Prodigal Summer

by Barbara Kingsolver

  He said, feebly, “You don’t act normal for your age.”

  She stood with her mouth a little open, as if there were words stuck halfway between her mind and the world around. At last they came out: “There isn’t any normal way to act seventy-five years old. Do you know why?”

  He didn’t dare answer. Was she really seventy-five, exactly?

  “I’ll tell you why,” she said. “Considering everything—the whole history of things—people are supposed to be dead and buried at our age. That’s normal. Up till just lately, the Civil War or something, they didn’t even know about germs. If you got sick, they slapped leeches on you and measured you for a coffin. I wouldn’t doubt but hardly anybody even made it to fifty. Isn’t that so?”

  “I suppose it is.”

  “It is. Our mammaw and pappaw got to keep their dignity, just working right up to the end and then dying of a bad cold one day, with most their parts still working. But then along comes somebody inventing six thousand ways to cure everything, and here we are, old, wondering what to do with ourselves. A human just wasn’t designed for old age. That’s my theory.”

  He hardly knew what to say. “That’s one of your theories.”

  “Well, think about it. Women’s baby-business all dries up, men lose their hair—we’re just a useless drain on our kind. Speaking strictly from a biological point of view. Would you keep a chestnut in your program if it wasn’t setting seeds anymore?”

  He frowned. “I don’t think of myself as obsolete.”

  “Of course not, you’re a man! Men walk around with their bald heads bare to the world and their pony put out to pasture, but they refuse to admit they’re dead wood. So why should I? What law says I have to cover myself up for shame of having a body this old? It’s a dirty trick of modern times, but here we are. Me with my cranky knees and my old shriveled ninnies, and you with whatever you’ve got under there, if it hasn’t dropped off yet—we’re still human. Why not just give in and live till you die?”

  Garnett was so hot under the collar he could scarcely breathe. He had never sworn in front of a woman in his life, not since grammar school, anyway, but this was a near occasion. She was asking for it. Nannie Rawley needed a willow switch, was what she needed. If they’d both been sixty-five years younger, he’d have turned her over his knee. Garnett swore a silent oath, turned on his heel, and walked away without so much as a word. For an occasion like this, there just weren’t any words that would do.

  An hour and ten minutes later, Garnett returned to Nannie’s backyard with one asphalt shingle in his hand. She was carrying a bushel of Gravensteins to her pickup truck, starting to load up for the Amish market tomorrow, and was so startled to see Garnett Walker that she stumbled and almost dropped her basket.

  He held up the shingle, showing her the peculiar heart-shaped profile that matched the ones on her roof, and then he threw it at her feet. It lay there in the grass next to a puddle, this thing she needed, like a valentine. A bright crowd of butterflies rose from the puddle in trembling applause.

  “There are two hundred of those in my garage. You can have them all.”

  She looked from the shingle to Garnett Walker and back to the shingle. “Lord have mercy,” she said quietly. “A miracle.”

  {24}

  Moth Love

  It was nearly noon on a Sunday when Jewel came up to collect the children. Lusa was in the garden picking green beans when she saw her coming up across the yard, moving slowly. “Honey, it’s the Lord’s day of rest,” Jewel called out when she reached the gate. “You shouldn’t be working this hard.”

  “What was God thinking, then, when he made green beans and August?” Lusa replied, trusting that her sister-in-law wasn’t really scolding her for sacrilege. Jewel looked pale but jaunty in a little blue cloche someone had crocheted for her. She hadn’t ever bothered with a wig but just wore scarves and hats. “Come on through the rabbit fence,” Lusa called to her. “The gate just has a wire around the top.”

  Jewel fiddled with the chicken wire and found her way in. “Lord, this is pretty,” she remarked. Lusa sat back on her heels, feeling proud. Red and yellow peppers glowed like ornaments on their dark bushes, and the glossy purple eggplants had the stately look of expensive gifts. Even the onions were putting up pink globes of flower. During all the years of childhood she’d spent sprouting seeds in pots on a patio, she’d been dreaming of this.

  “You must be a slave to this garden,” Jewel said.

  “Just about. Look at this.” She gestured at the long row of un-picked beans. “I’ve done forty quarts of beans already, and I’ve still got two more rows to go.”

  “You’ll be glad, though. Come next February.”

  “That’s the truth. Between this and my chickens, I may not have to go to Kroger’s again till next summer. I’ve got tomatoes put up, spaghetti sauce—maybe twenty quarts—and I’m freezing broccoli, cauliflower, you name it. Tons of corn. Your kids ate their own weight each in corn last night, by the way.”

  Jewel smiled. “They would. Lowell will even eat roasting ears, and he is Mister Picky. They didn’t put much dent in your broccoli, though, did they?”

  “No.”

  “You could quit on the green beans right now,” Jewel said. “If you’ve got forty quarts, you could just stop picking and say, ‘Well, sir, I’m done.’ It’s not against the law.”

  “I could,” Lusa said. “But Cole planted these beans. He put in most of this. Remember how it got warm early, in May? I feel like as long as I’m up here picking stuff, he’s still giving me presents. I hate to think of the fall, when I’ll have to turn it under.”

  Jewel shook her head. “It’s your work, too, though. I swear, this is pretty. It looks like a woman’s garden, some way. It doesn’t look like other people’s gardens.”

  Lusa thought, but did not say, that this was because she was an outsider. She planted different things: five-color Swiss chard instead of collard greens, and several rows of fava beans to dry for falafel meal. She’d grown four different kinds of eggplants from seed, including the pink-and-white-streaked “Rosa Bianca” for her beloved imam bayildi and baba ganouj.

  Jewel was examining the tomato plants, rubbing their healthy leaves between her fingers. “What do you kill the hornworms with, Sevin dust?”

  “No, not that. It kills too many of my friends.”

  Jewel looked over at her with a horrified face, and Lusa laughed. “Bugs, I mean. I know you all laugh at me, but I’m so fond of bugs, I can’t stand to use a general pesticide like Sevin. I use different things. I use Bt on the tomatoes.”

  “B-T?”

  “It’s a germ, Bacillus thuringiensis. A bacterium that gives hornworms indigestion when they eat my tomatoes but doesn’t hurt bees or ladybugs.”

  “Are you pulling my leg?”

  “Nope. Well, bad indigestion—the hornworms die. It works on cabbage loopers, too. Here, there’s a peck basket by the fence there, why don’t you pick some tomatoes for you and the kids to take home?”

  “I won’t eat them; my stomach’s shot for anything acid, I guess from the chemo. I still can’t even drink orange juice. But I’ll pick you the ripe ones, instead of just standing here useless. Something else for you to put up.”

  “I have quit on canning tomatoes. Now I just slice them up with basil and olive oil and eat them for breakfast.”

  “Oh, shoot, I stepped right on your marigolds.”

  “That’s okay, I don’t care what they look like. I just put them in to keep nematodes away from the roots of the tomato plants.”

  “Now, that is something. That is really something. Cole was starting to get real interested in all that the last couple years. How to poison things without using poison. He went up to U.K. to take a class on that.”

  “That’s how we met,” Lusa said, looking down. “I was his teacher.”

  “Oh!” cried Jewel, as if she’d been stung by a bee. Was she jealous? Lusa wondered. She didn’t usually seem
to be, not so much as the other sisters, even though she and Cole had been so close. Jewel alone had always seemed willing to share him. Lusa bent close to her beans to keep the sun out of her eyes as she neared the end of her row. She moved along on her knees, dragging a nearly full paper grocery bag along beside her.

  “Believe it or not,” she said to Jewel, “I had both your kids up here for half the morning handpicking the bean beetles and squashing them. I told them I’d pay them a penny apiece if they kept track, and would you believe, they did a body count. They’re going to go home rich today. You got any overdue bills you need paid, talk to Crys and Lowell.” She glanced up. “Jewel? Jewel?”

  Lusa scanned above the whole row of tall tomato plants for Jewel’s head, but it wasn’t there. She stood up and walked along the end in a panic, looking down between the rows. There Jewel was on the ground, gripping her knees and rocking with her face tight with pain and a basket of tomatoes spilled out on the ground beside her. Lusa flew to her side and put both arms around her to steady her.

  “Oh, God,” Lusa said, several times. “What should I do? I’m sorry, I’m not one of those people who’re good in emergencies.”

  Jewel opened her eyes. “It’s no emergency. I just need to get to the house. I guess I overdid it. I’ve got pain pills in my purse.”

  Leaving beans and tomatoes strewed on the ground and the rabbit fence wide open, the two small women struggled down the slope and across the yard to the house. Lusa practically carried Jewel up the steps. Upper-body strength had come to her unbidden in the last months: nearly every day she did something she used to have to ask Cole to do, and it startled her, always, to glance at her body in the mirror and see planes where soft curves used to be. Carrying a relative up the porch stairs, though, was a first.

  They paused in the front hallway, hearing the children’s voices. Lowell and Crys were in the parlor with a stack of ancient board games Lusa had pulled out of a closet. Their favorites were Monopoly and the Ouija board, which they pronounced “Ow-jay.”

  “Where are your pills?” Lusa asked.

  “Oh, shoot, my purse is in the car.”

  “Let’s get you onto the parlor couch, then. I’ll run and get it.”

  Jewel gave Lusa a pleading look. “Could we go upstairs? I hate for the kids to see me like this.”

  “Of course.” Lusa felt stupid for not thinking of that. Jewel gripped the banister with a tight, white hand, and Lusa carried most of her weight up these stairs, too. She guided Jewel into the bedroom, deciding not to care that the bed wasn’t made and clothes were on the floor. “Here, you sit and I’ll be right back.”

  She flew down to the car and back, breathless, just taking a quick glance at the kids to see that they were occupied. They were arguing over Monopoly money, so they hadn’t noticed anything. Keeping her voice as calm as she could, she asked them to go out and close the rabbit fence around the garden and then gather the eggs, which she knew Lowell loved to do, so long as his sister protected him from the rooster. Then she ran back upstairs, pausing in the upstairs bathroom to draw a glass of water from the tap. When she returned to the bedroom she found Jewel settled into the green brocade chair by the window, Lusa’s reading chair. She was running her fingers over the vine pattern on the nubbly green fabric, as if reading something written there in Braille. Lusa handed her the glass of water and sat on the floor at her feet to work on the childproof ca.

  When she got it open at last, Jewel swallowed the pills and drank the whole glass of water, obediently, like a child. She set down the glass and went on rubbing the arms of the chair, thoughtfully. “We used to have two of these,” she said. “A pair. Mommy’s good parlor chairs, till they got old. Lois finally spilled something on one of them. Or, no, she cut her leg open with a pocketknife and got a big streak of blood from here to there. Lordy, she was in trouble.”

  “For cutting her leg?”

  “Well, no, see, for doing it in that chair. She was trying to make a soap carving of Marilyn Monroe! We weren’t supposed to be in the parlor at all; it was just for company. That was a whole mess of trouble. Mommy about had a fit. She couldn’t clean it for anything. She had to throw that chair out! Lord, I wonder where it ever ended up.”

  “Probably in the barn, along with everything else in the free world. Do you know there’s part of a piano in there?”

  “No,” Jewel said quietly, her eyes fixed on the wallpaper over the bed. “She put it down by the road. That’s the way you did back then, when we were kids. Somebody would always come along that was worse off than you and didn’t mind putting a sheet over a stained chair, and they’d take it. It’s somewhere now. Somebody’s using it someplace.” Her eyes focused and came down like a pair of blue butterflies to light on Lusa’s face. “Isn’t it funny how you never know how things are going to wind up? I get so mad, thinking about not having a chance to get old. Darn it. I want to see what Lois looks like with white hair.”

  “I don’t think any of us will live to see that. As long as Lady Clairol’s still in business.”

  Jewel let out a weak laugh, but Lusa felt bad for trying to cover this awful, important moment with a joke. She had suffered so much herself from people’s platitudes and evasions of death, yet here with Jewel she had no idea what else to say. “You never know, Jewel, you still might outlive us all,” was what came out.

  Jewel shook her head, keeping her eyes steady on Lusa. “I’m not going to see another summer. I’ll be gone before you’re done eating the canned goods in your pantry.”

  “I’m sorry,” Lusa whispered. She reached up to take both of Jewel’s hands in hers and held on to them without speaking for several minutes. An occasional syllable of the children’s shouts drifted in through the open window. The position eventually became awkward for Lusa and she had to let go, stroking her sister-in-law’s fingers gently as she did. She looked back up at Jewel’s face, which seemed empty now. The hat looked sad and undignified indoors, seeming to mock her seriousness, but Jewel had been adamant about not spending money on a wig. Lusa had wondered whether it signified optimism that her hair would grow back or realism, an acknowledgment that there wouldn’t be much time. Now she knew.

  “Jewel, I want to ask you a question. Something I’ve been thinking about. You don’t have to answer today; you can think it over as long as you need to. Or maybe you’ll just say no, and that’s fine, too. But I want to ask.”

  “Ask me, then.”

  Lusa’s heart pounded. She had imagined asking this in a more casual setting, maybe while she and Jewel did something together in the kitchen. She hadn’t realized before today that it was too late for casual. And this was not a casual thing.

  “What is it, then?” Jewel seemed troubled now by the pause.

  “I wondered if, when the time came, if the time came…” Lusa felt her face grow hot. “Forgive me if this is inappropriate to ask, but I wondered what you’d think about the idea of my adopting Crys and Lowell.”

  “Taking care of them or adopting them?”

  “Adopting them.”

  Jewel studied Lusa’s face, surprisingly unshaken. She didn’t seem angry, anyway, as Lusa had feared she might be.

  “We don’t have to talk about this if you don’t want to,” Lusa said. “I can’t imagine anything harder to think about.”

  “Don’t you think I think about it every minute of the day?” Jewel said in a flat voice that frightened Lusa.

  “I guess you do. I would. That’s why I brought it up.”

  “Well, it’s not something you ought to feel obligated about,” she answered finally. “I’ve got four sisters.”

  Lusa looked at the floor, at her callused knees and dirt-streaked thighs beneath the hem of her shorts, and then she took Jewel’s hand back in hers without looking up. “You’ve got five sisters. I’m the only one without children.” She glanced up then at Jewel, who was listening. “But that’s not the reason. That wouldn’t be a good reason. I love your kids, that’s th
e reason. I love Crys and I love Lowell. I’m not sure I’d be the greatest mother, but I think I could learn on those two. Lowell’s easy, he’s a heart stealer, and Crys…Crys and I are two peas in a pod.”

  “You’d have plenty of help, right down the hill,” Jewel said equivocally.

  “Plenty of help,” Lusa agreed, encouraged by Jewel’s use of the conditional. She hadn’t said no. “More help than you can shake a stick at. Although to be honest I don’t think Lois and a stick should be allowed near those kids. At least till they’re older.”

  “Not till they’re older,” Jewel echoed, closing her eyes and leaning her head back against the big green chair. “Can you picture Crys at the senior cotillion?”

  “Believe it or not, I can,” Lusa said gently. “But she might be wearing a tux. She’s got the world by the tail; she just needs help figuring out what to do with it. It’s going to take an open mind. When I look around this family, the best candidate I come up with is me.”

  Jewel opened her eyes and looked down at Lusa with a new expression. “There’s some papers I have to get their father to sign before I can really decide the next step. I’ve been thinking about all this since I first got sick. I had the papers drawn up already at the lawyer’s.”

  “For what, releasing them for adoption?”

  “Well, just releasing them to me. He doesn’t even know I’m sick. There’s no telling what he’d do. I don’t think he’d really come scoop them up, but you never know with him. With Shel, that’s the one thing you can count on, is that you never can tell. He might think he wanted them, for a week or two, and then he’d dump them out like kitties by the side of the road when he figured out a kid has to eat and shit.”

  She closed her eyes again and winced. Lusa stroked the backs of her hands until whatever it was passed over. She wondered what this invisible beast was doing to Jewel on the inside, what parts of her it already owned. She thought of an old tale her zayda used to tell about the beast that ate the moon every month and then slowly spat it back out. A happier ending than this. She could feel the heat and ire of Jewel’s monster right through her thin skin.