Prodigal Summer

by Barbara Kingsolver

  A fierce crack of lightning shot her eyes through with a momentary electric blindness. “Oh God, oh God,” she sang, withdrawing further into her chair, blinking the rain-blurred landscape back into focus. That was close. That was fifty feet away, or less. She could smell its aftermath in the ionized air. Now it was time to pray that there would be something left of this mountain after the storm passed over. She turned the radio back on and listened. It wasn’t music now; it was the names of counties being repeated over and over. They’d gone to full-time emergency mode, listing counties, all of which she knew well. Franklin, Zebulon. The eye of the storm was here. She flipped the radio over and eviscerated it, slipping the batteries into her pocket. Better to save them for her flashlight. She would have laughed at herself if she could. If ever there was a piece of news she did not need a radio to receive, this was it. The eye of the storm was here.

  She got up and tried to look through the sheet of water that flowed over the eave like a translucent shower curtain. She walked to the end of the porch and found she could see better out the gable end, where less water came off the roof. The rain seemed a little less dense now. An hour ago the air had been so solidly full of water it looked as if fish could jump the stream banks and swim into the treetops. She’d never seen rain like that. There was less of it now, but an ominous wind was rising. While she watched, in the space of just a few minutes, the rain died back drastically and the lightning seemed to have moved past the ridge top, but a wind came howling like the cold breath of some approaching beast. It blew the rain horizontal, straight into her face. Now frightened to her bones, she went inside and put on her boots and raincoat, and walked a few more circles around the room while she was at it. Every instinct told her to make a run for it, but there was nowhere to go. She felt vulnerable and trapped in the cabin. Standing on the porch seemed a little better, but once outside again, she was shocked by a wind that blew her backward against the cabin wall so hard she felt the humps of its logs against her back. The cold wind hurt her teeth and her eyes. She held both hands over her face and looked out through the small space between them, transfixed by the impossible menace of this storm dancing on her forest. The solid trees she’d believed in were bending unbelievably, breaking and losing limbs. Trunks cracked like gunshots, one after another. Up where the forest met the sky she watched the poplars’ black silhouettes perform a slow, ghostly tango with the wind. They moved in synchrony, all the way around the top of the ridge surrounding the hollow. There is no safety here, they seemed to be saying, and her panic rose into pure, dry nausea. The trees were falling. This forest was the one thing she’d always been sure of, and it was ripping apart like a haystack. Any of these massive trunks could crush her between one heartbeat and the next. She turned her face against the wall of the cabin, unaware that she was holding her braid in her teeth and both hands protectively over her abdomen. Unaware that she would never again be herself alone—that solitude was the faultiest of human presumptions. She knew only that she was standing with her back to the storm in a sheer blind panic, trying to think what to do.

  It was dark as night now, but she could make out the alternating dark and light stripes of the horizontal logs and the pale chink-mortar in between. She counted logs, starting at the bottom, to give herself a task she might be able to complete. Surprisingly, she’d never counted the logs before. Eleven, there were in this wall, an odd number. That meant either twelve or ten in the end walls. She ran her eye down the knobby length of one to its end, where all the logs of this wall articulated with those of the next, like fingers of a person’s clasped hands. She attached her terrified gaze to that corner, a stack of twenty-one stout tree trunks neatly interlocked.

  Shelter, was what dawned on her as she stared. This was the very principle of genuine shelter, these twenty-one interlocked logs. No single falling oak or poplar could ever crush this cabin. This cabin was made of fallen trees. She closed her eyes, pressed her forehead to the rounded trunk of an old, quiet chestnut, and prepared to wait out the storm.

  When the rain and thunder died and the wind had gone quiet, coyotes began to howl from the ridge top. With voices that rose and broke and trembled with clean, astonished joy, they raised up their long blue harmony against the dark sky. Not a single voice in the darkness, but two: a mated pair in the new world, having the last laugh.

  {30}

  Moth Love

  The males of the giant Saturniid moths have imperfect, closed mouths and cannot feed. Their adult lives, poignantly brief, are devoted fully to the pursuits of locating and coupling with a mate.

  That was the passage she’d been thinking of vaguely for a long time before finding it last night, paging with desperate distraction in the middle of the storm through the same book she’d been reading on the night of Cole’s death. It was under the bed; the book hadn’t moved at all. Lusa wasn’t even sure why she’d wanted to read it again, but when she came across that passage she recognized something in it that explained her life.

  People outside the family had begun to ask about her plans. It had happened just lately. Some change in the weather or in Lusa herself had signaled to them that it was now safe to speak, and they always said the same thing: It was a shame about Cole, and had she made up her mind what she meant to do now?

  There was no shame about it, she wanted to tell them. She imagined quoting that passage from Darwin at them, explaining that there was room in this world even for certain beings who could not eat or speak, whose only purpose was to find and call out the other side of their kind. She had been called here. There was no plan to speak of.

  Of course, she said no such thing. It was always in bright, normal places like the cereal aisle at the Kroger’s or in Little Brothers’ Hardware that people asked her about her plans, and so she always said only this: “I’ve made up my mind to finish what I started.”

  And this was what she had started: in the absence of Cole, in the house where he’d grown up, she was learning to cohabit with the whole of his life. It was Cole who’d broken out the top rail of the banister as a rambunctious child, Cole who’d built the dry sink in the pantry for his mother the first year he took shop in school. He’d planted every one of the lilacs in the yard, though that seemed impossible because they were thirty feet tall now. His father had made him plant them for his mother the summer he was nine, as reparation for cursing in front of her. Lusa was making progress toward understanding. Cole was not to be a husband for whom one cooked, with whom one sat down to meals. He would be a second childhood to carry alongside her own, the child becoming the man for all the years that had led up to their meeting. She could coax stories about Cole even from people outside the family: women in town, strangers, Mr. Walker. Country people seemed to have many unwritten codes about death, more of them than city people, and one was that after a given amount of time you could speak freely of the dead man again. You could tell tales on him, even laugh at his mild expense, as if he had rejoined your ranks. It seemed to Lusa that all these scattered accounts were really parts of one long story, the history of a family that had stayed on its land. And that story was hers now as well.

  In the afternoon she’d learned she was going to get a dollar eighty a pound for her goats, if everything went according to plan. It was a price unheard of in the county, apparently, for any animal. She considered this now, happily taking a minute to let her success sink in while she rested on her ladder in the darkness and rubbed the tired muscles in the back of her neck. This was like winning the blue ribbon. By her wits she had made something succeed here, where there seemed to be no hope. It didn’t even matter that no one would ever properly admire her canny ingenuity. Nobody would realize that the major holidays of three of the world’s major religions coincided in the week she sold her goats, like stars aligning for a spectacular horoscope. Only a religious mongrel like Lusa could have seen it coming and hitched her fortunes to it. Probably the real facts of her coup would be transformed into the sort of wild rumor that ran bar
efoot through Oda Black’s and the hardware store, and that nobody believed: Lusa had a cousin with connections to rich Italian gangsters. Lusa had illegally gotten her goats sold to the king of Egypt. In a place like this, some secrets kept themselves, out of a failure to stand up to the competing rumors.

  She knew her goat success wasn’t any kind of permanent answer; there was no cure-all for the predicament known as farming. She’d have to be resourceful for the rest of her life. At Southern States she’d noticed the native bluestem grasses the government was now paying people to plant in place of fescue, and had been shocked to see what the seed went for. Twenty-eight dollars a pound. That seed had to be grown somewhere; a grass farm, imagine the gossip that would generate. Next year she might raise no goats at all, depending on the calendar, though many other people surely would, after they heard what she got for hers. And they would discover they couldn’t give their goat meat away. Lusa was beginning to see how she would live out her life in Zebulon County. She was going to be a woman men talked about.

  This morning after her terrible night Lusa had awakened feeling shucked out and changed altogether, shaken but sound. As if she’d passed through some door into a place where she could walk surely on the ground of her life. The storm had washed the world clean and snuffed out the electricity in the whole county. Here, it shattered the windows on the north side of the house and rattled every ghost out of the rafters, from both sides of the family. She’d spent the night saying prayers in the languages she knew, feeling sure some kind of end was near, before finally falling asleep curled up on Cole’s side of the bed with Charles Darwin in her arms and a candle burning on the night table.

  And awoke resurrected. She walked out into the yard, astonished by the downed catalpa branches everywhere and the twinkling constellations of broken glass. Those windows had been the antique, wavy glass original to this house. It was amazing. After all the years this place had known, something new could still happen.

  In the first confident act of her new life, she called up Little Rickie and hired him to be her part-time assistant farm manager. Over the phone they agreed on ten dollars an hour (the rule of neighbors and family notwithstanding) and a starting date as soon as he could get the parts from Dink Little to fix the baler. He would mow her hay and help her get it in the barn, then take on the task of clearing the multiflora roses out of any field edges her goats couldn’t reach. She would not let him spray any weed killer. They’d argued about it briefly, but she’d won, because this wasn’t a marital feud as it had been with Cole. It was a condition of employment. Rickie could clear with the bush hog and a hand scythe or not at all, and he was not to touch the woods, not to hunt squirrel or deer or coyote or ginseng. It would be Rickie’s job, too, to find tactful ways of keeping the other men in the family from hunting up in the hollow. This was still the Widener farm, but the woods were no longer the Widener woods, Lusa explained. They were nobody’s.

  The yard she could take care of herself. He’d offered, but she’d said she wanted to do it. She’d awakened today with a deep desire to put the place in order. Not just to drag the downed branches out of the yard, but to cut back the brambles she’d allowed to creep in over the course of the summer. She couldn’t explain why, but she felt closed in and needed to strike out, to take up her Weed Eater and pruners like weapons against the encroachment. She’d been working at it fiercely all day, taking a break only briefly in the afternoon, when the call came from her cousin in New York. Then she’d gone right back to it and continued working long into the evening, with the mountain’s breath on the back of her neck and moth wings looping circles in the porch light.

  She knew, from Rickie and Crystal, that the family had begun to talk about how hard she worked with her hands. They seemed to respect her use of tools. Earlier in the day she’d showed Rickie how to use a sharpened spade instead of Roundup to cut out the field-apple saplings planted by accident in the lawn. After he left, she’d taken a pruning saw to the creeper vines that were trailing up the sides of the house and over into the boxwoods, getting into everything, the way creeper vines did. Then she ripped out every climbing vine from the row of old lilacs so they could bloom again.

  Now, in the gathering darkness, she turned finally to tearing out the honeysuckle that had overgrown the garage. There was enough moon reflected off the white clapboards that she could see what she needed to see. It was only honeysuckle, an invasive exotic, nothing sacred. She saw it now for what it was, an introduced garden vine coiling itself tightly around all the green places where humans and wilder creatures conceded to share their lives.

  She ripped the vine down from the walls in long strands, letting them fall in coils like rope on the ground at the foot of her ladder. Wherever she ripped the long tendrils from the flank of the building, dark tracks of root hairs remained in place, trailing upward like faint lines of animal tracks traveling silently uphill. Or like long, curving spines left standing after their bodies were stripped suddenly away. She worked steadily in the cool night, tearing herself free, knowing this honeysuckle would persist beyond anything she could ever devise or imagine. It would be back here again, as soon as next summer.

  {31}

  She paused at the top of the field, inhaling the faint scent of honeysuckle. It seemed odd for someone to be out down there, this late at night. She kept up her pace, walking quickly through the field at the forest’s edge, where the moon found the long, silver part in the grass that had led hundreds of other animals along this field edge ahead of her. She was following a trail she couldn’t be sure of, and she was used to being sure. But there was no threat here. She lowered her nose and picked up speed, skirting the top of the long field that lined this whole valley, ducking easily through the barbed wires of fences, one after another. She never strayed far out into those fiercely open places, with their dumb clots of moonlit animals, but was careful instead to keep to the edge of the woods with its reassuring scents of leaf mold and rotted fruit. She loved the air after a hard rain, and a solo expedition on which her body was free to run in a gait too fast for companionship. She could stop in the path wherever she needed to take time with a tempting cluster of blackberries or the fascinating news contained in a scent that hadn’t been here yesterday.

  She was growing a little uneasy, though, this far down the mountain. She had never been able to reconcile herself to the cacophony of sensations that hung in the air around these farms: the restless bickering of hounds penned behind the houses, howling across one valley to another, and the whine of the perilous freeway in the distance, and above all the sharp, outlandish scents of human enterprise. Now, here, where this row of fields turned back up into the next long hollow, there was gasoline wafting up from the road, and something else, a crop dust of some kind that burned her nose, drowning out even the memorable pungency of pregnant livestock in the field below.

  She had reached the place where the trail descended into a field of wild apple trees, and she hesitated there. She wouldn’t have minded nosing through the hummocks of tall grass and briars for a few sweet, sun-softened apples. That whole field and the orchard below it had a welcoming scent, a noticeable absence of chemical burn in the air, that always made it attractive to birds and field mice, just as surely as it was drawing her right now. But she felt restless and distracted to be this far from her sister and the children. She turned uphill, back toward safer ground where she could disappear inside slicks and shadows if she needed to. The rest of them would be coming up onto the ridge from the next valley over. The easiest way to find them from here would be to follow the crest of this ridge straight up and call for them when she got closer.

  She skirted a steep, rocky bank that was fetid with damp moss and hoarded little muddy pools along its base—a good place to let the little ones nose around for crayfish in the daylight, but not now—and then she climbed into the older, more familiar woods. Here was a nutty-scented clearing where years of acorns and hickory nuts had been left buried under the soil by
the squirrels that particularly favored this place, for reasons she couldn’t fathom. She’d had meals of squirrel here before, many times, but now it was dark, and they were nervous things, reluctant to leave shelter after a storm like that one. Still, she could hear the much bolder, needly nocturnal banter of flying squirrels high up in the hickory. She crossed back into the woods and then stopped again to put her nose against a giant, ragged old stump that had a garden of acid-scented fungus sprouting permanently from its base. Usually this stump smelled of cat. But she found he had not been here lately.

  She paused several more times as she climbed the ridge, once picking up the scent she’d followed for a while earlier tonight but then had lost again, because a rain like that erased nearly everything. It was a male, and particularly interesting because he wasn’t part of her clan; he was no one they knew. Another family had been coming down from the north, they knew that; they’d heard them sing at night and known them to be nearby, though never right here before. She paused again, sniffing, but that trail wasn’t going to reveal itself to her now, no matter how hard she tried to find it. And on this sweet, damp night at the beginning of the world, that was fine with her. She could be a patient tracker. By the time cold weather came on hard, and then began to soften into mating season, they would all know each other’s whereabouts.

  She stopped to listen, briefly, for the sound of anything here that might be unexpected. Nothing. It was a still, good night full of customary things. Flying squirrels in every oak within hearing distance; a skunk halfway down the mountainside; a group of turkeys roosting closer by, in the tangled branches of a huge oak that had fallen in the storm; and up ahead somewhere, one of the little owls that barked when the moon was half dark. She trotted quickly on up the ridge, leaving behind the delicate, sinuous trail of her footprints and her own particular scent.