Prodigal Summer

by Barbara Kingsolver

  Crys trailed along behind her at a little distance. “D’you think it’s, like, going to hail?” she seemed to be asking.

  Lusa glanced up at the bits of sky she could see between trees. “No way. There aren’t any rain clouds in the sky.”

  “I’m talking about hail,” the child insisted.

  Lusa moved deeper into the woods, scanning limbs and the undersides of leaves with a practiced eye. “It takes a big storm to bring hail. Why do you care, anyway? You don’t have a crop in the ground.”

  “Hail, I said!”

  There was enough frustration in her voice to bring Lusa out of her own thoughts and make her turn around. Crys had her feet planted and was glaring at her, aggravated.

  “What about hail?”

  “Hail!” the child said, frankly annoyed. “Where the devil’s at.”

  Lusa slowly turned over this mystery. “Are you asking me about hell?”

  The child shrugged. “Just forgit it.”

  “Well, I’m sorry. I guess we kind of missed our moment there to talk about the afterlife.” Crys had tromped ahead, yanking sassafras leaves off the bushes as she passed.

  “I’m just curious,” Lusa said, catching up to her. “How do you tell the difference between ‘hail’ that falls from the sky and ‘hail’ where the devil is?”

  Crys stopped and looked up at her, stupefied. “Duh! They’re spailed different!”

  “Oh,” Lusa said. “Duh.”

  Crys studied her for a moment. “Aunt Lusa, did you know you talk really funny?”

  “Yeah. It’s starting to sink in.”

  Lusa cajoled Crys into sparing the sassafras bushes and helping her look for a luna instead. “It will be the biggest green moth you can imagine. They’re amazing.” Crys seemed unwilling to believe in the possibility of finding magic, here or anywhere, but she did come running when Lusa finally let out a yelp and cried, “Oh, look, look, look!”

  “Where?”

  “Way up there—it’s too high for us to get. Do you see it, though? Right in the crotch of that branch sticking out.”

  Crys squinted, seeming less than impressed. “We could poke it with a stick.”

  “You don’t want to hurt it,” Lusa argued, but she’d already had the same thought and was twisting a long, skinny limb off an oak sapling. She reached as high as she could, jumping a little, waving the switch like a broom to brush against the hickory trunk just below where the luna rested with its wings serenely folded. It twitched a little and took flight. They watched it dip and climb, dip and climb, high into the branches until it was gone.

  Lusa turned to Crys, her eyes shining. “That was a luna.”

  Crys shrugged. “So?”

  “So? So what? You want it should sing, too?” Crys laughed, and Lusa felt a little startled. They took her by surprise, these moments when her zayda slipped right past her father’s guard into her own tongue. “Come on, let’s go look in the grass for things we can get our hands on.” She led the way back to the grassy clearing on the bank above the road and flopped down in the center of it. She was content for a minute just to lean back on her elbows and look at the toes of her sneakers and past them, down through the enticing woods. She’d been cooped up in the house or weeding or mowing or checking the health of her goats for too many days. She ought to get herself into the woods more often. The grass in this clearing was a little damp—she could feel it soaking her shorts—but the sun felt so good. She closed her eyes and tilted her face toward the sky.

  “What’s this one?”

  Lusa leaned over and looked closely at the shield-shaped green bug that Crys had coaxed onto her wrist. “Southern green stinkbug,” Lusa pronounced.

  Crys studied it closely. “Does it stink?”

  “That’s a matter of opinion.”

  “Is it kin to that red and black one we found on the peach tree?”

  “The harlequin bug? Yes, it is, as a matter of fact. Same family, Pentatomidae.” She looked at Crys, surprised. “That’s very good. You have a really good eye for this, did you know that? You’re a good observer, and you remember things well.”

  Crys flicked the bug off her wrist and rolled over onto her stomach, looking away from Lusa. She parted the grass carefully with her hands, here and there, like an animal grooming its kin. Lusa left her alone, rolling over to study her own patch of grass. Crys eventually gave up the chase and lay on her back, staring into the treetops. After a while she declared, “You could cut down all these trees and make a pile of money.”

  “I could,” Lusa said. “Then I’d have a pile of money and no trees.”

  “So? Who needs trees?”

  “About nineteen million bugs, for starters. They live in the leaves, under the bark, everywhere. Just close your eyes and point, and you’re pointing at a bug.”

  “So? Who needs nineteen million bugs?”

  “Nineteen thousand birds that eat them.”

  “So? Who needs birds?”

  “I do. You do.” She so often wondered whether Crys was really heartless or only trying to be. “Not to mention, the rain would run straight down the mountain and take all the topsoil off my fields. The creek would be pure mud. This place would be a dead place.”

  Crys shrugged. “Trees grow back.”

  “That’s what you think. This forest took hundreds of years to get like this.”

  “Like what?”

  “Just how it is, a whole complicated thing with parts that all need each other, like a living body. It’s not just trees; it’s different kinds of trees, all different sizes, in the right proportions. Every animal needs its own special plant to live on. And certain plants will only grow next to certain other kinds, did you know that?”

  “Sang only grows under a sugar maple tree.”

  “What does? Ginseng? Where’d you learn that?”

  She shrugged again. “Uncle Joel.”

  “So he’s a sang digger, is he?”

  She nodded. “Him and his friends like to go up ’air on the mountain and dig it up. There’s a lady up ’air hollers at ’em for it, too. You’re not supposed to dig it up. He says she’s prolly fixing to shoot his hide if she catches him one more time.”

  Lusa looked up the mountain. “Some lady lives up there? Are you sure? That’s just supposed to be Forest Service land, above this farm.”

  “Ask Uncle Joel. He’ll tell you. He says she’s a gol-dang wild woman.”

  “I’ll bet. I think I’d like to meet her.” Lusa poked an inchworm out of the grass and let it make its way up her finger. “What does Uncle Joel say about me? Is he the one who thinks I should cut down my trees?” She felt only slightly guilty about exploiting this new source of inside information.

  “No. He’s the one says you’ve gone plumb goat-crazy.”

  “Him and everybody else. They’re all just dying to know why, aren’t they?”

  Crys shrugged and looked over at Lusa, a little guarded. But she nodded. “I guess you wouldn’t tell, though.”

  “I’d tell you,” Lusa said quietly. She would love to give this child a gift that mattered. Her confidence, that would be something.

  Her face lit up. “You would?”

  “Only if it was just you, not Uncle Joel or anybody else. You couldn’t tell them no matter what. Can you keep a secret, cross your heart?”

  With earnest solemnity, Crys drew a cross on her chest.

  “OK, here it is. I’ve got this cousin in New York City, he’s a butcher, and we’ve made a deal. If I can get all those goats up there on the hill to have babies a month before New Year’s, he’ll pay me so much money for them your uncle Joel will keel over.”

  The child’s eyes grew wide. “You’ll be rich?”

  Lusa grinned and hung her head. “No, not really. But I’ll be able to pay the guy who’s redoing all the plumbing in the house, and that friend of your uncle Rickie’s who’s fixing the barn right now.”

  “Clivus Morton?” Crys made an awful face. “He’s
got B.O.”

  Lusa tried not to laugh. “Well, that’s no reason not to pay him, is it? If so, I just wasted nine hundred dollars, because I wrote him a check this morning.”

  Crys seemed astonished by this figure. “Shit fire. I guess now he’s rich.”

  “It takes a bunch of money to keep a farm in one piece. Sometimes you don’t make as much in a year as you have to pay out. That’s why people moan and groan about farming. Just in case you were wondering.”

  “What if your goats don’t do that—have their babies?”

  “I’ll still have to pay Clivus Morton a whole bunch more money when he’s finished. Whether or not he takes a bath.” Lusa lay down on her back in the damp grass, crossed her arms behind her head, and sighed. “It’s risky. But the goats are the only way I could think of this year to make some money off a little patch of briar scrub and keep the farm in one piece.” She glanced at Crys, who didn’t seem to be listening, though it was hard to tell. “So that’s what I’m doing with the goats. Just trying to keep my little piece of heaven from going to hail.”

  “Uncle Joel said you was throwing the place away.”

  “He’s welcome to make a suggestion if he has a better idea—he and my vegetarian friends Hal and Arlie in Lexington, who’ve informed me I’m a sellout. There’s not one crop I can put in the ground here that’ll earn as much as it costs to grow. Other than tobacco.”

  Crys looked at her. “Are you that?”

  “Am I what?”

  “Veg-arian.”

  “No, I’m one of the other Christianities. As your cousin Rickie put it.”

  Crys had taken up a stalk of long grass and was very lightly touching Lusa’s skin in the spot where her T-shirt rode up and exposed her belly. It was the closest thing to intimacy she’d ever seen this child share with anyone. Lusa held her breath and lay very still, stunned by luck, as if a butterfly had lit on her shoulder. Finally she breathed out, feeling a little dizzy from watching the high, thin clouds race across the blue gap in the trees overhead. “Listen to me moan and groan. I guess I must be a real farmer now, huh?”

  Crys shrugged. “I guess.”

  “If my goats don’t work out, I’m what you call screwed. I hate to think about it. I’d feel like a murderer logging this hill, but I’m not sure how else I can keep this farm.”

  Crys turned suddenly from Lusa and tossed the grass stem away. “Why do you have to keep it?”

  “That’s a good question. I’m asking myself that question. You know what I come up with?”

  “What?”

  “Ghosts.”

  Crys leaned over and peered down into Lusa’s face. She looked puzzled, briefly, before her expression went neutral. “That’s stupid.”

  “Not really. You’d be surprised.”

  Crys pulled a handful of grass out of the ground. “Ghosts of who?”

  “People who have lost things, I think. Some are your family, and some are from mine.”

  “Real people? Dead people?”

  “Yes.”

  “Like who?”

  “My zayda, my grandpa on my dad’s side. Once upon a time he had this beautiful, beautiful farm, right? And people took it away from him. It was a long time ago, before I was born. My mother’s grandparents had a farm, too, in a whole different country, and the same thing happened: gone. Now they’ve all wound up here.”

  “Are you scared of them?” Crys asked quietly.

  “Not at all.”

  “Do you really believe in ghosts?”

  Lusa wondered why on earth she was talking about this with a child. But she needed to speak of it, as badly as Crys needed to curse. They both had their reasons. She sat up and looked at her until at last she caught her eye. “I’m not scaring you, am I?”

  The girl shook her head rapidly.

  “Maybe I shouldn’t even call them ghosts. It’s just stuff you can’t see. That I believe in, probably more than most people. Certain kinds of love you can’t see. That’s what I’m calling ghosts.”

  Crys wrinkled her nose. “What do you do, then, smell ’em?”

  “I do. And hear them. I hear my grandfather playing music when it rains. That’s how I know he’s here. And your uncle Cole’s here, too. I smell him all the time. I’m not kidding: three or four times a week. I’ll open a drawer or walk into the corncrib in the grain house, and there he is.”

  Crys looked truly unhappy. “He’s not there for real, though. If you can’t see him, he’s not.”

  Lusa reached out and rubbed her shoulder, a hard little point of bone beneath a tense little blanket of muscle. “I know, it’s hard to think about,” she said. “Humans are a very visual species.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  A monarch butterfly drifted into the shaft of light in front of them and batted lazily into the cleared path through the trees toward the fields below. Lusa said, “What that means is, we mainly love things with our eyes.”

  “You mean like Rickie does with those girl magazines under his bed?”

  Lusa laughed hard. “That is exactly what I mean.”

  They both watched the monarch, a bouncing orange dot receding downhill until it was nothing, just a bright spot melting into the light of day.

  “A lot of animals trust their other senses more than we do. Moths use smell, for instance. They don’t have to see their husbands or wives at all to know they’re there.”

  “So? You’re not a moth.”

  “So. I guess you’re right. Pretty stupid, huh?”

  Crys shrugged her shoulders. “When you die will you be a ghost hanging around here, too?”

  “Oh, yeah. A good one.”

  “And who’ll be here then, after you?”

  “That’s the sixty-four-dollar question. The ghosts of my family and yours are having a big disagreement over that one. Mine say stay, yours say go, on account of who comes after me. I have no idea how to make everybody happy.”

  Crys studied her. “Which side you figure to pick?”

  Lusa stared and shrugged back at her, the same quick, introverted jerk of the shoulders that Crys kept ready at hand to answer all questions. A stolen gesture.

  “Come on,” she said then, jumping up and pulling Crys up by the hand. “We’d better go see if Lowell’s awake.”

  “He’ll still be asleep. He’d sleep forever if you let him.”

  “Maybe he’s just a little sad about your mom. Sometimes people need to sleep more when they’re sad.” She reached over to give Crys a hand down the bank into the road cut, but the girl took the plunge by herself in one huge leap.

  “Not me,” she said, landing on her feet.

  “No? What do you do?” Lusa climbed more slowly through the daylilies down onto the road, feeling like the turtle trailing the hare.

  “Nothing. I don’t think about it.”

  “Really. Not ever?”

  Crys shrugged, then caught herself at it. They didn’t speak for several minutes as they walked side by side downhill, through puddles of light in the road spilled by gaps in the forest canopy. Every fifty feet or so they scattered up another cloud of swallowtails—the choirboys turned out of church. Lusa liked the idea of butterfly church. Frankly, it was no more far-fetched than the notion of a communal sucking-up of sodium for sperm valentines. She wondered what would happen if she submitted a paper to Behavioral Ecology on the spiritual effects of swallowtail puddling. Lusa was still amusing herself with the idea when they rounded the corner above the house and she was stopped dead in her tracks.

  “Oh, no, look,” she cried.

  “Shit, Aunt Lusa. The damn booger honeysuckles et your garage.”

  Lusa could not think of a better way to put it. The mound of dark-green leaves was so rounded and immense, there was hardly any sign that a building lay underneath. An ancient burial mound, Lusa might have guessed. A Mayan temple crumbled to ruin. Could this really have happened in just one wildly rainy, out-of-control summer? She hadn’t been up the cemetery road
for as long as she could remember, and certainly hadn’t looked at the garage from the back side since before Cole’s death. Now she could only stare, recalling the exact content of their argument about honeysuckle before he was killed: the absurd newspaper column about spraying it with Roundup; her ire on the plant’s behalf. How could she have gotten so sanctimonious about honeysuckle? It wasn’t even native here, it occurred to Lusa now. It was an escapee from people’s gardens, like the daylilies—like most weedy things that overgrew, in fact. No local insects could eat it because it was an introduction from someplace else—Japan, probably. Lonicera japonica, that would be right, like Japanese beetles and chestnut blight and the horribly invasive Japanese knotweed and the dreaded kudzu. One more artifact of the human covenant that threatened to strangle out the natives.

  You have to persuade it two steps back every day, he’d said, or it will move in and take you over. His instincts about this plant had been right; his eye had known things he’d never been trained to speak of. And yet she’d replied carelessly, Take over what? The world will not end if you let the honeysuckle have the side of your barn. She crossed her arms against a shiver of anguish and asked him now to forgive a city person’s audacity.

  Her head filled with the scent of a thousand translucent white flowers that had yellowed and fallen from this mountain of vine many months before. Maybe years before.

  Crys was looking up at her so anxiously that Lusa touched her own face to make sure it was still intact.

  “Don’t worry, it’s nothing,” she said. “I saw a ghost.”

  {22}

  Predators

  Dog days. Deanna sat on her freshly completed bridge in the hemlock grove, nervously picking off splinters from the end of a pine plank and tossing them into the water, listening to the clan of red-tails screaming at one another up in the sky. Sometimes the birds dipped into the trees overhead, and their reflections glanced briefly across the surface of the water below her feet. She pulled her bandanna out of her back pocket and wiped sweat out of her eyes, leaving a trail of grime and sawdust across her forehead. A hawk goes blind in the dog days, people used to say. And her dad said different: Nothing about a hot summer day could make a bird lose its sight. They’re pushing their young out of the nest in August, is all. The parents fly around crazy, diving into the treetops to try to get away from their full-grown young following them around screeching to be fed, unwilling to hunt on their own. Her dad didn’t know the word fledge, but he knew what it meant. Look close, he always used to tell her. If it doesn’t sound true, it isn’t. There’s always a reason for what people say, but usually it’s not the reason they think.