happy about it, to both have factory jobs instead of farming.”

  “But I heard Frank complaining at the funeral about losing his tobacco lease. And he complains about commuting to Leesport.”