Prodigal Summer

by Barbara Kingsolver

  “And that would be terrible?”

  “To the moth it would. I think it dies or something, without them.”

  He stepped back, deferring to this dire claim. “Is that a scientific fact?”

  She smiled. “My dad told me, so it must be true.” She tried with her cupped hands to steer the moth away from the window. “Darn it, little wing, I’d open this window for you, but you’ve picked the only one that doesn’t open.”

  “Who’s your dad, a moth scientist or something?”

  “Don’t laugh, there are moth scientists. I knew of one, in graduate school.” She tried to urge the moth toward the window over the bed, but nothing doing. It continued to throw itself eastward like a supplicant toward Mecca.

  “Maybe if we close the curtain she’ll go to a different window,” he suggested.

  “Maybe.” Carefully she drew the white cotton curtain between the moth and the glass, but she could see that wasn’t going to help much.

  “She can still see the light,” he said.

  He’d believed her when she declared the moth a female. Deanna was touched. “You know what, I can’t really sex a moth at twenty paces, I was bluffing. And no, my dad wasn’t a scientist. He could have been. He was a farmer, but he was…” The moth settled onto the curtain and sat still. It was an astonishing creature, with black and white wings patterned in geometric shapes, scarlet underwings, and a fat white body with black spots running down it like a snowman’s coal buttons. No human eye had looked at this moth before; no one would see its friends. So much detail goes unnoticed in the world.

  “I can’t really even describe how my dad was,” she finished. “If you spent a hundred years in Zebulon County just watching every plant and animal that lived in the woods and the fields, you still wouldn’t know as much as he did when he died.”

  “Your hero. I’m jealous.”

  “He was. He had theories about everything. He’d say, ‘Look at that indigo bunting, he’s so blue, looks like he dropped down here from some other world where all the colors are brighter. And look at his wife: she’s brown as mud. Why do you reckon that is?’ And I’d say something dumb, like, maybe in indigo buntings it’s the men instead of the ladies that like to get dressed up. And Dad would say, ‘I think it’s because she’s the one that sits on the eggs, and bright colors would draw attention to the nest.’”

  “And what did your mama say about it?”

  “Yeek!” Deanna howled, startled by the darting shadow of a mouse that burst from behind the woodpile and ran practically across their bare feet before disappearing into a hole in the corner between the log wall and the floor. “Damn.” She laughed. “I hate how they make me squeal like a girl, every time.” Eddie Bondo had jumped, too, she’d noticed.

  “Your mama said ‘Yeek’?”

  “My mama said not a whole heck of a lot. On account of she was dead.” Deanna narrowed her eyes, studying the hole into which the mouse had disappeared. She’d been stuffing holes with scraps of aluminum foil for two years. But anything with mice was a war you couldn’t win, she’d learned that much.

  She realized Eddie was looking at her, waiting for the rest of the story. “Oh, it’s not a tragedy or anything, about my mother. I mean, to Dad it was, I’m sure, but I don’t even remember her, I was that little.” Deanna spread her hands, unable really to name the hole this had put in her life. “Nobody ever taught me to be a proper lady, that’s the tragedy. Oh, now look, she is a she.” Deanna pointed to the moth, which was pressing the tip of its abdomen against the fabric of the curtain, apparently attempting to lay eggs.

  “My mama died, too, quite a while back,” he said, as they watched the moth closely. “Happens, I guess. Daddy remarried after about, oh, fifteen minutes.”

  Deanna couldn’t imagine such family carelessness. “Did you get along with her, at least?”

  He laughed oddly. “She could have got along without me. She had her own kids, that was some of the trouble, who the ranch would go to. The whole ugly-stepsister story, you know.”

  Deanna didn’t know. “My dad never did remarry.”

  “No? So it was always just you and him?”

  Did she want to tell him this? “Mainly me and him, yeah,” she said. “He had a friend, but that was years later. They never moved in together, they both had their farms to run, but she was good to me. She’s an amazing lady. I didn’t even realize until just lately how she’d been through hell and back with us. My dad was a mess on her hands at the end. And she had a little girl, too, with Down’s syndrome and a hole in her heart that couldn’t be fixed. My half-sister.”

  Eddie Bondo put his hands on Deanna’s shoulders and kissed her. “This is you, isn’t it?”

  She ran a hand through his hair, newly shorn to a smoother shape—less crow, more mink. On Tuesday, her day of mortification after assaulting him in the chestnut log, she had let him talk her into many things, including cutting his hair with her little scissors. It was surprisingly thick, like the pelt of some northern animal that needed the insulation. The exquisite tactile pleasure of that slow hour spent out on the porch with her hands on his scalp had created between them a new kind of intimacy. Afterward they’d stood quietly watching a pair of chickadees gather up the fallen hairs for their nest.

  “Me, no,” she said, unsure what he meant, “my half-sister. Rachel was her name.”

  “It’s who you are, I mean. You’re telling me a piece of your life.”

  She looked at his eyes, watched him glance back and forth between her own two pupils. He was that close.

  “Our bed’s getting cold,” he whispered.

  “I don’t think that’s possible.”

  The fire cracked loudly then, like a shot, startling them like the mouse had, making them laugh out loud. Eddie Bondo ran for the bed and leapt under the blankets, hooting that the posse had found him out. She tugged at the edge of the bed, fighting him to let her in. “I reported you to the Forest Service,” she warned. “Keeping a wildlife manager from her work, which is a hanging crime in these mountains.”

  “I get my last meal, then.” He threw aside the covers to reveal himself, solemn and flat on his back. She pounced and tried to pin him, but he was strong and seemed to know real wrestling moves. In spite of her size and longer limbs, he could have her tidily turned with an elbow pinned behind her back every time. In less than a minute she was helpless, laughing as he straddled her.

  “What is that, Bondo? Some kind of sheep-herding maneuver?”

  “Exactly.” He gathered a thick skein of her hair in one hand. “Next I shear you.”

  Instead he kissed her forehead and then each one of her ribs before nuzzling his head against her waist. But she tugged him back up to the pillow beside her. She needed to look at him. “OK,” she said, “you’re saved. I’m giving you a stay of execution.”

  “Governor. I’m your slave.”

  She wanted to play, but her mood was wrong for it. Speaking aloud of Nannie and Rachel had brought those two into this cabin. And her father, too—especially him. What would he have made of Eddie Bondo? “I told you something about me,” she said. “Now you have to tell me one thing about you.”

  He looked wary. “I choose which thing? Or you get to ask?”

  “I get to ask.”

  “A serious thing?”

  “To me it is.”

  He rolled onto his back and they both stared up at the ceiling, its crooked log beams riddled with the small tunnels of beetles. Deanna thought about the trees they had been once, a long time ago. Suffering more in life than in death, surely. There was a scratching sound coming from the space above the roof boards.

  “What’s up there?” he asked.

  “On top of those boards, cedar shingles—rotten, probably. See all the nails? Then galvanized tin on top of the whole mess.”

  “I mean that noise,” he persisted.

  “Mouse, probably.”

  “The same one that just made you squeal like a girl?
”

  She narrowed her eyes. “Different one. One of his innumerable friends and relations.”

  They both stared for a while at the roof, their eyes following the sound as it moved higher, toward the peak. Deanna decided the motion was too slow for a mouse and considered the other possibilities.

  “Who built this cabin?” he asked her.

  “Guy named Walker, Garnett something Walker. There was this whole line of them, all with the same name. Kind of like land barons in this area, a hundred years ago.”

  “And this was the baron’s luxurious abode?”

  “Oh, not hardly. This was just the headquarters for one of his hundred logging camps. He and his sons logged out all these mountains. This was probably one of his last stands; the cabin is nineteen-thirties or so, I’d guess. Looking at the logs.”

  “What are they, oak?”

  “Chestnut, every one. When people realized the chestnuts were dying out, they had this huge rush to cut down all that were left, even the standing deadwood.”

  He studied the construction more closely. “That’s why the logs are kind of small and twisted?”

  “Yeah. Deadwood, or maybe some of the bigger limbs off huge trunks they took for lumber. But Eddie, listen.” She turned to look at him. “What I’m saying is, they realized the chestnuts were going extinct. So what did they do? They ran up here and cut down every last one that was left alive.”

  He thought about it. “They were dying anyway, I guess that’s what they figured.”

  “But not all of them would have died. Some of those last chestnuts were standing because they weren’t sick. They might have stood straight on through the blight.”

  “You think?”

  “I’m sure. People study this stuff. Every species has its extremes, little pockets of genetic resistance that give it an edge on survival. Some would have made it.”

  She watched his eyes track the twisted logs as he pondered what she’d just said. This was the thing that surprised her again and again: Eddie Bondo paid attention. Most men of her acquaintance acted like they already knew everything she did—and they didn’t.

  “If some of the chestnuts had lived,” he asked, “how long would they have stood?”

  “A hundred years, maybe? Long enough to spread their seeds. Some of them did live; there’s maybe five or six per county hidden back in the hollows, but there aren’t enough to pollinate one another. If more of them had been spared they could have repopulated these mountains over time, but nobody thought about that. Not one person. They just sawed the last ones down, hell for leather.”

  He turned his acute gaze on Deanna. “That’s why you live up here by yourself, isn’t it? You can’t stand how people are.”

  She weighed this, feeling its truth inside herself like damp sand. “I don’t want to feel that way,” she said finally. “There’s people I love. But there’s so many other kinds of life I love, too. And people act so hateful to every kind but their own.”

  He didn’t reply. Was he taking her judgment personally? She’d been thinking of people who refused to be inconvenienced for the sake of an endangered fish or plant or owl, not of coyote killers per se. She forced her next words, knowing that each one had its own cost. “You said I could ask you a question, and now I’m asking it.”

  “What?”

  “You know.”

  He blinked but didn’t speak. Something in his eyes receded from her.

  “What brought you down here to the mountains?”

  He looked away. “A Greyhound bus.”

  “I have to know this. Was it the bounty hunt?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Just say no if the answer is no. That’s all I want.”

  He still said nothing.

  “God.” She let out a slow breath. “I’m not surprised. I knew. But I will never, ever understand who you are.”

  “I never asked you to.”

  No, he hadn’t, and she would refrain from trying if she was capable of it. But here he was, naked beside her with his left hand lying above her heart. How could she not need to know who he was? Were male and female from different worlds, like the indigo bunting and his wife? Was she nothing but mud-colored female on the inside? She who’d always been sure she was living her life bright blue?

  “Where does it come from?” she asked. “I can’t understand that kind of passion to kill a living thing.”

  “Not just a living thing. An enemy.”

  “Tell me the truth. How many times have you seen sheep killed by coyotes?”

  “Enough.”

  “A hundred?”

  “On my own family’s ranch? No. A hundred would wipe a man out, even if it was spread out over four or five years.”

  “On your own family’s ranch, in your lifetime, how many? Fifty? A dozen?”

  He was still looking up at the roof beams. “Maybe a dozen,” he conceded. “We’ve got sheepdogs, we’ve got good fences, but even so. Probably that many. You can’t always tell what got them, especially if it was a lamb and whatever got it just hauled it clean away.”

  “So in one or all of those cases it could have been anything. A neighbor’s dog. A barn owl. A damn bald eagle.”

  Eddie Bondo grimaced, declining to agree or disagree.

  “A coyote is just something you can blame. He’s nobody’s pet; he doesn’t belong to anybody but himself. So, great, put a bullet in him.”

  He turned to look at her full on, propping himself up on an elbow. “What you don’t understand is that ranching’s not like farming. It’s not a vegetarian proposition.”

  She shook her head but said nothing, beginning to feel herself recede in her own way. What was it about the West, that cowboy story everybody loved to believe in? Like those men had the goods on tough. She thought of her soft-spoken father, the grim line of his mouth stretched pale as a knuckle while he worked the docking tool and she held the bawling head end. Working to castrate the bull calves.

  The moth on the window grew restless again, fluttering against the sheer curtain and the bright outdoors behind it. He saw her watching it and reached up to tug her hair gently. “Miracle of miracles, I do believe I’m in bed with an animal lover.”

  She looked at him, surprised. If he only knew she’d been reminiscing about castration. It bothered her a lot, his being so sure he had her number. She opened her mouth, closed it, then opened it again, a little startled at what she chose to say. “I’ll tell you something. If a feral cat wandered up here from some farm and started wrecking nests and killing birds and having babies in the woods? I’d trap it and drown it in the creek.”

  He made a face of exaggerated dismay. “You wouldn’t.”

  “Maybe I would. I’d want to.”

  “Why?”

  “Because cats like that don’t belong here. They’re fake animals, introduced, like the chestnut blight. And just about that destructive.”

  “Not a cat person,” he decided. Once again, sure he knew.

  “I had cats as a kid. But people won’t be bothered to fix them, so they breed in the barns and prowl the woods, and they don’t have any sense about what things to take. They’re not natural predators, except maybe in a barn. In the woods they’re like a firebomb. They can wreck a habitat so fast, overrun it in a season, because there’s no natural control. If there were still red wolves here, the place could hold its own against a stray cat. But there aren’t.” Or enough coyotes, she thought.

  He studied this new Deanna, potential murderess of tabby cats. She met his gaze for a second, then rolled over and rested on her elbows, twirling the end of her hair into something like a paintbrush and touching its tip to the palm of her other hand.

  “I don’t love animals as individuals, I guess that’s the way to put it,” she said. “I love them as whole species. I feel like they should have the right to persist in their own ways. If there’s a house cat put here by human carelessness, I can remedy that by taking one life, or ignore it and let the mistake
go on and on.”

  “How much damage could a cat really do?”

  “You wouldn’t believe how much. I could show you a list of species that have been wiped out because of people’s laziness about cats. Ground-nesting birds, especially.”

  “Not the kitty’s fault.”

  “No,” she said, amused that her hunter seemed to be pleading the kitty’s case. “And it’s also not a cat’s idea that every life including its own is sacred. That’s a human idea, and I can buy it for humans. But it’s some kind of weird religion to impose it on other animals that have already got their own rules. Most animals are as racist as Hitler, and a lot of them practice infanticide. Cats do—lions. A lot of primates, too.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yep. And I support their right to go on murdering their babies in the wild if that’s how they do it, unpestered by humans. That’s the kind of animal lover I am.”

  He raised his eyebrows and nodded slowly.

  “It’s not like you thought, is it?”

  “Heck, now I’m thinking maybe you’ll go hunting with me.”

  She rolled onto her back. “Forget it. I’d never kill just for fun. Maybe to eat, if I was hungry, but never a predator.”

  “So a deer but not a fox? Plant eaters matter less than carnivores?”

  She thought about this. “They don’t matter less. But herbivores tend to have shorter lives, and they reproduce faster; they’re just geared toward expendability. They can overpopulate at the drop of a hat if nobody’s eating them.”

  He lay on his back next to her, at ease with this kind of talk. “Like rabbits do, sure. But it’s complicated. Up north, the lynx go in these cycles. Every ten years, boom, there’re thousands, and then they crash.”

  “All the more reason to leave them alone,” she insisted. “There’s something going on there you don’t want to mess with. Maybe there’d be some plague let loose on the Arctic.” She wondered if he’d seen lynx. She’d probably never see one herself.

  “I know what you’re saying,” he conceded. “It’s been messed with already.”