Prodigal Summer

by Barbara Kingsolver

  “Yeah. Not ten days ago. He came up to diagnose my worm problem. He didn’t act like he’d ever set foot on this place before. He wouldn’t even step through the barn door till I’d invited him in, like it was a living room.”

  “Well, that’s just like him. They were funny people, him and Ellen. Just kindly old-fashioned I guess. And old, period. I think Shel was a change-of-life baby that came after they’d given up, and they never got over the shock.”

  Lusa realized this was more or less what she’d been to her own parents. They’d never known what to do with her.

  “She died of cancer,” Jewel added.

  “Who did, Mr. Walker’s wife? When?”

  “Right around when Shel ran off. No, a couple of years before. Lowell wasn’t born yet. She never had a thing to do with Crystal, either, but I guess she was already right sick by that time.” Jewel sighed, too familiar with the lapses caused by illness.

  Lusa was amazed. She’d simply pegged the old man for a lifelong bachelor. “He’s your father-in-law. I can’t believe it. How come you never told me?”

  “Because I had no earthly notion you even knew him, that’s why. We haven’t any of us spoken to the old man since her funeral, as far as I can think. I’ve got nothing against him. It’s more like he was funny towards us.”

  “He’s funny toward everybody,” Lusa said. “That’s my impression.”

  “What it is, I think, is they were embarrassed to death by Shel’s drinking. Shel Walker has shortchanged about everybody in this county, one way or another. He used to paint houses and do odd jobs, and after we got married he got to where he’d take their money for a deposit, go drink it up, and then never come back and do the work. I felt like I couldn’t hardly show my face in town. His daddy probably feels worse.”

  “I had no idea,” Lusa said.

  “Oh, yeah. Shel spent many a year running around wild. And see, I was part of the wild, to begin with, in high school. Then after Shel left me and ran off, that was just finally the last straw. I think old Mr. Walker decided to put that whole chapter on the shelf and pretend me and the kids never happened.”

  “But he’s their grandfather, right?”

  “That’s sad, isn’t it? They never really got to have any mammaw or pappaw. Daddy and Mommy died before they got the chance. And if Shel’s got no legal tie to them anymore, Mr. Walker’s not hardly obligated to start being a pappaw now, is he?”

  “Not obligated, no. But would you care if I called him up? Maybe not right now, but sometime. The kids might like to go over there; he’s got a beautiful farm, he grows trees. And there’s an apple orchard right nearby, I saw. Wouldn’t it be fun to take the kids over there to get cider in October?”

  Jewel looked pained, and Lusa could have bitten her tongue off for taking a thing like “October” for granted. “You could call today, I don’t care,” she told Lusa, “but I wouldn’t get my hopes up. He’s a sour old pickle.”

  Lusa didn’t say anything. She wasn’t sure where Jewel’s heart lay in all this. Jewel was looking out the window now, miles away. “They came to our wedding,” she said. “It was here, in this house. But they left before the reception—that’s how they were. They never approved, they said we were too young. We were too young. But just think.” She looked back at Lusa, intense. “What if I’d been sensible and waited, instead of marrying Shel? There’d be no Crystal and Lowell.”

  “That’s true,” Lusa said.

  Jewel narrowed her eyes. “Remember that. Don’t wait around thinking you’ve got all the time in the world. Maybe you’ve just got this one summer. Will you remember that? Will you tell the kids for me?”

  “I think so,” Lusa said. “Except I’m not sure I understand what you mean.”

  “Just make sure they know that having them, and being their mother, I would not have traded for anything. Not for a hundred extra years of living.”

  “I will.”

  “Do,” Jewel said urgently, as if she meant to leave the world this very afternoon. “Tell them I just got this one season to be down here on the green grass, and I praise heaven and earth that I did what I did.”

  In the early afternoon Lusa took a deep breath, picked up the heavy box of vaccine vials she’d bought from the vet, and went down to face her goats. After some weeks of worry over poor eating and lethargy, Lusa had figured out that she had worms in the herd—which according to Mr. Walker was no surprise, given their motley origins. His advice was to worm the whole herd at once with DSZ, which he vowed wouldn’t hurt her pregnant mothers, and while she was at it, to stick every last one of them with a shot of seven-way vaccine. Lusa was daunted, but Little Rickie had promised to come up and help. He claimed there was no sense letting all those years of 4-H go to waste.

  Lusa found the goats easy to manage most of the time, much easier to herd than cattle once she got the first ones going where she wanted them. She already had them corralled into the small calf pasture by the time Rickie showed up for the rodeo. The idea was to let them through the gate into the bigger field one at a time. Rickie could wrestle each victim down as it came through, then shove the worm pill down its gullet and sit on its head while Lusa sat on the rear end and gave the shot. Simple enough in theory, but it took her a full hour to do the first five animals. Lusa felt like a torturer. The poor things struggled and bleated so, it was hard for her to keep her eyes open and aim for muscle when she jabbed in the hypodermic. Once she accidentally hit bone and cried out as loudly as the goat did.

  “I’m a scientist,” she said aloud to slow down her fluttering heart. “I’ve dissected live frogs and sacrificed rabbits. I can do this.”

  She kept hoping Rickie would volunteer to take over the needle, but he seemed as scared of it as she was. And she didn’t think she’d be any better at his task, forcing the huge worm pill down the hatch, which he seemed to manage comfortably.

  “You should see what you have to do to get a cow to take a pill,” he told her when she remarked on his skill. “Man. Slobber all the way up to your armpit.” She watched him push the white tablet deep into the doe’s mouth, then clamp her lips closed and wobble her head from side to side. He was gentle and competent with animals, as Cole had been. That’d been one of the first things she loved about Cole, beyond his physical person.

  The second hour went better, and by the time they reached number forty or so Lusa was getting almost handy with the needle. Mr. Walker had showed her how to give the thigh muscle three or four stout punches with her fist before poking in the needle on the last one. When a shot was delivered this way, the animal tended to lie perfectly still.

  Rickie was impressed with this technique, once she got it working. “He’s a smarter old guy than he looks, I guess. Mr. Walker.”

  “Yeah, he’s that,” Lusa said, keeping her eyes on the brown pelt of this girl’s flank. The hard part was getting the plunger pushed all the way down and then extracting the needle without getting poked if the goat began to kick. When she was out and clear, Lusa gave the nod, and she and Rick jumped off at the same time, allowing the doe to scramble to her feet. With an offended little toss of her triangular head, she ran with a slight limp toward the middle of the pasture, where her friends had already put the humiliation behind them and were munching thistles in vaccinated, amnesiac bliss.

  “Did you know he was Jewel’s father-in-law? Old Mr. Walker?”

  Rickie thought about it. “Ex-father-in-law. I don’t think that’s a real big thing on the family tree. I don’t think he’s said boo to Aunt Jewel since his outlaw son ran off. And he didn’t say much before, from what I hear.”

  “No, I guess not,” Lusa said, looking over her newly medicated herd with some satisfaction. She was about to turn back to her work when a quick, pale movement up at the top of the field snagged her eye.

  “My God,” she said. “Look at that.”

  They both watched as the animal froze, then lowered its body close to the ground and walked slowly along the fence
back into the woods.

  “That wasn’t a fox, was it?” she asked.

  “Nope.”

  “What was it, then?”

  “Coyote.”

  “Are you sure? Have you ever seen one before?”

  “Nope,” Rickie said.

  “Me either. But I could swear I heard some a couple of nights ago. It was amazing, like singing. Dog singing.”

  “That’s what that bastard was, then. Got to be. You want me to go home and get my rifle? I could get up there after it right now.”

  “No.” She put her hand on his forearm. “Do me a favor. Don’t turn into your uncles.”

  He looked at her. “Do you know what those things eat?”

  “Not really. I imagine it could kill a goat, or a kid, at least. But it didn’t look that big. Don’t you think it’s more likely to kill a rabbit or something?”

  “You’re going to wait around and find out?”

  She nodded. “I think I am. Yeah.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “Maybe. We’ll see.” She stood for a while longer, staring into the edge of the woods where it had vanished. Then she turned back to the goats in her paddock. “OK, let’s get this over with. How many have we got to go?”

  Rickie moved reluctantly to the gate, preparing to let in another goat. He counted heads. “A dozen, maybe. We’re near ’bout done.”

  “Good, because I’m near ’bout dead,” she said, moving up quickly behind the doe to help shove down with all her weight on its haunches. Once they had it down, Lusa pushed the sweat and unruly hair out of her eyes with the back of one hand before filling the next syringe.

  He watched. “Want to swap heads and tails? My part’s way easier than yours.”

  Now he asks, she thought. “No, you’re working twice as hard as I am,” Lusa said, steeling her sore biceps for the next punch and poke. “I’m just a wimp.”

  He waited respectfully while the needle went in, then spoke. “No way, you’re doing great. I’ve never seen a woman sit on so many animals in one day.”

  At Lusa’s nod they got up and let the doe saunter off. “Know what I’m dying for?”

  “A cold beer?” he asked.

  “A bath. Pew!” She sniffed her forearms and made a face. “These girls don’t smell pretty.”

  “They don’t,” Rickie agreed. “And they are the girls.”

  By the time they’d finished all the does and the buck, which they saved for last, Lusa could hardly tolerate the smell of her own body. She turned on the hose bib by the barn for Rickie and walked around to get the big square bar of soap that was down below in the milking parlor. Her mind drifted back to the coyote. It had been so beautiful and strange, almost ghostly. Like a little golden dog, but much wilder in its bearing. If she could find just one other person in this county who didn’t feel the need to shoot a coyote on sight, that would be something. Then she’d have a friend.

  When she came back around the corner of the barn she walked straight into a spray of cold water that caused her to shriek. A direct hit by Rickie.

  “I’m going to kill you,” she said, laughing, wiping her eyes.

  “It feels good,” he said, running the water over his head.

  “OK, then, here. You go first.” She tossed him the soap and they took turns lathering themselves up and hosing each other down, enjoying a gleeful, chaste, slightly hysterical bath in their clothes. Some of the goats came over and put their noses through the fence to watch this peculiar human rite.

  “I can’t get over their eyes,” Lusa said as Rickie turned off the hose. She bent over and shook her head like a wet dog, sending water drops flying into the golden light of late afternoon.

  “Who, the goats?” He’d thought to strip off his dark-red T-shirt before hosing down, to keep it dry, and now he used it as a towel to dry his face. Lusa wondered if the display of his body was as ingenuous as it seemed. He was seventeen. It was hard to say.

  “They have those weird pupils,” she said. “Little slits, like a cat’s, only sideways instead of up and down.”

  He rubbed his head violently with the shirt. “Yep. Funny eyes.” He combed his dark hair back on the sides with his hands. “Kindly like they’re from another planet.”

  Lusa studied the faces of her girls at the fence. “Kind of cute, though. Don’t you think? They grow on you.”

  “Oh, boy, she’s getting sentimental about goats.” He tossed Lusa his shirt. “You need to get out more.”

  She dried her face and arms with the frankly male-scented shirt, suddenly recalling Rickie’s description of her dancing through the pasture waving a buck-scented rag in front of the does. This world was one big sexual circus, or so it seemed to the deprived. She balled up his shirt and threw it back. “For this I owe you big-time, Rick. If I’d known how hard today was going to be, I might have chickened out, but you stuck with me to the bitter end. Can I write you a check for some gas money, for your trouble?”

  “No, ma’am, you don’t owe me a thing,” he said, polite as a schoolboy. “Neighbors and family don’t take money.”

  “Well, your neighbor and aunt thanks you kindly. I don’t have the cold beer you’re thirsty for, but I could give you some lemonade or iced tea before you go home.”

  “Sweet tea would hit the spot,” he said.

  A bird called loudly from up in her fallow pasture behind the house—a dramatic “Wow-wheet!” in a voice as powerful and self-important as an opera singer’s.

  “I’ll swan, listen to that,” Rickie said, struck motionless where he stood toweling his shoulders. “That was a bobwhite.”

  “Yeah?”

  “You don’t hardly hear them anymore. I don’t think I’ve heard one since I was a little kid.”

  “Well, that’s good,” Lusa said, impressed that Rickie had noticed a bird, had even declared its name. “Welcome back, Mr. Bob White. I can always use another man on the place.” She picked up the box of empty glass vials and walked slowly to the house, feeling the extent of exhaustion not only in her arms but also in her thighs and lower back. She was getting acquainted with these sensations in her body, to the point where she almost enjoyed the tingling, achy release of lactic acid in her muscles. It was the closest thing to sex in her life, she thought, and gave in to a sad little laugh.

  When she came back outside with the cold jar of tea and a glass, Rickie had put on his shirt and was sitting on the lawn, barefoot among the dandelions with his long legs stretched straight out in front of him. He’d taken off his shoes and for some reason set them on top of the cab of his pickup truck.

  “Here you go,” she said, collapsing on the grass beside him, but facing him, to hand him the jar and glass. She’d considered changing out of her wet clothes, but the contrast of cool dampness and warm sun felt wonderful on her limbs. She probably looked like a drowned rat, but she didn’t care. She felt a friendly intimacy with Rickie after their long afternoon of sitting on goats together. She stretched her legs beside his, in the opposite direction, so her feet were next to his hipbones. Sitting this way gave her a childhood feeling, as if they were on a seesaw together, or inside an invisible fort. He poured a glass of tea, handed it to her, then turned up the jar and drained it in one long, awe-inspiring draft. Watching his Adam’s apple bob made her think of all those huge pills going down all those goat gullets. Teenaged boys were just a loose aggregation of appetites.

  He produced a pack of smokes from somewhere—he must have gotten them out of his truck while she was inside, Lusa guessed, since he was entirely wet and they were not. He tipped the pack at her, but she held up her hand.

  “You stay away from me, you devil. I’ve kicked that nasty habit.”

  He lit up, nodding enthusiastically. “’At’s good. I should, too.” He snapped his wrist to extinguish the match. “I was thinking about what you said, that you didn’t care if you saw thirty or not. Thing is, I really do. I figure it all gets better after high school.”

  “It does,
” Lusa said. “Trust me. Barring a few rocks in the road, it’s all uphill from high school.” She thought about this, surprised by the truth of it. “I can vouch for that. Even depressed and widowed and a long way from home, I like my life right now better than I liked it in high school.”

  “Is that so?”

  “I think so.”

  “You like the country, then. You like farming. You were meant for it.”

  “I guess that’s true. It’s weird, though. I was born into such a different life, with these scholarly parents, and I did the best I could with it. I raised caterpillars in shoeboxes and I studied bugs and agriculture in school for as many years as they’ll let you. And then one day Cole Widener walked into my little house and blew the roof off, and here I am.”

  Rickie nodded, brushing a fly away from his eyebrow. She had her back to the low-slung sun, but he was looking into it. His skin was the color of caramelized sugar against his red shirt, and his dark eyes glowed in the slanted light. She picked a dandelion and smoothed its furry yellow face. White sap bled from its stem onto her fingers. She tossed it away. “I was mad at him for dying and leaving me here, at first. Pissed off like you wouldn’t believe. But now I’m starting to think he wasn’t supposed to be my whole life, he was just this doorway to me. I’m so grateful to him for that.”

  Rickie smoked in silence, squinting into the distance. Lusa didn’t mind whether he spoke or not, or whether he even understood. Rickie would just let her talk, anytime, about anything. It made him seem older than he was.

  “Did I tell you my parents are coming to visit?” she asked brightly. “Right before classes start in the fall, when my dad has a week off.”

  He looked at her. “That’s good. You don’t see much of your folks, do you?”

  “I really don’t. It’s like a state occasion; my mother doesn’t travel very well since she had her stroke. She gets confused. But Dad says she’s doing better—she’s started on a new medicine, and she’s walking better. If she can do the stairs, I’m going to try to talk him into leaving her here for a while. For a real visit. I miss my mother.”