Prodigal Summer: A Novel

by Barbara Kingsolver

  From the crumbling consistency of this scat Deanna expected pine nuts and berry seeds, a predictable diet for the locale. She was surprised by the hard, dark glint of an apple seed. Then several more. Apple seeds at this time of year, late May? Apples were just barely past blossom-drop stage down in the valley. Wild apples still hanging on to the trees down there in the wilding fields would be a long shot. More likely this fellow had crept into an orchard where someone grew old-fashioned leathercoats that stayed on the tree all the way through winter into spring. Or he might have nipped into someone's root cellar and rolled the last sweet Arkansas blacks out of a bushel basket. Deanna was sympathetic. She'd stolen apples, too, in her time. Her dad's tobacco farm had been short on pleasures from a child's point of view, but when the two of them discovered Nannie Rawley and her orchard, respectively, Deanna found seventh heaven. Nannie was a generous woman who did not count her Arkansas blacks after the guests left.

  Deanna's legs ached but she squatted a little longer, taking the time to flatten and dissect the scat completely with her twig. Something else here surprised her: millet seed, both red and white. No millet grew on this mountainside, or on any farm down below, as far as she knew. Certainly not red and white millet together; that was a combination unlikely to be found on any farm. Mostly it showed up in the commercial seed mixes people put out for their birds. Probably this was the birdseed she had put out herself. She stood up blinking, peered downhill through the tree trunks, and thought about it. Who else around here was likely to be feeding chickadees? "You rascal," she said aloud, laughing. "You magnificent son of a bitch. You've been spying on me."

  She spent the afternoon in an edgy distraction, curled into the dilapidated green brocade armchair that sat on her porch against the outside wall, sheltered under the eave. With her field notebook on her knee she cataloged the contents of the scat and the size and location of the tracks and the location of the magnolia warbler she'd heard today. Then she reached back in her memory to the first magnolia warbler and quite a few other things she should have recorded before now. She had ignored her notebooks completely for the full nine days of his visit. Even now she felt abnormally jumpy, in need of something to eat, or to look up, or to check on, and had to scold herself like a child to sit still and focus. She stared at the blank, numbered pages ending with today's date, May 19, and felt coldly disgusted by her laziness and poor concentration. Anything could have happened in those days, life or death, and she would have missed it.

  What she had here on this mountain was a chance that would never come again, for anybody: the return of a significant canid predator and the reordering of species it might bring about. Especially significant if the coyote turned out to be what R. T. Paine called a keystone predator. She'd carefully read and reread Paine's famous experiments from the 1960s, in which he'd removed all the starfish from his tidepools and watched the diversity of species drop from many to very few. The starfish preyed on mussels. Without starfish, the mussels boomed and either ate nearly everything else or crowded it out. No one had known, before that, how crucial a single carnivore could be to things so far removed from carnivory. Of course, the experiment had been replicated endlessly by accident: removing mountain lions from the Grand Canyon, for example, had rendered it a monoculture of prolific, starving deer that out-bred all other herbivores and gnawed the landscape down to granite. Plenty of people had watched and recorded the disaster of eliminating a predator from a system. They were watching it here in her own beloved mountains, where North America's richest biological home was losing its richness to one extinction after another, of plants and birds, fish, mammals, moths and stoneflies, and especially the river creatures whose names she collected like beads: sugar-spoon, forkshell, acornshell, leafshell. Sixty-five kinds of mussels, twenty now gone for good. There were hundreds of reasons for each death--pesticide runoff, silt from tilling, cattle in the creek--but for Deanna each one was also a piece in the puzzle she'd spent years working out. The main predator of the endangered shellfish was the muskrat, which had overpopulated to pestilence along the riverbanks over the last fifty years. What had kept muskrats in check, historically, was the mink (now mostly coats), the river otter (also nearly gone), and, surely, the red wolf. There was no telling how the return of a large, hungry dog might work to restore stability, even after an absence of two hundred years. Rare things, endangered things, not just river life but overgrazed plants and their insect pollinators, might begin to recover.

  Or maybe coyotes would turn out to be pests, as newly introduced species nearly always are. Maybe the farmers were right to shoot them--she had to concede it was possible. But she didn't think so. She believed coyotes were succeeding here for a single reason: they were sliding quietly into the niche vacated two hundred years ago by the red wolf. The two predators were hardly distinct: the red wolf may have been a genetic cross between the gray wolf and the coyote. Like the coyote, it was a scent hunter that could track in the dead of night, unlike the big cats that hunt by sight. It was like a coyote in its reproductive rate, and close in size. In fact, judging from the tracks she'd seen, the coyotes here were nearly red wolf-sized, and probably getting larger with each generation--insinuating themselves into the ragged hole in this land that needed them to fill it. The ghost of a creature long extinct was coming in on silent footprints, returning to the place it had once held in the complex anatomy of this forest like a beating heart returned to its body. This was what she believed she would see, if she watched, at this magical juncture: a restoration. If she was not too lazy or careless. And if she did not lead a killer to their lair.

  She fring the red and white millet and wondering how else she might be influencing the experiment. She bit her pen, trying to concentrate. The longer she worked, the more surely her body's cravings grew from a nudge to a frank distraction. She wanted something to eat, warm and particular. She would not let herself name this craving what it was, so she named it food, a thing that normally didn't merit a second thought in her life here--she ate when she was hungry, and anything would do. But for this whole day her body had been speaking to her of its presence: an ache in the thigh, a need in the gut.

  Maybe navy bean soup would do it, she decided, jumping up and going inside. Navy beans steaming in an enamel bowl, smothering the rest of the leftover cornbread. He'd made a bright yellow pone of it in her Dutch oven yesterday morning before he left--to take with him, she'd assumed, but instead he'd left most of it for her. She would bring it back out here to the porch chair and sit facing west, with her back carefully turned on Clinch Peak. Watch the sky turn to flame behind the trees.

  She went inside, lit the kerosene lamp, and first went without thinking to the big metal canister where she stored her ten-pound bags of beans, but then paused there, feeling foolish. It was too late to soak them and cook them from scratch as she normally did, making enough at one time for half a week's distracted consumption. But she was pretty sure she had a can of precooked white beans in the back of the cupboard. She flung back doors and raked aside jars of spaghetti sauce, Campbell's soup, ravioli, things she'd forgotten were here--she rarely bothered with much beyond beans and rice. She shoved aside the Dutch oven to look behind it and was dismayed to see the heavy iron lid sitting ajar. Darn it! She must have left it that way this morning in her rush to get out the door, and the army of mice in this cabin didn't need an invitation. She looked inside knowing exactly what she'd see: the crisp round edge nibbled ragged, the scattering of black droppings over the golden surface. Tears sprang to her eyes as she stared into the heavy pot.

  "Too much of a fool-headed hurry, Deanna," she said out loud.

  It was only food, and she had plenty more, but what she'd wanted was this. She slammed down the lid, swung the heavy pot down from the shelf, and headed outside. She had left the lid ajar, no "must have" about it. Living alone leaves you no one to curse but yourself when the toilet paper grins its empty cardboard jeer at you in the outhouse, or when the cornbread is peppered w
ith poop. She could blame the mice if she wanted to, little devils. But they were only doing their job, which was the same as everybody else's: surviving.

  All right, then; fascinated by animal scat though she was (the last straw for her ex-husband, that part of her thesis), she was not about to eat it, nor eat after a mouse, either. She walked to the end of the porch in her heavy wool socks and continued out to the boulder under the wild cherry. She shook the hunks of yellow cornbread and crumbs onto the ground, adding her loss to the nebulae of birdseed glittering there. Then, dispirited utterly, she went back inside, sat at her table, and ate cold ravioli out of a can while she finished recording her notes. To hell with the body's cravings.

  Before sunset she rose from the table and stretched because she was cramped, then walked out to the porch for no good reason, just in time to catch the unusual sight of a luna moth flying in the daytime. The surprising ascent, like a pair of pale hickory leaves caught in an updraft, arrested her there in the doorway. She watched it flutter upward gradually by increments: up, down, then a little higher up, as if it were climbing a staircase in the air. Deanna didn't realize she was holding her breath, even when she released it finally as the creature reached the upper leaves of the chokecherry, landed there, and held on. Luna moths were common enough up here but still never failed to move her because of their size and those pale-green, ethereal wings tipped with long, graceful tails. As if they were already ghosts, mourning their future extinction. This one was out of its element, awake in broad daylight. A busy chipmunk might have rousted it from a lower resting place. Or it was possible she was witnessing the fatal, final disorientation that overcomes a creature as it reaches the end of its life. Once, as a child, waiting with her dad in a gas station, she'd found a luna moth in that condition: confused and dying on the pavement in front of their truck. For the time it took him to pump the gas she'd held it in her hand and watched it struggle against its end. Up close it was a frightening beast, writhing and beating against her hand until wisps of pale-green fur slipped off its body and stuck to her fingers. Her horror had made her want to throw it down, and it was only her preconceived affection for the luna that made her hold on. When these creatures danced above their yard at night, she and her dad called them ballerinas. But this was no ballerina. Its body was a fat, furry cone flattened on one end into a ferocious face like a tiny, angry owl's. It glared at Deanna, seeming to know too much for an insect and, worse, seeming disdainful. She hadn't given up her love for luna after that, but she'd never forgotten, either, how a mystery caught in the hand could lose its grace.

  It was later, long past dark, after she'd pinched out the lamp and was nearly asleep in her cot but not quite, when she heard him outside. Those were footsteps, she felt sure, though it wasn't the crackle of a step that she'd heard. It wasn't anything, really. She sat up in bed hugging herself under the blanket, holding her braid in her mouth to keep herself still. It was nothing, but nothing isn't an absence, it's a presence. A quieting of the insect noise, a change in the quality of night that means something is there, or someone. Or was it less than nothing, just a raccoon waddling through his endless rounds, come to scavenge the cornbread she'd thrown out?

  Finally she heard something definite: the crackle of a step. She groped for the flashlight she kept under the cot, slipped her bare feet into her boots, and got to the door, where she stood quiet, looking out. Should she speak? Why didn't he come?

  Out in the darkness beyond the end of the porch where she scattered the seed--that was where he was. She could actually see movement. She put the butt end of the flashlight against her forehead, just above the space between her eyebrows. It was something she'd learned long ago about seeing at night. A light shined from there would reveal nothing of herself to a trespasser, and from that spot on her forehead a beam would go straight to his retinas and return to her own eyes the characteristic color of the trespasser's eye-shine. If it had eyes, of course, and if they were looking at her directly.

  She waited a little longer, heard nothing. Clicked on her light: only darkness at first. Then suddenly two small lights appeared, bright retinal glints--not the fierce red of a human eye, but greenish gold. Not human, not raccoon. Coyote.

  {5}

  Moth Love

  The spiraling flights of moths appear haphazard only because the mechanisms of olfactory tracking are so different from our own. Using binocular vision, we judge the location of an object by comparing the images from two eyes and tracking directly toward the stimulus. But for species relying on the sense of smell, the organism compares points in space, moves in the direction of the greater concentration, then compares two more points successively, moving in zigzags toward the source. Using olfactory navigation the moth detects currents of scent in the air and, by small increments, discovers how to move upstream.

  It was Lusa's nephews running a zigzag course through the metal folding chairs that had set her to ruminating on that passage she'd read on moth navigation, and then roused her suddenly to wonder: When was that, a hundred years ago? Day before yesterday? Reading in bed secretly, hurrying to finish a page or a chapter before Cole got back: there would be no more of that. Now she could read wherever she pleased, read until she finished the book if that was what she felt like. Lusa tried to make this strange dream feel true but couldn't quite connect herself with the person she found herself sitting inside of here, a woman in a borrowed black dress that hung loose in the bosom. This funeral parlor was a place she'd never seen on the inside or even imagined, especially not for the occasion of her husband's wake. The rooms were painted a stale toothpaste green, and the fancy, dark-painted molding around the doors was actually molded plastic, textured with artificial grain to look like wood. What an odd thing, Lusa thought, to buy and install plastic woodwork in this town surrounded on every side by forests.

  Beyond the doorway she could hear the people who waited in line, filling the long, narrow hallway like a glass pipette or medicine dropper that kept dispensing solemn visitors into the room, one stricken face at a time. Visitors just now arriving for the viewing would have to wait in line for an hour or more, Mary Edna had just announced (seeming pleased) after going out for reconnaissance. The line was out the door now that it was evening and people were getting off work. Most came in their work clothes, the clean jeans they'd worn underneath their milking overalls if need be; suits and ties would be saved for the funeral tomorrow. Tonight was a friendlier business, their chance to look at Cole and say their private good-byes. There was hardly a soul in the valley who had not turned out, it seemed. Cole was very well loved--Lusa had known this, of course. And also there was the handiwork of the undertaker to be admired, given the accident.

  Lusa hadn't had to wait in the line. She was the end of the line, sitting near the head of the casket where people could come over and pay their respects if they wanted to, though most of them knew her only by name and hearsay and couldn't manage much more than a stiff little nod. She knew they were sorry, though. To the rest of Cole's family they were pouring out such a stream of condolences that Lusa feared she might drown in the backwash. She sat on a metal chair flanked by sisters-in-law--Hannie-Mavis and Mary Edna at the moment. When Mary Edna went out front to hold court she was replaced by Jewel or Lois or Emaline, interchangeable blocks in a solid, black-clad wall. Maybe not precisely interchangeable. She felt a little breathing room when it was Jewel, who was less overbearing than Mary Edna of the tree-trunk physique or Lois with her deep smoker's croak. Or Hannie-Mavis with eyeliner a la Cleopatra, even for this somber occasion. In the beginning, when Lusa needed a secret mnemonic to learn their names, Mary Edna had been Menacing Eldest; Hannie-Mavis kept Makeup Handy; Long-faced Lois was Long-haired and Loud; Emaline was Emotional. But Jewel was just Jewel, an empty vessel with two kids and mournful eyes the exact color of Cole's. Lusa couldn't remember ever having had a conversation with Jewel, or having watched her do anything beyond handing Popsicles to the children out in the yard at family gatheri
ngs and, once, walking up the drive to ask Lusa if she'd seen their missing bobtail cat.

  Jewel's and Hannie-Mavis's five-year-olds were running underfoot, literally: one of the two had just climbed underneath Lusa's legs and the strange black stockings someone had given her to put on. The persistent, spiraling path of these boys through their uncle's wake made her ponder moth navigation: were the children sampling the air for grief in different parts of the room? If so, what would they find in the air around Lusa? She found it impossible to feel anything. Somehow her numbness seemed connected with the great din of noise. As the evening wore on and on, the noise seemed to rise like a tide. So many conversations at once added up to a kind of quacking racket that she could not begin to sort through. She found herself considering, instead, the sounds of nonsensical phrases that bounced into her ears. Mountain speech, even without its words, was a whole different language from city speech: the vowels were a little harsher, but the whole cadence was somehow softer. 'At'en up 'air, she heard again and again: "That one up there."