Prodigal Summer

by Barbara Kingsolver

  Her plan had been to sit down here on the porch for a minute before hurrying to refill their water jug and the gas can and get straight back down there. Right. She shaded her eyes and frowned at the sun, which was touching the crowns of the poplars. She’d slept for hours. Then she noticed the ax lying at the end of the porch. She studied it, puzzled. He must have come back up here looking for her when she didn’t return. Saw her asleep, left again, and now was—where? Panic rose into her throat. The gunfire, that would have been him. Eddie Bondo had shot something while she slept.

  She jumped up and paced the porch, gripped with the surreal possibility that her obsessive dread had come true. But there had been only the one shot; he couldn’t have killed much with just one shot, since they weren’t all together anymore. They were leaving the den to hunt now, all of them. She’d seen one or two young at a time running with an adult, as high up as the hemlock grove and all the way down to the boundary line. Most nights now she heard their yips and tremulous, rising howls. They were all over this mountain. She couldn’t keep them safe anymore. Dragging her untied bootlaces, she went quickly inside the cabin and checked the corner where his rifle had stood for most of two months. No surprise: it was gone. Bastard.

  She went to her desk and yanked open the drawer where she kept her pistol, but then she just stared at it. What did she think she was going to do? She slowly closed the drawer and stood with her head back and her eyes closed, stood that way for a long time while tears crept onto her temples. No more shots rang out. Only the one.

  She was still not ready to face him—maybe would never be—when she heard him whistling at a distance, coming up the Forest Service road. She glanced out the window, went to the door and bolted it, sat back down on the bed, put her boots back on, stared some more at the book she’d been staring at, then went to the window again. Here he came, grinning like a polecat, resting his gun on one shoulder and in his other hand toting some object that resembled a dark jacket. She squinted. Something black. Something feathered, with wings, bouncing along limply in his hand as he carried it by its feet. A turkey. She ran outside, banging her forehead hard against the door in her haste to get through it, having completely forgotten she’d bolted it shut a minute before. She watched him from the porch, holding her head. The pain burned tears into her eyes, but relief made her laugh like a child.

  When he saw her there he hitched a small, extra step into his gait and held up his trophy. “Happy Thanksgiving!”

  “Happy Easter’s more like it. Turkey season was done with in April.” She touched her fingers to her forehead and looked at them, but she wasn’t bleeding. She felt delirious, unable to stop laughing. He halted ten feet away and appraised her.

  “Well, hell. You’re going to let me live. I thought you’d skin me for this.”

  “I’m mad as hell,” she declared, trying to sound like it. “It’s high summer. That turkey could be brooding a whole clutch of young. If that’s so, you’ve killed a family.”

  “Nope. This was Daddy.”

  “It’s a tom? Did you know that before you shot it?”

  He gave her a wounded look.

  “Well, I’m sorry. You’ve got a good eye, and you know better than to shoot a hen turkey in July. But still, look at you, poaching. Smack under the nose of a game warden.”

  He walked straight toward her, turkey and all, and kissed her mouth with such enthusiasm that she had to take several steps backward. “This is the warden’s dinner,” he said.

  “You don’t need to be shooting me any dinner. And it’s too late for dinner anyway, it’s suppertime.”

  “It’s your supper, then”—he kissed her again—“and I did need to do it. I’ve been bumming off you all summer. You don’t even know what a good provider I am. I considered bringing you a deer.”

  She laughed. “Oh, boy. That’d be hard to hide if one of my colleagues happened to show up.”

  He handed her the bird and checked the chamber of his rifle before he set it carefully against the wall. “You need protein,” he said. “You’ve been living too long on bird food, and you’re peaked. You’re walking around here with iron-poor tired blood.”

  She laughed. “You’re too young to even know what that means. Now what are you doing?” He’d picked up the shovel and was over at the edge of the clearing by the boulder, eyeing the ground around it. “You thinking to give it a Christian burial?”

  “We need a fire pit. I’ve been hankering to do this all summer.”

  She smiled at his hankering. “Where’d you learn to talk like ’at, young fella?”

  “Some beautiful long-haired hillbilly girl.”

  He poked the point of the shovel into the soft dirt. Deanna studied the bird in her hand, holding it out at arm’s length. It weighed more than a gallon jug of water—ten or twelve pounds, maybe. “So what are your exact plans for tom here?”

  “Pluck him.”

  “Right. But you have to scald him in hot water first to get the feathers loose, and I don’t think I have any pot big enough to dunk this old boy in.”

  “Yes, you do—one of those big metal cans you keep the beans and rice in,” he said without looking up. He was excavating a good-sized pit. “We’ll boil the water to scald it in there first, and then we can empty it out and cook the bird inside there, with the coals piled all around it.”

  She looked at Eddie, surprised. “You have been thinking about this all summer.”

  “Yep.”

  “Carnivorous fantasies,” she said.

  “Yep.”

  She went inside, smiling in spite of herself as she checked the bottoms of the storage canisters and emptied out the one that looked more watertight. She felt excited. She’d passed so many days now on forest time, timeless time, noting the changes in leaf and song and weather but imposing no human agenda. Even her own birthday she’d let pass without mentioning it to Eddie. But something in her body had been longing for a celebration, or so it seemed right now. He’d guessed right. She wanted this feast. An extravagant event to mark this extravagant summer.

  When she carried the empty canister outside, Eddie had already lined the pit with rocks and was starting the fire. While he built up kindling and the rising flame licked around the tall metal can, she carried water one kettleful at a time from the pump spigot inside the cabin. The cold water hissed and sheared into columns of steam as she poured it down the inside of the hot cylinder. On her trips back and forth she paused just once to examine the turkey. She let herself touch the bumpy red skin on his head and wattles and his translucent eyelids, then stroked the iridescent sheen on his dark feathers. Not a human’s idea of beauty, maybe, but she felt something for all the days he’d passed in the filtered sunlight of this forest, meditating on fat berries and the far-off sound of a mate. Eddie was right, they’d done no damage to anyone’s childhood here—turkey paternity was the hit-and-run kind. But she wondered what mark this grand male had left on his mountain. She hoped the last of his genes were warm in a nest being brooded somewhere.

  It was going on dusk by the time the water finally boiled. They argued about whether it was really necessary to scald the bird before plucking, and Deanna went ahead and pulled the long, stiff wing and tail feathers; she couldn’t remove the softer breast feathers without tearing the flesh, since the bird was already cold. Eddie deferred to her expertise. She was surprised her hands still knew the motions of plucking and squeezing out pinfeathers after so many years of grocery-store birds or none at all. In recent years she’d hardly eaten meat. But nearly every weekend of her childhood she’d helped butcher a chicken or two. This carcass was impressively large by comparison, even after she’d stripped it naked. Eddie helped her to lift it by the feet and dunk it into the boiling pot for a full minute, and later, to hold it over the flame to singe off the down feathers, and he steadied the bird while she used the ax to chop off its head and feet. He also managed to drag the heavy pot to the edge of the fire pit and continued to build up the coals
while she settled down on the flat boulder to eviscerate their prey.

  “Leaving the dirty work to the womenfolk,” she muttered, not really minding the task but still faintly put out with Eddie for being so cheerful this morning while she was dying on her feet. She put both hands deep inside the bird and gently loosened the membrane that attached the intestines and lungs to the body wall. He watched, impressed, as she pulled the entire mass out in a single glistening package and used her knife to cut carefully around the excretory vent, freeing the mess of viscera, which she set on the boulder beside the carcass. She poked through it, extracted the heart, and looked at it closely, then pitched it to Eddie, causing him to yelp. She laughed. “Anything you’re willing to eat, you ought to be willing to look under its hood first. That’s what Dad used to tell me.”

  “I’m not squeamish; I just never cared for bird guts. I’ll gut a deer over a turkey any day.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “I don’t know—personal preference. It’s not so delicate. You don’t have all those crops and craws and things to deal with.”

  “Oh, I see. This is a more skilled surgery than you’re qualified to handle.” She cut the skin all the way down the length of the tom’s long neck after carefully examining the wounds that had killed it. It was a good, clean head-and-neck shot: Eddie had done well. The carcass wouldn’t be riddled with the hazard of tooth-cracking bird shot, as had so often been the case with the squirrels and turkeys that neighbors gave to her dad. She reached in with two fingers to pull out the damaged esophagus and windpipe. “Boy, he had a voice, this guy. Look at that.”

  “He has gobbled his last.”

  “He has,” she agreed.

  “I can’t believe you,” he said. “The happy carnivore.”

  She looked up. “What? Humans are omnivores. We’ve got meat teeth and fiber teeth and a gut that’s fond of both. I know a little bit too much about animals to try to deny what I am.”

  “But I shot a bird off your precious mountain. I thought for sure you’d grab the gun and shoot me.”

  “Then why’d you do it?”

  He flashed his one-sided grin. “You know me. I like a challenge.”

  She rinsed her hands in a bowl of water, then set to the task of washing every inch of the carcass, looking it over for the last pinfeathers. After it was clean and dry she would rub its skin with salt and a little oil. “It’s just a turkey,” she said after a minute.

  “What do you mean, ‘just a turkey’? You won’t even let me squash a spider in the outhouse with my shoe.”

  “A spider’s a predator. You kill that gal and we’ll have a hundred flies in there, which is not my idea of a good time.”

  “Oh, right, predators matter more.” He went to the firewood pile for another armload of kindling.

  She shrugged. “I won’t say this guy didn’t matter. Everybody in Zeb County can’t be up here shooting turkeys, or they’d all be gone by full dark. But something would have gotten him sooner or later. An owl, maybe, if he stuck his neck out after dark. Or a bobcat.”

  Eddie was picking through the pile, pulling out medium-sized hickory logs, but he stopped to stare at her with raised eyebrows.

  “What?” she asked. “It’s a prey species. It has fallen prey to us. I can deal with that. Predation’s a sacrament, Eddie; it culls out the sick and the old, keeps populations from going through their own roofs. Predation is honorable.”

  “That’s not how Little Red Riding Hood tells it,” he said.

  “Oh, man, don’t get me started on the subject of childhood brainwash. I hate that. Every fairy story, every Disney movie, every plot with animals in it, the bad guy is always the top carnivore. Wolf, grizzly, anaconda, Tyrannosaurus rex.”

  “Don’t forget Jaws,” he said.

  “Oh, yeah: shark.” She watched him return to the fire with his carefully stacked armload of wood. He squatted and began feeding the flames again with such tender care, examining each stick on both sides before extending it toward the tongues of the fire, that he might have been feeding a cranky toddler. “I will never understand it,” she said. “We’re the top of our food chain, so you’d think we’d relate to those guys the best. Seems like we’d be trying to talk them into trade agreements.”

  Eddie laughed at that. “So you’re telling me that as a kid, you were rooting for the wolf to eat the Riding Hood babe?”

  “My last name was Wolfe. I took it all kind of personally.” She finished drying the carcass inside and out with a rag and inspected the cavity. “I sure as heck wanted Wile E. Coyote to get that stupid roadrunner.”

  “But then the show would be over,” he protested.

  “Amen to that.” She stood up and dried her hands on her jeans. “I’m going to get some salt.”

  Inside the cabin she poured some olive oil from the square metal container into a jar and dug out her moisture-proof can of salt. She peered into the vegetable bin: plenty of onions, and some potatoes left, too, burgeoning with pink sprouts. Four carrots. She would throw all these into the pot with the turkey once it was halfway cooked. And then drop in a few smoldering hickory twigs and put the lid on to give it a nice smoky flavor. She glanced at the clock on the bookshelf and tried to guess how long this would all take. Hours, of course. And she was ravenous. They would get to smell the heavenly, mounting fragrance and anticipate their feast for hours. Nothing was more wonderful than waiting for a happiness you could be sure of. The pleasure of food was something she’d nearly forgotten. Her sympathy for Jaws and T. rex notwithstanding, Deanna was a little surprised at herself—to be engaged in this act of carnivory and just thrilled about it.

  When she came outside she saw that Eddie had managed to dump the hot water out of the pot without dousing the fire, which was now roaring. He was piling on logs the size of arms and legs. Luckily her woodpile was in no danger of depletion: there were oak and hickory and poplar logs neatly split and stacked head-high against the cabin’s west wall, in spite of its being only July. Splitting firewood seemed to be Eddie’s favorite exertion—or second-favorite, anyway. She paused to admire his body as he stood back from the heat and brushed bark off his hands. It was so easy to let go of their animosity in these moments of animal grace. She felt moved by what he’d done for her, his act of provision.

  He turned and caught her watching. “What are you thinking about?” he asked.

  “Hankerings,” she said. “Eating that bird. You may be right about me, I may be a little anemic. Why, what are you thinking about?”

  “The gospel according to Deanna. It’s a sin to kill a spider but not a turkey.”

  She walked over to the boulder and settled down beside her next meal. “Oh, sin, who knows what that is? Something invented by mothers, I guess. And me never having one.” She glanced up. “What?”

  He shook his head. “Just you. I was trying to be serious. For once.”

  “What, about spiders and turkeys? You know about that as well as I do, it’s not complicated. Removing a predator has bigger consequences for a system.”

  “Than taking out one of its prey. I know. Numbers.”

  “Simple math, Eddie Bondo.”

  He seemed thoughtful, squatting by the fire with his hands between his knees. “How many big carnivores on this mountain, you think?”

  “What does ‘big’ mean? Mammals, birds?” She looked down the narrow cleft of the hollow, where lightning bugs were beginning to rise in irregular yellow streaks. “Maybe one bobcat per five hundred acres. One mountain lion per mountain, period. Big birds of prey, like great horned owls, one pair needs maybe”—she thought about this—“two hundred acres, I’d guess, to feed itself and raise two or three young in a year.”

  “And how many turkeys?”

  “Oh, gosh, there’s gaggles of them walking around this hollow. A turkey lays fourteen eggs without half thinking about it. If something gets one of her babies she might not quite notice. If a fox gets the whole nest, she’ll go bat her eyes at t
om here and plunk out fourteen more eggs.” She pondered the equation for a minute as she worked. “But still, turkeys are scarce compared to their prey. Grubs and things, there’s millions of them. It’s like a pyramid scheme.”

  Eddie was silent, poking at the fire but still listening. He seemed to understand that this was not a casual conversation to her. She shook a handful of salt out of the can into her palm and rubbed the bird’s stippled skin, first with the gritty salt and then with the smooth, cool oil. When she spoke again, she took care to keep the emotion out of her voice.

  “The life of a top carnivore is the most expensive item in the pyramid, that’s the thing. In the case of a coyote, or a big cat, the mother spends a whole year raising her young. Not just a few weeks. She has to teach them to stalk and hunt and everything there is to doing that job. She’s lucky if even one of her kids makes it through. If something gets him, there goes that mama’s whole year of work down the drain.”

  She looked up, catching his eye directly. “If you shoot him, Eddie, that’s what you’ve taken down. A big chunk of his mother’s whole life chance at replacing herself. And you’ve let loose an extra thousand rodents on the world that he would have eaten. It’s not just one life.”

  He was looking away. She waited until she had his eye again. “When you get a coyote in your rifle sight and you’re fixing to pull the trigger, what happens? Do you forget about everything else in the world until there’s just you and your enemy?”

  He thought about it. “Something like that. Hunting’s like that. You focus.”

  “‘Focus,’” she said. “That’s what you call it? The idea that there’s just the two of you left, alone in the world?”

  “I guess.” He shrugged.

  “But that’s wrong. There’s no such thing as alone. That animal was going to do something important in its time—eat a lot of things, or be eaten. There’s all these connected things you’re about to blow a hole in. They can’t all be your enemy, because one of those connected things is you.”