Prodigal Summer

by Barbara Kingsolver

  “Yeah? That story’s still going around?”

  “That’s how Miss Oda Black tells it. But hell, I didn’t believe it. Gal like you getting cold all by herself up here on the mountain? Hell, you haven’t changed a bit.”

  All by herself. She glanced to the side, listened behind her. If Eddie Bondo could be relied on for one thing, it was to disappear. Well, fine, he didn’t need to be part of this. “Not a bit, since high school?” she asked sweetly. “You’re saying I still couldn’t get a date unless everything else female in the county had rabies?”

  “No, now, you’ve got that wrong. We was all in love with you, Deanna.”

  “Well, heck, Sammy. How come I didn’t notice?”

  He laughed. “We’s just asceared of you.”

  “Now, is that why you brought your gun up here today?”

  He looked at his rifle, dismayed. “What, this?”

  “I hate to tell you, Sammy,” she said, sounding convincingly sorrowful, “but deer season’s in the fall. And now here it is June.”

  He looked at her, blinking with the effort of his innocence.

  “You know what?” she said. “Down at George Tick’s gas station? He’s giving out free calendars. You could pick you up one on your way back to town.”

  Sammy chuckled, shaking his head. “Deanna Wolfe. You.” He chuckled some more. “You’s just as funny as you ever was.”

  “You, too, Sammy.” She kept up the smile, waiting. She knew this routine. They were almost finished.

  He seemed to have a bright idea. “Hell, I wasn’t aiming on shooting nothing today, I’s just looking for sang,” he said. “Got me a alimony payment due.”

  “Oh, well, then,” she said, nodding seriously, “good thing you brought that rifle. Sang plants can get real mean in breeding season.”

  He chuckled and chuckled, Sammy Hill. Tilted his head back and gave her a little wink, and then in a flash she saw him at age sixteen, in a different body altogether. Lean and confident, the cocked wrist tossing a wad of paper into the trash can—that Sammy Hill, the basketball player. He had a stuck-up sister, Regina, whom the boys called Queen of the Hill.

  Sammy scratched his cheek with a knuckle, betraying a missing molar in his embarrassed grin. “No, now, I needed this rifle for protection,” he said, with make-believe conviction. “Bears and stuff. After I heard what happened to you.”

  “Well, yeah, I can sure understand that. But now, Sammy, you could take a bear one-handed. Athlete like you. You still sink a jump shot like you used to?”

  His face brightened. “Naw,” he said, blushing under his stubble.

  “Well, now, here’s the bad news. There’s no sang hunting up here, either, anymore—the governor’s trying to let everything on this mountain grow back. I’m sorry, Sammy, but I’ve got to send you on out of here.” She truly felt sorry for this heavyset version of Sammy, so early to ripen and now gone so badly to seed. “Maybe there’s some sang up on the back of your dad’s farm,” she suggested, “up there by the fork.”

  “You know, I bet there is.”

  “How is your dad?”

  “Dead.”

  “Oh. Not so good, then.”

  “Not so ornery, neither.”

  “Well, OK,” Deanna said. “Nice to see you, Sammy. Say hey to Regina for me.”

  “Well, hell, Regina don’t speak to me no more but to nag. Since I busted up her Camaro. I reckon you’ll have to tell her hello yourself.”

  “I’ll do that,” Deanna said, raising one hand in a coy little wave. Sammy touched the brim of his camouflage cap and headed downhill, slow and awkward with his head craned far forward in the way of tall men with potbellies and bad backs. He had to watch his footing carefully on the steep slope.

  She stood waiting a long time for the molecules of Eddie Bondo to reassemble out of pine boughs and humid air. He wasn’t behind her now, it turned out, but above her, standing a little to the rear of where Sammy had been. She spotted his grin first, like the Cheshire cat’s.

  “Well hell, Deanna,” he mocked, and spat.

  “Watch it. That’s my mother tongue.”

  “I bet those boys were all in love with you.”

  “Uh-huh. Not so much that it interfered with their general disdain.”

  He moved down the slope toward her as if he’d been born to slopes. Short men really had the advantage in the long run, she decided, admiring his grace. Their backs held better. And then there was the matter of shoulders and narrow hips and that grin—the matter of Eddie Bondo. She felt a strange little interior pride, that this beautiful male was her mate, at least for a season.

  “What the heck is sang?”

  “Ginseng.” She began picking her way toward the Egg Creek trail, and he followed.

  “That’s what I thought,” he said.

  “You ever seen any?”

  “I don’t know. What’s it look like?”

  She thought about it. “A five-fingered leaf, littlish plant, dies back to the ground in winter. It’s particular about where it grows. Only under sugar maples, on a north slope.”

  “And it’s good for ex-wives?”

  She was puzzled. “Oh, right, alimony payments. Good for payments of all kinds. It’s hard to find, though. It’s been overharvested for about five generations, I guess.”

  “Daniel Boone had an ex-wife?”

  “No doubt. They could always sell it for good money even back then, get it packed off to China some way.”

  They walked quietly for a while. “Sammy Hill wasn’t looking for sang,” she confided.

  “No?”

  “Nope. He’d have had a spade and a burlap bag, and he’d be a little higher up than this, and he’d be looking in the fall. Not now.”

  “You can’t find it now?”

  “I could. Sammy couldn’t.”

  Eddie clucked his tongue at her. “Bragging.”

  “Well, it’s just…you know. It’s easy to find in the fall, and people do what’s easy. Spring and summer, ginseng’s a real shy plant, and then in October it goes careless and gets bright-red berries and these yellow leaves like highway construction flags.”

  She didn’t mention that whenever she found it in that condition she plucked off the gaudy leaves and tucked them in her pockets to save it from being discovered by hunters. She scattered the ripe berries under new groves, helping the ginseng roots to keep their secrets. Later on, when she did her weekly washing in a tub of scalding water, she’d roll ginseng leaves out of all her pockets like wads of tissue. Eddie would think she was nuts if she told him that. Hoarding this mountain all to herself, was his general accusation, but that wasn’t it. If no person ever saw it again, herself included, that would be fine; she just loved the idea of those little man-shaped roots dancing in their world beneath the soil. She wanted them to persist forever, not for the sake of impotent men in China or anywhere else, just for the sake of ginseng.

  Eddie Bondo was curious about the roots. When they sat down in the moss on the bank of Egg Creek to eat their lunch of sardines and crackers, she took a stick to the soft black dirt and tried to draw pictures of the different forms she’d seen: one-legged man, one-armed man; they weren’t always perfect. Rarely, in fact.

  He wasn’t looking at her pictures. He was looking at her. “Those guys don’t scare you, do they? You chew them up and spit them out between your teeth, smiling the whole time.”

  She looked down at her ginseng man. “What, you mean Sammy Hill?”

  “And the best part was, he loved it. He’ll go down and tell everybody he ran into this long-haired she-wolf with legs like a pinup girl.”

  She didn’t like to think about what he’d tell. “I try not to step too hard on their manhood. You do that, next thing you know they’re back up here with three or four of their buddies, which can get ugly. But no, they don’t scare me.” She shrugged. “They’re just people I grew up with.”

  “I can’t picture that,” he said. “You with those guys.
You driving a car, going shopping. I don’t really see you anywhere but in the woods.”

  “Well. I guess it’s been a while.”

  “Don’t you miss it, any of it?”

  “If you’re speaking of high school and the Sammy Hills of this world, no, I don’t.”

  “I’m not. You know what I mean.”

  She tried to decide if she knew. “There’s some people I’d love to spend the day with, sure. And certain things.”

  “Like what?”

  “I couldn’t even say.” She thought about it. “Not cars or electric lights, not movies. Books I can get if I ask. But walking around in a library, putting my hands on books I never knew about, that I miss. Anything else, I don’t know.” She pondered some more. “I like the beach. My husband’s family had a beach house in North Carolina.”

  “The beach doesn’t count. I mean stuff invented by people.”

  “Books, then. Poems, scary stories, population genetics. All those pictures Mr. Audubon painted.”

  “What else?”

  “Chocolate? And Nannie’s apple cider. And my border collie, if he weren’t dead. But he counts, domestic pets are inventions of man.” She closed her eyes, fishing for the taste of something lost. “And music, maybe? That’s something I used to love.”

  “Yeah? Did you play any instrument?”

  She opened her eyes wide. “No, but I listened a bunch. My dad played in a bluegrass band, Out of the Blue. And when I lived in Knoxville there was this little bar where we’d go, bluegrass and country music. People you’ve never heard of. These sisters used to play there sometimes—man, they were great. They came up from Texas, I think. The Dixie Chicks.”

  Eddie Bondo laughed out loud.

  “Yeah, funny name.”

  “Funny you. You’ve been out of circulation awhile. They don’t play little joints anymore.”

  “You’ve heard of them?”

  “Me and everybody with ears.”

  She shook her head. “Amazing. Nothing stays the same down there.”

  “Nothing stays the same anywhere.”

  She looked at him earnestly. “Well, but see, up here it does. I guess there’s big successes and failures going on, but they’re too slow to notice in a lifetime.” She crossed her arms, hugging herself. “I guess that’s why I like it. Nature’s just safer.”

  He leaned forward and kissed her. “Tell me some more about ginseng.”

  She concentrated on her drawing of a perfect two-armed, two-legged cocky little man who had no need to dig up ginseng for virility. He laid her down on the ground on top of her artwork and they stayed there awhile in the shifting leafy sunlight, leaving their own impression of human desire. Soon they were headed back toward the cabin with nothing on their minds but their bodies.

  That was when they came upon the coyotes, two females hunting in the open. They were a mile or so from the hollow that fed Bitter Creek, not a place where Deanna would have gone looking for them. It was in a clearing where fallen trees had opened the canopy, letting the sun onto a patch of forest floor that now grew thick with a red carpet of new blackberry leaves. At first she thought they were dogs, they were so big: thick-furred behind the ears like huskies, and much stockier than the scrawny specimen she’d seen in the zoo or any western coyotes she’d seen in photographs. These two appeared golden in the sunlight, arching their backs and hopping through the foot-deep foliage, one and then the other, like a pair of dolphins alternately rolling above the waves. They were on the trail of something small and quick beneath the leaves and grass. Probably a vole or a mouse. They paid no attention to the pair of humans who stood with their boots frozen in the shadows. Focused entirely on their pursuit, their ears twitched forward like mechanical things, tracking imperceptible sounds. Like two parts of a single animal they moved to surround and corner their prey against a limestone bank, tunneling after it with their long noses. Deanna watched, spellbound. She could see how efficiently this pair might work a field edge, pursuing the mice and voles they seemed to prefer. No wonder farmers saw them often and feared for their livestock; if only they knew that they had nothing to lose but their mice. It occurred to her as she watched them that this manner of hunting might actually be helpful to ground-nesting birds like the bobwhite, because of the many passages it would open through the tight clumps of fescue.

  Then, without any warning that the chase was near an end, the forward guard pounced and then raised her head with a sideways jerk, snapping the mouse just once in the air like a small, damp dust-rag she meant to shake clean, before disappearing into the woods with her catch still writhing in her jaws. Her sister paused at the edge of the woods and turned back on them with a dark, warning glare.

  Deanna didn’t speak for the rest of the afternoon. What was there to say, to this man whose thoughts she couldn’t stand to know? She wanted him to have seen how they really were in that sunny clearing, how golden and perfectly attuned to their own necessities. But she knew not to ask. The sight of them had caused him to withdraw far inside himself, carefully avoiding any touch or glance at her as they stood watching the animals. Afterward, he hadn’t offered a word about what they’d witnessed.

  They did not go to bed in the afternoon, as it seemed they’d intended. Her body went cold. She put on a kettle for tea, then boiled some rice and reheated yesterday’s black beans. She and Eddie had fallen into the habit of eating their meals on the bed, but on this day she claimed back the single chair and the table, covering it with a pile of books and papers and her neglected field notebook, writing while she ate. Eddie Bondo was restless, pacing out on the porch. The loudest sound on the earth, she thought, is a man with nothing to do. Why was he still here?

  For the hundredth time she asked herself what madness of mate choice this was. A female prairie chicken would reliably copulate with the cock who inflated his yellow air sacs and boomed loudest. Bower birds went for the guy with the gaudiest nest. What was it in Eddie Bondo that moved her so powerfully to capitulate—his gait that matched hers, finally a man who could keep up? Or was it his smaller stature, after all those years of professors’ bossing her around? But he was plenty cocky, as self-sufficient as any creature she’d met. Her match, she supposed, in that regard. She only wished she felt less like a prairie chicken stalking dazed across the lekking ground toward the grand display.

  In the evening, when she couldn’t stand any more of his proximity, she invented the necessity of walking down to the hemlock grove with a claw hammer. She would work on the trail bridge over the creek that had collapsed back in February. She still had a few hours of sunlight, as it was close to the summer solstice. (She thought about this: had she missed the solstice, in fact?) She would pull the old bridge apart, count the unsalvageable boards, and put in a requisition for the lumber she’d need to repair it, since the Forest Service jeep would be coming up fairly soon to drop off supplies and collect her new list. She would order no more food than usual, nothing extra. She’d left the cabin without a word, unable to imagine his doing anything but cleaning his gun in her absence.

  The hemlock grove was on a tributary that fed Bitter Creek, in a strange, narrow hollow where long updrafts carried sound peculiarly well. Sometimes here she’d heard sounds all the way up from the valley: a dog barking, or even the high, distant whine of trucks on the interstate. That was in winter, though, when the trees were bare. Today, as she worked to pry up boards, she heard mostly the heavy quiet that precedes a summer evening, before the katydids start up, when the forest’s sounds are still separated by long silences. A squirrel overhead scolded her halfheartedly, then stopped. A sapsucker worked its way around a pine trunk. Eddie Bondo had spoken of acorn woodpeckers he’d seen in the West, funny creatures that worked together to drill a dead tree full of little holes, cached thousands of acorns in them, and then spent the rest of their days defending their extravagant treasure from marauding neighbors. How pointless life could be, what a foolish business of inventing things to love, just so
you could dread losing them. She listened to the sapsucker’s methodic rapping, which ceased only when the bird paused to flick off sections of bark that landed on the mossy ground near the creek.

  She was tearing the last boards off the log frame of the bridge when she heard something else that caused her to stop her hammer and listen. Voices: men talking, it sounded like. She stood up and listened more carefully. Hunters.

  She wiped a strand of hair out of her eyes, feeling put out. This must be the longest day of the year, for she’d had quite enough of it. Talking meant there was more than one, and this late in the day they’d be up to something stupid like sleeping in a tree all night so they could poach wild turkeys at first light. She sighed and walked the log back across the creek to where she’d thrown her jacket. She’d have to head down there and summon the energy to call their bluff.

  The sounds were very distant, maybe as much as a mile off. But they were certain, and continuous. She listened for another minute to the low, steady murmurs. It wasn’t words. Growls, they were. Little conversational growls and higher-pitched barks. It wasn’t men talking; this was women, coyote women, not howling at the moon but snarling quietly in the language of mothers speaking to children. Those two females this morning had taken a live mouse, she’d noticed. They hadn’t eaten it or even killed it, just disabled it. Now Deanna knew why. Those pups are alive, she sang to herself in a whisper. Alive in the world with their eyes open, learning to hunt. Learning to speak. Coyote children born empty-headed like human infants, needing to learn every skill they’d need for living. Their protectors hadn’t vocalized all spring, but now they would have to; no social creature could grow up mute, it wouldn’t survive. The pups must be over six weeks old, nearly ready to hunt on their own. What a sight they must be now. Quickly she stacked the good lumber against a hemlock trunk and set off for home, though “home” didn’t offer her much right now: a place where she couldn’t breathe a word of what she knew tonight, nor even sleep, until she saw those pups with her own open eyes.