Prodigal Summer: A Novel

by Barbara Kingsolver

  Then, without any warning that the chase was near an end, the forward guard pounced and then raised her head with a sideways jerk, snapping the mouse just once in the air like a small, damp dust-rag she meant to shake clean, before disappearing into the woods with her catch still writhing in her jaws. Her sister paused at the edge of the woods and turned back on them with a dark, warning glare.

  Deanna didn't speak for the rest of the afternoon. What was there to say, to this man whose thoughts she couldn't stand to know? She wanted him to have seen how they really were in that sunny clearing, how golden and perfectly attuned to their own necessities. But she knew not to ask. The sight of them had caused him to withdraw far inside himself, carefully avoiding any touch or glance at her as they stood watching the animals. Afterward, he hadn't offered a word about what they'd witnessed.

  They did not go to bed in the afternoon, as it seemed they'd intended. Her body went cold. She put on a kettle for tea, then boiled some rice and reheated yesterday's black beans. She and Eddie had fallen into the habit of eating their meals on the bed, but on this day she claimed back the single chair and the table, covering it with a pile of books and papers and her neglected field notebook, writing while she ate. Eddie Bondo was restless, pacing out on the porch. The loudest sound on the earth, she thought, is a man with nothing to do. Why was he still here?

  For the hundredth time she asked herself what madness of mate choice this was. A female prairie chicken would reliably copulate with the cock who inflated his yellow air sacs and boomed loudest. Bower birds went for the guy with the gaudiest nest. What was it in Eddie Bondo that moved her so powerfully to capitulate--his gait that matched hers, finally a man who could keep up? Or was it his smaller stature, after all those years of professors' bossing her around? But he was plenty cocky, as self-sufficient as any creature she'd met. Her match, she supposed, in that regard. She only wished she felt less like a prairie chicken stalking dazed across the lekking ground toward the grand display.

  In the evening, when she couldn't stand any more of his proximity, she invented the necessity of walking down to the hemlock grove with a claw hammer. She would work on the trail bridge over the creek that had collapsed back in February. She still had a few hours of sunlight, as it was close to the summer solstice. (She thought about this: had she missed the solstice, in fact?) She would pull the old bridge apart, count the unsalvageable boards, and put in a requisition for the lumber she'd need to repair it, since the Forest Service jeep would be coming up fairly soon to drop off supplies and collect her new list. She would order no more food than usual, nothing extra. She'd left the cabin without a word, unable to imagine his doing anything but cleaning his gun in her absence.

  The hemlock grove was on a tributary that fed Bitter Creek, in a strange, narrow hollow where long updrafts carried sound peculiarly well. Sometimes here she'd heard sounds all the way up from the valley: a dog barking, or even the high, distant whine of trucks on the interstate. That was in winter, though, when the trees were bare. Today, as she worked to pry up boards, she heard mostly the heavy quiet that precedes a summer evening, before the katydids start up, when the forest's sounds are still separated by long silences. A squirrel overhead scolded her halfheartedly, then stopped. A sapsucker worked its way around a pine trunk. Eddie Bondo had spoken of acorn woodpeckers he'd seen in the West, funny creatures that worked together to drill a dead tree full of little holes, cached thousands of acorns in them, and then spent the rest of their days defending their extravagant treasure from marauding neighbors. How pointless life could be, what a foolish business of inventing things to love, just so you could dread losing them. She listened to the sapsucker's methodic rapping, which ceased only when the bird paused to flick off sections of bark that landed on the mossy ground near the creek.

  She was tearing the last boards off the log frame of the bridge when she heard something else that caused her to stop her hammer and listen. Voices: men talking, it sounded like. She stood up and listened more carefully. Hunters.

  She wiped a strand of hair out of her eyes, feeling put out. This must be the longest day of the year, for she'd had quite enough of it. Talking meant there was more than one, and this late in the day they'd be up to something stupid like sleeping in a tree all night so they could poach wild turkeys at first light. She sighed and walked the log back across the creek to where she'd thrown her jacket. She'd have to head down there and summon the energy to call their bluff.

  The sounds were very distant, maybe as much as a mile off. But they were certain, and continuous. She listened for another minute to the low, steady murmurs. It wasn't words. Growls, they were. Little conversational growls and higher-pitched barks. It wasn't men talking; this was women, coyote women, not howling at the moon but snarling quietly in the language of mothers speaking to children. Those two females this morning had taken a live mouse, she'd noticed. They hadn't eaten it or even killed it, just disabled it. Now Deanna knew why. Those pups are alive, she sang to herself in a whisper. Alive in the world with their eyes open, learning to hunt. Learning to speak. Coyote children born empty-headed like human infants, needing to learn every skill they'd need for living. Their protectors hadn't vocalized all spring, but now they would have to; no social creature could grow up mute, it wouldn't survive. The pups must be over six weeks old, nearly ready to hunt on their own. What a sight they must be now. Quickly she stacked the good lumber against a hemlock trunk and set off for home, though "home" didn't offer her much right now: a place where she couldn't breathe a word of what she knew tonight, nor even sleep, until she saw those pups with her own open eyes.

  In the early-morning light, moving fast down the Bitter Creek trail, she stopped for a minute to listen. Nothing, only silence. Or rather, every kind of sound except what she was listening for. Plenty of noise rustling up from the dry leaves around her feet--that would be a lizard making itself sound as big as a bear. She walked on, knowing now what to listen for and knowing she would hear it. All spring she'd been waiting while her imagination filled with voices that made the small hairs stand up on the back of her scalp: those classic howls to the moon, the yips and polyphonic cries she'd studied on cassette tapes till she'd worn them to crinkled, transparent cellophane. She was beginning to fear she'd worn out her mind the same way, waiting in these mountains, leaning into the silent nights, eventually deciding that the one sound she longed for was not going to come. Here it wasn't necessary for them to speak. Not like out west, where they would have to call to each other from the tops of desert hills for the joy of their numbers because they were so plentiful. They'd have to remind one another of who they were, how many families, and where they stood. Here there was just one single family, and it knew exactly where it stood. Best to keep quiet.

  The hardest work of Deanna's life had been staying away from that den, protecting it with her absence. Sometimes she'd felt sure they were gone, maybe headed south toward the Blue Ridge. She tried to believe that was for the best, but really there would be no safe haven for this family. Wherever these coyotes went, they'd have the hatred of farmers to contend with. Here on this isolated mountain they had the strange combination of one protector and one enemy. She didn't trust her power to bargain for their safety. In the six weeks of her acquaintance with Eddie Bondo, including both his presence and his absences, she'd hedged and evaded. Now he'd seen them, and she'd spent last night curled miserably in her chair near the wood stove, thinking, while he snored. By morning her bones ached and her mind was raw, but she was ready to lay her cards on the table.

  "I'm going down the hill this morning, alone," she'd said. "If you follow me, you're off this mountain for the rest of your life or mine. Whichever lasts longer."

  Without a word he'd packed some cold biscuits in his pack, hitched it over his shoulder, and hiked out whistling along the Forest Service road, in the opposite direction from Bitter Creek. Deanna stood for several minutes looking at his hat, which he'd left hanging on the peg by the door, and a
t his gun propped in the corner. Then she dressed and flew down the trail, free at last to go see. Now she could listen and not be afraid of hearing the voices that could give away their presence. For all those weeks she'd been holding her breath, listening and wanting not to hear. How had she let that happen?

  She stopped again, this time hearing only the manic laughter of a woodpecker pair having too much fun, moving sideways through the woods, hopping over each other from one tree trunk to the next. For a minute she watched this pileated woodpecker couple playing checkers with themselves. They were huge, as big as flying black cats, and impossible to ignore with their big, haughty voices and upswept red crests. She received a vision of ghosts, imagined for a moment the ivory bills--dead cousins to these pileated woodpeckers--who had been even bigger, with nearly a three-foot wingspan and a cold, white-eyed stare. Lord God birds, people used to call them, for that was what they'd cry when they saw one. Never again.

  Now, beneath the laughter of ghosts, she began to hear the intermittent vocalizations of the coyotes. She moved toward the sound, another slow hundred steps down the trail, stopping finally in a place where she could peek through rhododendrons and get a clear view of the den. The place had altered since spring; now the woods were thick with leaves. Air and light moved differently, and the den had changed, too. The bank below the cave was an apron of bare dirt, ridged with so many tiny claw marks it looked like light-brown corduroy. She thought she saw some movement inside the dark grin of the den's mouth, but then nothing, only stillness. She counted her own heartbeats to pass a minute, then more minutes, and convinced herself she'd actually seen no movement. There had been pups here, that was sure from all the claw marks on the bank, but it was too late, she began to believe. She'd missed them by one day; they'd grown up and gone.

  Then she saw a rustling movement in the huckleberry thicket a little distance from the opening. A long, low whine pulled at her heart, an irresistible appeal. An adult was in that thicket, the mother or one of the beta females calling the children out. Instantly they appeared all together in the opening, a row of bright eyes beneath a forest of tiny, pointed ears. Deanna tried to count, but there were too many, and they moved in a rambunctious swarm of ears and tails: more than six, she decided, and fewer than twenty. They tumbled over one another out the doorway as the female approached with something in her teeth, a dark, small thing she tossed into their midst. A wake of tiny growls and yips erupted, and the little golden furballs hopped like popcorn in a kettle. Puppies, she thought; they were nothing but puppies. But kittenlike, too, in the way they were pouncing and playing with the half-living vole that had just been delivered to their schoolyard. Deanna sank down on her knees, into the childhood summers when neighbors had brought litters of pups in boxes and the barn cats had delivered their kittens practically into her hands. Without self-consciousness her body became a child's, her teeth holding her braid in her mouth for silence and her hands on her chest to keep her heart from bursting.

  She wished so hard for her father, it felt like a prayer: If I could only show him this, oh, please. Let him look down from Heaven, whatever that means, let him look up through my eyes from the cells of genesis he planted in me, let him see this, because he would understand it perfectly. Love was one thing he always knew when it looked him in the face.

  She wondered if there was anyone alive she could tell about these little dogs, this tightly knotted pack of survival and nurture. Not to dissect their history and nature; she had done that already. What she craved to explain was how much they felt like family.

  {14}

  Old Chestnuts

  Garnett turned up the hot water and let it scald the muscles shielding his shoulder blades. What an ache he had back there, as if some schoolyard bully had landed a haymaker squarely on his backbone.

  He sighed. This life was getting to be too much for one old man. It wasn't so much the work; he loved messing with his chestnut trees. People presumed it was awfully tedious to bag all the flowers in the spring, do the careful cross-pollinating, collect the seeds, and plant the new seedlings, but every inch of that was exciting to Garnett because any of those seeds might grow up to be his blight-resistant chestnut tree. Every white bag slipped over a branch tip, every shake of pollen, each step carried the hope of something wondrous in the making. A piece of the old, lost world returning, right before his eyes.

  No, what got him lately was the running into one problem after another, this farm and all its history dragging him down. The farm was a darn junkyard hiding its menace under a thin skin of grass. Every farm around here was, to tell the truth. He'd seen a young couple with a real estate agent looking over the farmhouse down by Oda Black's, and he'd been tempted to holler at them out the window of his truck, "Come looking for some history, have you? Well, this here's the story of how Old Man Blevins buried himself in debts and broke-down machinery, and it's just waiting to tangle up whoever steps on it next."

  Well, of course he hadn't told them anything, and they'd buy. They had that strenuously foolish look of city people; the woman was dressed more like a man than the man. Soon they'd be finding out what Garnett knew by heart: on an old farm, every time you sink a spade to plant a tree, you're going to hit some old piece of a broken dish, a length of leather harness, some rusted metal, maybe even a cannonball! When Garnett was a schoolboy his father used to bring cannonballs home from somewhere and the boys would play with them till they ended up forgotten in the orchard or buried in their mama's flower patch, lying in wait to wreak havoc fifty years later on a tiller, a mower blade, or some other piece of equipment costing a day's work and too much money to repair.

  This morning his plan had been modest: to finish clearing out the edge of the back field along the fencerow to make room for a single new row of trees. He thought the worst of it would be clearing the weeds, but no. He'd wrecked his bush hog and then his tiller blade. Half buried in that slim patch of ground he'd found six old fenceposts all wrapped up in barbed wire, evidently just thrown down there after they pulled them out to put in the new fence, back in the forties. Once he'd wrestled all that out, he'd discovered underneath it enough nails and carriage bolts scattered around to fill a bucket three times (and three times had carried it to his trash pile in the garage, now growing monstrous). Then, beneath all that, the entire metal chassis of an old wagon--and the worst was still yet to come! All in a mess at the end of the fencerow he'd uncovered a huge roll of black plastic with something heavy inside, which Garnett began to fear would turn out to be a body (he'd already found everything else there was today, so why not?). But no, it was clumps of white powder, possibly rock salt, though he wasn't sure. Something his father had meant to throw away when Garnett was still a boy. That was the trouble with their thinking back in those days: "away" simply meant "out of sight somewhere," for someone else to run into further down the road. Garnett was fed up to the teeth with it all, and he still hadn't cleared the ground he'd meant to have laid open by midmorning, and now what? Good grief, that was his telephone ringing.

  He turned off the shower and listened. Yes, there it was, the telephone on the little hall table just outside the bathroom door, ringing off the hook.

  "Hold your horses!" he cried, not very pleased to have to cut his shower short and scurry around drying his head and wrapping himself in a towel. He stepped gingerly out onto the floorboards in the cool hallway and yanked up the receiver.

  "Hello," he said, as pleasantly as he could manage while patting down his wet hair. He didn't feel right to be chatting with anyone, even a wrong number, looking like this.

  "Hello, Mr. Walker?"

  It was a woman. Not from around here, either; she had a townish sound to her, that way they have of hurrying up every single word.

  "Speaking," he said.

  She seemed uncertain for a moment, and he prayed she'd hang up, but then she launched into it: "I was wondering if I could ask you some questions about goats. I'm interested in getting started on kind of a semi-la
rge-scale meat-goat operation, but I don't really have much capital, and some people directed me to you. They said you were the man to talk to, the regional goat maven, and you might even know how to get me started with some...I don't know how to put this." She breathed. "OK, plain talk? I'm wondering if you know anybody who'd give me goats for free. To get me started."

  Garnett collected himself: the Regional Goat Maven, caught with a towel around his waist and his hair standing up like a chicken in the rain.

  "Goats," he said.

  "Yes."

  "May I ask where you are located? That would be the first consideration."

  "Oh, I'm sorry. I forgot my manners. This is Lusa Landowski, I live on the old Widener place, my husband was Cole Widener."

  "Oh, Mrs. Widener. I was awfully sorry to hear about your husband. I would have been at the funeral, but there were...there are some considerations between our families. I expect you've heard all about that."

  She was silent for a few seconds. "You're related to us somehow, aren't you?"

  "By marriage," he said. "Distantly."

  "I'm sorry; my nephew mentioned it, but I'd forgotten. That's right, one of my sisters-in-law is a Walker. I think." She laughed, sounding rather jolly for a new widow. "I'm still learning what it's like to live among six hundred relatives. I'm new to all this--I'm from Lexington."

  "And that would be where you plan on raising the goats?"

  "Oh no, here. I'm trying to keep this farm solvent, which would be the point of this goat business, if I can do it. I'm not at all sure I can, or whether it's crazy to try."

  "Oh? Now, don't you have beef cattle up there on the Widener place?"

  She sighed, now sounding not jolly at all. "Cattle just seem to be a losing proposition for me, with all you have to put into them. The Ivermec and everything, and I know I'm also supposed to check the cows to see if they're pregnant, but a cow pelvic examination I know from nothing. I'm scared to get close to them. I'm a small woman, and they're so huge." She gave an embarrassed laugh. "I guess I'm not much of a farmer yet. I can't even get my hay baler working. Two of my brothers-in-law have this leased-out cattle empire, so I could sell them my cattle, I'm thinking. Get into a smaller breed." She paused. "I was thinking I could handle goats."