Prodigal Summer: A Novel

by Barbara Kingsolver

  Lusa smoothed her shirttail and composed herself to look busy and well nourished, for here came Herb and Mary Edna's green truck bouncing up the drive. But it was not the Menacing Eldest behind the wheel this time. It was her husband, Herb, Lusa saw as he pulled up in front of the house, and Lois's husband, Big Rickie, who got out on the passenger's side. Both men tucked their heads down and held the bills of their caps with their right hands as they jogged toward her through the rain. They ducked through the beaded curtain of drips, carefully avoiding her buckets on the steps, and stomped their boots several times on the porch floorboards before taking off their caps. The scents rising from their work overalls put Cole right there with them: dust, motor oil, barn hay. She breathed in, drawing from strange men's clothes these molecules of her husband.

  "He needs a gutter put on this porch," Rickie told Herb, as if they also agreed to the fact of Cole's presence here--and Lusa's absence. What mission required this delegation of husbands? Were they going to order her to leave now, or what? Would she put up a fight or go peacefully?

  "Rickie, Herb," she said, squaring her shoulders. "Nice to see you."

  Both men nodded at her, then glanced back out at the rain, the absent gutter, and the waterlogged fields where they seemed eager to return to work. She eyed the green cockleburs planted like tiny land mines on the cuffs of their khaki trousers.

  "Another good hard rain," Herb observed. "Too bad we need it like a hole in the head. One more week of this, the frogs'll drown."

  "Supposed to clear up by Saturday, though," said Rickie.

  "'At's right," Herb agreed. "Otherwise we wouldn't have bothered you, but it's supposed to clear up."

  "To tell me it's supposed to stop raining, you came up here?" Lusa asked, looking from one sun-toughened face to the other for some clue. It was always like this, anytime she got wedged into a conversation with her brothers-in-law. This sense of having wandered into a country where they spoke English but all the words meant something different.

  "Yep," said Herb. Rickie nodded to corroborate. They looked like a comedy team: stout, bald Herb was the front man, while tall, gangling Rickie stood mostly silent with his cap in hand and his wild black hair molded to the shape of the cap. He had an Adam's apple like a round oak gall on the stalk of his long neck. People called him Big Rickie even though his son Little Rickie had, at seventeen, surpassed him in many ways. Lusa felt some sympathy with Little Rickie's fate. Life in Zebulon: the minute you're born you're trapped like a bug, somebody's son or wife, a place too small to fit into.

  "So," Herb interjected into the silence. "We'll be needing to set Cole's tobacco."

  "Oh," Lusa said, surprised. "It's time for that, isn't it."

  "I'll tell you the truth, it's past time. All this rain's been keeping everybody's fields mucked up, and now here it is June, perty near too late."

  "Well, it's only, what, the fifth or something? June fifth?"

  "'At's right. Blue mold will be setting in here come July, if the plants aren't up big enough by then."

  "You can spray for blue mold if you have to," Lusa said. Tobacco pathology was not exactly her department, but she'd heard Cole speak of it. She felt desperate to know something in front of these men.

  "Can," they agreed, with limited enthusiasm.

  "Have you both got your own tobacco plants in? You should go ahead and do your own first."

  Herb nodded. "I leased out my allotment this year, since them durn cows are keeping me too busy to mess with it. Me and him got Big Rickie's in on Monday morning, when we had that break in the weather. That puts Cole next."

  And what about Jewel? Lusa wondered. Are they also running her life, since her husband ran off with a waitress from Cracker Barrel? "So what you're saying is," she interpreted cautiously, her heart pounding in her ears, "on Saturday you and your boys will be coming up here to set the tobacco."

  "'At's right. If it dries out for a day first."

  "And what about me? Do I get a say?"

  Both men glanced at her with the exact same eye: surprised, fearful, put out. But wasn't it her farm? She looked away from them, inhaling the rich scents of mud and honeysuckle and listening to her childish project, her bucket on the step: Tat-tat-a-tat-tat-a-tat-tat-tat! She heard a song against the beat, distinctly, the trilling clarinet rising like laughter and the mandolin as insistent as clapping hands. Klezmer music.

  "It's my farm now," she said aloud. Her voice quavered, and her fingers felt hot.

  "Yep," Herb agreed. "But we don't mind helping Cole out like any other year. Tobacco's a lot of work, takes a whole family. 'At's how people around here do it, anyways."

  "I was here last year," she said tersely. "I brought hot coffee out to you and Cole and Little Rickie and that other boy, that cousin from Tazewell. If you recall."

  Big Rickie smiled. "I recall you trying your hand at riding behind the tractor and setting a row of plants. Some of them ended up with their roots a-dangling up in the air and their leaves planted in the ground."

  "Cole drove too fast on purpose! We were just newlyweds. He was teasing me in front of you guys." Lusa flushed pink up to the hairline, remembering her ride on the little platform attached to the rear of the tractor, grabbing the floppy young tobacco plants from the box beside her. Their disintegrating texture was like that of tissue paper; trying to plunge them into the chunky clay of the furrow as it passed beneath her seemed impossible. They had been married only two days. "It was my first time behind a tractor," she contended.

  "It was," Big Rickie conceded. "And most of them plants was roots-down."

  Herb steered back to the business at hand. "We got no sets of our own left, but Big Rickie got up a good price on a batch from Jackie Doddard."

  "I appreciate that. But what if I don't want to plant tobacco this year?"

  "You don't have to do a thing. You can stay in the house if you want to."

  "No, I mean, what if I don't want tobacco planted on my farm?"

  Now they did not glance at Lusa sideways; they stared.

  "Well," she said, "why plant more tobacco when everybody's trying to quit smoking? Or should be trying to, if they're not already. The government's officially down on it, now that word's finally out that cancer's killing people. And everybody's blaming us."

  Both men turned their eyes out toward the rain and the fields, where it was clear they suddenly wished they could be, rain or no rain. She could see them working hard not to finger the packs of Marlboros in their shirt pockets.

  "What would you be wanting to plant, then?" Herb asked at last.

  "Well, I hadn't really thought. What about corn?"

  Herb and Big Rickie exchanged a smile, passing the joke between them. "About three dollar a bushel, that's how about it," Herb replied. "Unless you mean feed corn, that's more like fifty cents a bushel around here. But a-course you'd be talking about sweet corn."

  "Of course," Lusa said.

  "Well, let's see. Cole's got a five-acre tobacco bottom, so put it in sweet corn, that'd get you about five hundred bushels, maybe six in a good year, not that we ever have one of those around here." Herb rolled his eyes up, counting on his fingers. "About fifteen hundred dollar. Minus your diesel for your tractor, your seed, and a whole bunch of fertilizer, because corn's a heavy feeder. And some luck getting it sold on the right day. You might end up making near about...eight hundred dollars. On your corn crop."

  "Oh, I see." Lusa blushed deeper. "We usually clear around twelve or thirteen thousand for the tobacco."

  "Yep," said Big Rickie. "That'd be about right. Thirty-seven hundred an acre, minus your tractor costs, your sets, and your chemicals."

  "It's what we live on."

  She'd said it softly, but the words we and live hung heavily in the air. She felt them pressing on her shoulders like the hands of a disapproving matron trying to get the message across to a selfish child: "Sit down, your turn is over."

  Tat-tat-a-tat-tat-a-tat-tat-tat. Grandfather Landowski's rhythm
section was fading out. She needed to empty the buckets and start them over again. She wished these men would go away. Just leave her to muddle through in her own way, however mistaken. She wished she could ask someone for advice without feeling skinned alive and laughed at.

  "What else can people grow around here, on little scraps of land at the bottom of a hollow? What can earn you enough to live on, besides tobacco?"

  Big Rickie warmed to the subject of bad news. "Turner Blevins up 'air tried tomatoes. They told him he could get ten thousand dollar an acre. What they didn't tell him was if two other guys in the county try the same thing, they've done flooded the market. Blevins fed thirty-five hundred pound of tomatoes to his hogs and dished the rest under."

  "What about the other two guys?" Lusa asked.

  "Same. They all three lost money. One of them was so sold on tomatoes, he'd put him in a ten-thousand-dollar irrigation system to water 'em with, is what I heard. Now he's back in tobacco, and just hoping for a real dry year so he can turn on his fancy spanking hoses."

  "But that doesn't make sense, that they'd all lose money. People need lots of tomatoes."

  "Not all on the same day they don't, and that's how tomatoes comes in. If you can't get them suckers all into somebody's grocery cart in five days or less, then you've got you some expensive hog food. And out here in the boondocks, no shipper's going to touch you before he's sure he can make his cut."

  Lusa crossed her arms, despairing of the depth of her ignorance.

  "Your tobacco, you see, now," Rickie continued, "you hang it in the barn to cure, and then it can just go on hanging there as long as it needs to, till the time's good to sell. Everybody in the county can grow tobacco, but every leaf of it might get lit and smoked on a different day of the year, in a different country of the world."

  "Imagine that," Lusa said, sounding sarcastic, though she was actually a little astonished. She'd never thought through these basic lessons before. Tobacco's value, largely, lay in the fact that it kept forever and traveled well.

  They stood silent for a while, all three of them staring out into the yard. The rain fell on the big leaves of the catalpa tree, popping them down like the keys on a typewriter.

  Lusa said, "There's got to be something else I can make decent money on. The barn's got to have a new roof this year."

  Herb smirked. "Mary-jay-wanna. I hear that brings in about the same price per acre as tomatoes, and the market's solid."

  "I see," Lusa said. "You're making fun of me. Well, I appreciate your offer to set this weekend, but I'd like to think about the tobacco. Can you still get the sets from Jackie if I let you know tomorrow or the next day?"

  "I expect so. Jackie's got that hydroponic setup. It didn't work out too good last year, but this year he's done growed more'n he knows what to do with."

  "Well, good. I'll let you know, then, before Saturday. I'll decide what to do."

  "If it stops raining," Herb said, lest Lusa think she was in charge.

  "Right. And if it doesn't, then we're all sunk together, right? I'll make the same nothing off the tobacco I didn't grow as you will off the crop you tried to get put in. And think of the time and money I'll save!"

  Herb stared at her. Big Rickie smiled out toward the garage. "That's a smart lady, Herb," he said. "I believe she's got the right attitude for farming."

  "Well," Lusa said, slapping her hands together. "I've got a gallon of cherries in there that are going to rot if I don't get them canned today. So I'll call you Friday."

  Herb leaned out toward the edge of the porch, looking up the mountainside toward the orchard. She was controlling her breathing, counting the seconds until these two got into the truck and lit their cigarettes and drove away and she could sob on the porch swing. Standing up to them took almost more guts than she had.

  "I'm surprised you got cherry one off them trees this year," Herb pronounced. "As many durn jaybirds as we've had. Last spring I come over here and shot the birds all out of there for Cole, but I never got around to it this year. So you got you enough for a pie or two anyways, did you?"

  Lusa managed to grimace a smile, wide-eyed and fierce. "Miracles happen, Herb."

  That would be Jewel at the door, Lusa thought. Jewel thumping her umbrella out in the front hallway (they'd always come in without knocking, all of them, even when Lusa and Cole were newlyweds stealing sex in the afternoons), Jewel's tired voice telling the kids to wipe their feet and hang up their raincoats on the pegs. Then they poured through the kitchen doorway, the older child carrying a box of canning jars on his head, balancing it with both hands. Lusa had called Jewel when she ran out of canning jars.

  "Come on in," she said. "You can set the box right down there on the counter."

  "Lord, call the police," Jewel cried. "They's been a murder in here!"

  Lusa laughed. "Looks like it, doesn't it?" Her apron and the countertops were smeared garishly with the blood of hundreds of cherries. The hand-cranked pitter was clamped to the counter, a mass of dark pits glistening in the bucket underneath like something from a slaughterhouse. She'd been relieved when Jewel offered over the phone to come up and help her finish the canning. Lusa could recognize objectively, without really feeling it, that she needed company or she'd go crazy.

  Yet here was her sister-in-law with her hand to her mouth already, mortified by her slip, a joke about death. Lusa had hoped for a sturdier kind of company than this.

  "It's OK, Jewel. I know Cole's dead."

  "Well, I didn't...stupid me. Didn't think." She looked anguished.

  Lusa shrugged. "It's not like you're going to remind me of something I've forgotten about."

  Jewel stood a minute longer with her hand to her mouth and tears welling, staring at Lusa, while her ten-year-old slowly circumnavigated the kitchen island, balancing the cardboard box of jars one-handed. The younger child, Lowell, reached up to steal a handful of cherries off the butcher block. Jewel gently swatted his hand away. "Aren't people awful?" she asked Lusa, finally. "I know what you're saying. When Shel--" But she stopped herself to shoo out the kids. "Go play outside."

  "Mo-om, it-'s pouring down rain!"

  "It's pouring down rain, Jewel. They can play on the back porch."

  "OK, the back porch, then, but don't bust anything."

  "Hey, wait a sec, Chris, here." Lusa scooped a pile of cherries into a plastic bowl and handed it to the older boy. "If you run out of stuff to do, there's a broom and a dustpan out there."

  "To sweep with?" "To play hockey with, you're asking? Yes, to sweep with."

  Jewel waited for the door to close behind them before she spoke. "When Shel left me, everybody just stopped saying his name or word one about him, like I'd never even been married. But we were, for some of those years--I mean, married. Even while we were still just dating, if you know what I mean. We ran off to Cumberland Falls two months before the wedding and called it our test-drive honeymoon." For just a few seconds she stared at her hands with a faraway satisfaction, the most womanly expression Lusa had ever seen on Jewel. But then it vanished.

  "I swear it's sad," she finished, matter-of-factly. "Pretending that part of my life never happened." She began to unscrew the clamp that held the antique steel cherry pitter to the counter. Lusa had spent half an hour solving the puzzle of that clamp, but of course the pitter had been their mother's. Jewel would know it with her eyes closed.

  "This family's intimidating, no doubt about it," Lusa said. She wished she could say how hard it really was--how it felt to live among people who'd been using her kitchen appliances since before she was born. How they attacked her in unison if she tried to rearrange the furniture or hang her own family pictures. How even old Mrs. Widener haunted this kitchen, disapproving of Lusa's recipes and jealous of her soups.

  "Oh, it's not just the family," Jewel said. "It's everybody; it's this town. Four years it's been, and I still see people at Kroger's go into a different checkout line so they won't have to stand there and not say something to me
about Shel."

  Lusa mopped red juice from the counter with a sponge. "You'd think in four years they could come up with a new subject."

  "You'd think. Not that it's the same, Shel's running off and Cole's being..."

  "Dead," Lusa said. "It's the same. Around here, people act like losing your husband was contagious." Lusa had been amazed at how quickly her status had changed: being single made her either invisible or dangerous. Or both, like a germ. She'd noticed it even at the funeral, especially among the younger ones, wives her own age who needed to believe marriage was a safe and final outcome.

  "Well, at least everybody knows you didn't do anything to run your husband off."

  Lusa took a pinafore apron out of the drawer and put the neck strap over Jewel's head, then turned her around to tie the back. "What, and you did? God knows hand-to-mouth farming is a life anybody would run from. I considered leaving Cole a hundred times. Not because of him. Just because of everything."

  "Lord, I know, it's a misery," Jewel said, though just then they were both gazing out the kitchen window at a drenched, billowy mock orange in full bloom in the backyard--and it was beautiful.

  Lusa took up her sponge again. "Don't you dare tell your sisters I thought about leaving Cole. They'd chop me up and hide the pieces in canning jars."

  Jewel laughed. "You make us sound so mean, honey." She donned an oven mitt and lifted the huge, flat lid of the water-bath canner, holding it high in the air like a cymbal. "You want me to put the jars in to sterilize?"