If someone in this forest had been watching her—a man with a gun, for instance, hiding inside a copse of leafy beech trees—he would have noticed how quickly she moved up the path, attending the ground ahead of her feet, so preoccupied with her solitary search that she appeared unaware of his presence. He might have watched her for a long time, until he believed himself and this other restless life in his sight to be the only two creatures left here in this forest of dripping leaves, breathing in some separate atmosphere that was somehow more rarefied and important than the world of air silently exhaled by the leaves all around them.
But he would have been wrong. Solitude is a human presumption. Every quiet step is thunder to beetle life underfoot, a tug of impalpable thread on the web pulling mate to mate and predator to prey, a beginning or an end. Every choice is a world made new for the chosen.
Acknowledgments
This novel grew from soil richly blessed by my Virginia friends and neighbors. I’m especially grateful to Neta Findley for a friendship that has brought me home, and to her late husband, Bill, and their son Joe, whose stories and humor have enriched my life and this book. A tithe of my future apple crop goes to Fred Hebard of the American Chestnut Foundation for all kinds of help and an education in trees; the foundation’s chestnut breeding program—a far more systematic project than the one invented for this tale—will someday return the American chestnut to American woodlands. Thanks also to Dayle, Paige, and Kyla, our family’s family. I’m grateful to Jim and Pam Watson for carriage rides, good humor, and good will; Miss Amy for peace of mind; Randy Lowe for good advice; and the Cooperative Extension Service for answering perhaps the strangest questions they’ve ever been asked. Bill Kittrell of the Nature Conservancy provided valuable insights, as did Braven Beaty, Kristy Clark, Steve Lindeman, and Claiborne Woodall. Finally, I’m forever indebted to Felicia Mitchell for laundrymat friendship and the poetry of yard sales, and for taking me to the farm that first evening when I almost didn’t go.
In the wider world I’m beholden to a network of friends and colleagues larger than I can ever thank by name, though some rise to the top: blessed thanks to Emma Hardesty for years of our lives; to Terry Karten for believing in literature in spite of everything; to Jane Beirn for graciously connecting the private me with the public world; to Walter Thabit for Arabic curses; to Frances Goldin for recipes, Yiddish syntax, infallible instincts, unconditional love, and, basically, everything—for more than you, who could ask. I’m grateful to the family of Aaron Kramer for their generosity in allowing me to use his exquisite poem “Prothalamium,” from The Thunder of the Grass (International Publishers, New York); in discovering the beauty and breadth of his life’s work as a writer of passion and social conscience, I feel I am finding a kindred spirit. I thank Chris Cokinos for his wonderful book Hope Is the Thing with Feathers; Carrie Newcomer for invisible threads; W. D. Hamilton (in memoriam) for boldness and brilliance; Edward O. Wilson for those things and also devotion. Dan Papaj brought to my attention many wonderful lepidopteran mysteries, and solved others. Robert Pyle also helped answer butterfly and moth questions. Mike Finkel’s article “The Ultimate Survivor” (Audubon, May–June 1999) introduced me to a new way of looking at coyotes. Paul Mirocha turned my spare suggestions for the endpapers into a work of art.
For their comments on various drafts of the manuscript I thank Steven Hopp, Emma Hardesty, Frances Goldin, Sydelle Kramer, Terry Karten, Fenton Johnson, Arthur Blaustein, Jim Malusa, Sonya Norman, Rob Kingsolver, Fred Hebard, Felicia Mitchell, and the enthusiastic chorus at HarperCollins; all of it helped. Any errors of fact that have persisted in the face of all this expertise are supremely my own.
I’m pretty sure I owe my particular way of looking at the world, colored heavily in greens, to my parents’ choosing to rear me in the wrinkle on the map that lies between farms and wildness, and to my brother, Rob, mentor and coconspirator in snake catching and paw-paw hunting. My sister, Ann, has expanded her soul for my support in ways that sometimes resemble wings. My daughters, Camille and Lily, are such experts in grace and wonder that they deliver me a world baked fresh daily. And for Steven, whose perfect ear and steady hand were beside me through this book as they are through life altogether, I offer up my thanks to the fates of mate choice and can’t believe my luck.
About the Author
BARBARA KINGSOLVER’s nine published books include novels, collections of short stories, poetry, essays, and an oral history. Her previous novel, The Poisonwood Bible, remained on the country’s bestseller lists for more than a year and won literary awards at home and abroad. Her work has also appeared in numerous literary anthologies and periodicals.
Ms. Kingsolver grew up in Kentucky and earned a graduate degree in biology before becoming a full-time writer. She and her husband, Steven Hopp, cowrite articles on science and natural history. With their two daughters they divide their time between Tucson, Arizona, and a farm in southern Appalachia.
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By the Same Author
FICTION
The Bean Trees
Pigs in Heaven
Animal Dreams
Homeland and Other Stories
The Poisonwood Bible
NONFICTION
High Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now or Never
Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona
Mine Strike of 1983
POETRY
Another America
Copyright
PRODIGAL SUMMER. Copyright © 2000 by Barbara Kingsolver. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © MARCH 2007 ISBN: 9780061839924
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