Prodigal Summer

by Barbara Kingsolver

  He continued his slow backward progress, letting one tire run off the road for a second. “It’d take you an hour, and it’s raining cats and dogs. What’s wrong with you, you got the all-overs?”

  “Whatch’ all doin’, Jurry, takin’ a college course somewheres in hillbilly English?”

  “My mammaw says that, ‘You’ve got the all-overs.’ She’s from Grundy.”

  “Fine. I’ve got the all-overs from sitting here waiting for you to rear-end a tree or plow over the cliff. Will you just let me walk?”

  “No.”

  She gave up. Fighting with Jerry to be allowed walk in the rain seemed ridiculous. She faced forward and watched the road wind out in front of them like a film running backward in slow motion. Could he really be that blind? Even if Eddie Bondo hadn’t been there, the cabin was full of him. His coffeepot on the stove, his pack under the bed. Come to think of it, there were very few signs. There was next to nothing. She relaxed.

  “Hey, I met your boyfriend.”

  “What!”

  “He’s pretty cool. I never met anybody from Wyoming before.”

  “What’d you do, interview him? He’s not my boyfriend, Jerry. He’s just a friend who hiked up to see me for a couple days. He’s packing out tomorrow.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “What?” she asked.

  “Nothing. He’s packing out tomorrow.”

  Well, Deanna thought, he might be, for all she knew. She shifted her legs; this jeep wasn’t built for tall people. Soldiers must have been short in World War II. “Why does everybody assume boyfriend when a girl and a guy are friends?”

  Jerry touched his fist to his mouth and cleared his throat. “Maybe because of the twenty-five-pack of rubbers laying on the floor by the bed?”

  She turned to face him, openmouthed. “Lying on the floor. Jesus, Jerry, that’s none of your business. He’s just a friend, OK? People see a single woman and think she’s got to have a man hidden somewhere.”

  Damn him, she thought, why couldn’t he have been gone? Last month when Jerry brought the mail he was gone, usually he was gone, last week he’d stormed out and stayed away for four days, in the rain, just because she’d looked at him wrong. Of all the days for Eddie Disappearing Act Bondo to get domestic.

  “OK,” Jerry said. “Whatever you say.”

  Deanna stared ahead. “He probably thought you were my boyfriend.”

  Jerry blushed.

  “Scary thought, huh, Jur? Gives you the all-overs, don’t it?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “OK, just pull in here by the cabin. I’ll run in and get my req list. And don’t you be telling the boss I’ve requisitioned extra food for a visitor, OK? Because I haven’t.”

  “I’m not going to tell on you, Deanna. Government employees are allowed to have a life. At the office I think they’d all be glad if you were shacking up with some guy up here. They worry about you.”

  “Oh, do they?”

  “They think you should come down on furlough more often. You’ve got about a hundred vacation days saved up that you’ve never used.”

  “How do you know I’ve never used them? Maybe I’m on vacation right now.”

  “You live here,” he said firmly. “You work here. You take a vacation in civilization. TV, electricity, city streets, cars, honk honk. Remember?”

  “Not my idea of civilized, pal.” She slammed the jeep door and headed her long-legged stride toward the cabin. She flung open the door with no heed for its rusty hinges and stood for a second inside the doorway, glowering at Eddie Bondo in his blue corduroy shirt, unbuttoned. He was reading, leaning so far back in the chair that it was balanced on its two hind legs like a dancing dog. She pointed a finger at him.

  “As soon as he’s out of here, I’ve got a crow to pick with you.”

  Eddie raised his eyebrows.

  She snatched the requisition list off the desk and was out the door again. Through the kitchen window he could see her out there standing in the rain, talking a mile a minute to the kid in the hat. She could picture how she looked to him; her hood had slid off the back of her head, her hands flew as she spoke, and her braid hung out the bottom of her jacket, lashing at the backs of her knees like the tail of an animal setting off at a gallop. When she bent over to pull her long-handled scythe from behind the seat, the kid cowered as if he thought she might take his head off. Eddie Bondo would be smiling.

  She hung up her tools on the outside of the cabin with a hard thump while the jeep turned out and puttered down the hill.

  “What are you grinning at?” she demanded when she came back in. “I saw a copperhead a while ago, making a face just like that.”

  “I’m grinning at you, girl. Just like that snake was.”

  “Should I chop you into pieces like I did him?”

  “Don’t lie, tough girl. You didn’t hurt a hair on his little copper head.”

  She looked at him. “What, then?”

  “Nothing. You’re just beautiful, that’s all. You look like some kind of a goddess when you’re mad.”

  What did he think she was, some high school girl he could sweet-talk? Tight-lipped, she began to shove pots and pans around, putting away cans from the wooden crates Jerry had left on the table. She lugged the huge, mouseproof canisters out from under the pantry shelves and heaved in the sacks of beans and corn flour. Eddie Bondo couldn’t stop grinning.

  “I’m not kidding,” she warned him. “I’m just about mad enough to throw you out, rain or no rain.”

  He looked amused by this toothless threat. “What did I do now?”

  She turned around to face him. “You couldn’t have gone out? You couldn’t just step into the outhouse or something for ten minutes when you heard the jeep?” She stood with her hands on her hips, amazed, as if confronted with a fabulously unruly child. “For once it didn’t occur to you to disappear?”

  “No, it didn’t. May I ask why I’m supposed to hide?”

  She went back to slamming cupboards. “Because you don’t exist, that’s why.”

  “Interesting,” he said, looking at the backs of his hands.

  “I mean here you don’t. You’re not a part of my life.” She unzipped her parka and came out of it like a snake shedding its skin, shaking out the full length of her miraculous hair. She hung the windbreaker on a peg, wrung out the end of her braid, sat down on the bed with a put-out sigh, and began unlacing her soaked boots. With one damp, wool-stockinged foot she kicked the long string of condoms back into the darkness under the bed. “Jerry was impressed with your supply of prophylactics,” she said.

  “Oh, I see. I blew your cover. Deanna the Virgin She-wolf has her reputation to think about.”

  She glared at him. “Would you put all four legs of that chair on the floor, please? I’ve only just got the one. I’d thank you for not breaking it.”

  He obliged, with a thump. Closed his book, looked at her, waited.

  “Rainy day got you down?” he asked finally. “PMS? What?”

  The PMS joke made her wrathful. She had a mind to tell him the truth, that she was apparently menopausal. July’s early full moon had snuck past her with no ovulation, and she couldn’t even recall when she’d menstruated last. Her body was going cold on her. She tossed her boots at the door and stood up to pull off her soaked jeans. She didn’t care if he watched or not, she didn’t even feel like being modest. She was no virgin she-wolf, just an old woman with no more patience for keeping a boy around.

  “What reputation?” she said, hanging her wet clothes on a peg near the stove and getting a clean towel out of the cabinet. “Other than Jerry and the guy who cuts my paycheck, there’s hardly anybody who remembers I’m up here. I’m that far gone.”

  As she toweled her hair, she bent over toward the wood stove. Her chilled-to-the-bone body was treating it as a source of warmth, she realized, even though there was no fire there. She also noticed he was watching every move of her naked limbs, taking in the
long muscles of her thighs.

  “If you don’t care what people think,” he said, “then what’s the problem? Why was I supposed to hide from young Smokey?”

  “He’s not that much younger than you are. You’re both just a couple of kids. Button your shirt, my God, it’s freezing in here.”

  “Yes, Mother.” He made no move to button his shirt.

  She stood up, hugging the towel to her chest. “Why are we playing house here, you and me? Do you know I’m forty-seven years old? The year you were learning to walk, I had my first affair with a married man. Does that not freak you out?”

  He shook his head. “Not really.”

  “Does me. All of it does. That I spent six years researching an animal you’d like to see purged from the planet. That I’m half a foot taller than you. Nineteen years older. If we walked down the street together in Knoxville, people would gawk.”

  “As far as I know, walking down the street together in Knoxville is not in the plans.”

  She sat on the bed in her underwear, shivering, feeling suddenly too exhausted even to sit up. She got under the blankets and pulled them up to her chin. She tried that out, looking at him sideways from the pillow. “As far as I know, there are no plans.”

  “Is that a problem?”

  “No,” she said, miserably.

  He put his bare feet flat on the floor and leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. When he spoke again he used a new version of his voice, quieter and kinder. “I guess we might seem like a weird pair to anybody who was looking. But if nobody’s looking, there’s no weirdness. I thought it was pretty simple.”

  “If pride falls in the forest and nobody hears it, did it really fall?”

  He blinked. “What?”

  “You’re ashamed of me,” she said. “I’m ashamed of me, of us. Otherwise we’d be able to walk down the street anywhere.”

  He studied her face, seeming momentarily older—as if he could will himself into moments of maturity, she thought, but normally just didn’t bother. He was twenty-eight, a juvenile male. Like a yearling red-tailed hawk with his dark adult feathers just starting to show through. On the matter of mate choice, she was apparently addled.

  “Where I come from, people keep their treasure under the mattress,” he offered finally. “They don’t have to advertise it all over creation.”

  “But if they keep it hidden they never get to use it.”

  “What is there to use about you and me? Where are we supposed to be spending ourselves besides here?”

  “Nowhere. I don’t know what I’m saying. Forget it.”

  He sat up against the straight chair back and crossed his arms over his chest. “I know what you’re saying. I’m really not all that stupid. My immaturity notwithstanding.”

  She lay still for a long time, looking at him from her prone position. His blue-green eyes, the exposed skin of his chest, the white bone buttons on his corduroy shirt—all of his planes and angles held a clear light whose beauty cut her like a knife.

  “Eddie. It’s not like I want to get married and live happily ever after.”

  He winced a little, she thought, at the blunt mention of that possibility, even in the negative. “If you did,” he said slowly, “I’d be in Alberta about now.”

  “Alberta, Canada?” she asked. “Or Alberta, Kentucky? Just how repellent are we talking about here?”

  He stared at her, offering no answer.

  She shook her head. “You’re not big enough to break my heart. I’m not some schoolgirl, give me a little credit. But I’m not sure I can be like you, either.”

  “What does that mean, ‘like me’?”

  “Living with no plans at all. I keep bumping into walls.” She rolled onto her back, unable to look at him anymore. “When I moved up here I thought I’d be just like the phoebes and wood thrushes. Concentrate on every day as it came, get through winter, rejoice in summer. Eat, sleep, sing hallelujah.”

  “Eat, sleep, screw your heart out, sing hallelujah.”

  “Well, yeah.” She covered her face with both hands and rubbed her eyes. “The birds were getting a lot more action than me. But you know what? Turns out they do have a plan. I’m an outsider, I’m just watching. They’re all doing their own little piece of this big, rowdy thing. Their plan is the persistence of life on earth, and they are working on it, let me tell you.”

  “You’re persisting.”

  “In a real limited way. When I’m dead, what have I made that stays here? A master’s thesis in the U.T. library, which eleven people on the face of the earth have read or ever will.”

  “I would read it,” he said. “So, twelve people.”

  “You don’t want to.” She gave a short, unenthusiastic laugh. “It’s the last thing you’d ever want to read. It’s about coyotes.”

  “What about them?”

  She turned her head to look at him. “Everything about them. Their populations, how they’ve grown and changed over time. One of the things it shows is how people’s hunting them actually increases their numbers.”

  “That can’t be.”

  “You wouldn’t think so. But it’s true. I’ve got a hundred pages of proof.”

  “I think I ought to read that.”

  “If you want to. It’d be a nice gesture.” A gift before parting, she thought. She turned back to the ceiling and closed her eyes, feeling the distant pressure of a headache coming on. His reading it, or not, wouldn’t buy her a place in the scheme of the planet. She pressed her fingertips to her eyelids. “Maybe it’s my age, Eddie. You’ve got more time to pretend your life is endless. Before you face up to the bigger picture.”

  He didn’t ask her about the bigger picture. And he didn’t get up and walk out the door. He asked if she would like him to make a fire, and she said she would. Her body was shivering visibly. She pulled the blankets over her head, leaving a small window through which she could watch his careful, steady hands place kindling inside the stove. She thought about the things people did with their highly praised hands: made fires that burned out; sawed down trees to build houses that would rot and fall down in time. How could those things compare with the grace of a moth on a leaf, laying perfect rows of tiny, glassy eggs? Or a phoebe weaving a nest of moss in which to hatch her brood? Still, as she watched him light a match and bring warmth into the cabin while the rain pounded down overhead, she let herself feel thankful for those hands, at least for right now. When he climbed into bed beside her, they held her until she fell asleep.

  “You’re getting sick,” he told her when she opened her eyes again.

  She sat up, groggy and unsure of the time of day. He was up and dressed, shirt buttoned, even, working at the stove. He’d hooked up the new bottle of propane—a regular handyman. “What time is it?” she asked. “What do you mean I’m getting sick?”

  “You sneezed in your sleep. Four times. I never heard anybody do that before.”

  She stretched her limbs, feeling very tired and a little achy from the weed cutting, but nothing else. No headache; that threat had passed. “I think I’m OK.” She inhaled the rich, convivial scent of onions frying in oil, something wonderful. Occasionally it took all her wits to resist loving this man. She thought of coyotes; that helped. Something big enough to break her heart.

  “You sneezed in your sleep,” he insisted. “I’m going out to get some more firewood.” He dumped two handfuls of chopped vegetables into the pot, poured in water from the kettle, and settled the iron lid on it with a happy little ring.

  “Is it dark? Wait! What time is it?” She scratched her scalp and squinted at the window.

  “Dusk. Why?”

  “Be careful about the phoebe nest on the porch. Don’t scare her off the nest. If she goes off it this late she might stay off all night, and the kids will freeze.”

  “It’s not that cold out. It’s July.”

  “For a featherless little quarter ounce of bird it’s cold out. They’ll die overnight if she’s not on them.�
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  Eddie seemed to have trouble believing in the summertime cold up here, what people called blackberry winter. But he knew the truth of her warning, that a bird chased off its nest at dusk wouldn’t come back. She might sit fifty feet away from it, crying out to her babies all night, stranded. Deanna had never known exactly why, but Eddie had told her what a hunter knows about animal perceptions: most birds can’t see in the dark. From one minute to the next, at dusk, they go blind and can’t see at all.

  He smiled at her from the doorway. “I don’t need four dead babies on my conscience, on top of all my other sins.”

  “It’s important,” she persisted.

  “I know it is.”

  “It is. She’s already lost one brood, thanks to us tromping around out there.”

  “I’ll be careful,” he said. “I’ll tiptoe.”

  He did, apparently. She didn’t hear another sound until he came back in and stoked up the fire. She felt the mattress shift when he sat down on it, heard the hiss of the match, and smelled its sulfur when he leaned over to light the kerosene lamp on the table beside the bed. “Roll over, I’ll rub your back where it hurts.”

  “What’d you do, eat some Mr. Nice Guy mushrooms?” She opened her eyes. “How do you know my back hurts?”

  “I’m always a nice guy, you just fail to see through my irritating demeanor.” He kissed her forehead. “You’re coming down with something. The flu or something. You felt hot as a furnace a while ago. Roll over.”

  “The epizooty,” she said. “Nannie used to say that. It’s a catchall disease category.” She rolled over and lay with her face buried in the pillow, smiling, suffocating with comfort as he massaged her shoulders. “Nannie was my dad’s girlfriend,” she said into the pillow, which muffled her words completely.

  “What?”

  She turned over onto her back. “Nannie was my dad’s girlfriend.”

  “Oh. I thought you said, ‘Eddie is a mad birdbrain.’”

  “Well, yeah. That, too.”

  “The apple-orchard lady, I know. You got free apples, and old Dad got lucky.” His hands moved expertly down her sides, working gently from rib to rib but pausing just under her breasts and finally resting there, distracting her senseless. When she could no longer stand the suspense, he unzipped his jeans and got under the quilts. For a long time he stroked her without speaking.