Prodigal Summer: A Novel

by Barbara Kingsolver

  "Well. You seem to have a plan, at least."

  "It's a lot to go into; I'm sorry. I didn't mean to get into personal business, but listen, maybe this isn't a good time for you to talk. I'm sorry to be bothering you."

  "Oh, it's no bother at all," he said, shifting from one bare foot to the other, feeling a draft, and no wonder: under the skimpy towel he was naked as a jaybird. He thought he heard someone rapping at his front door. Oh, dear, was it a delivery? He wasn't expecting a delivery.

  "Oh, well, that's good," she said, laughing a little. "At least you haven't said flat out that I'm crazy--yet. I was hoping to kind of pick your brain. If I could."

  "Well, pick away," said Garnett, miserably. He heard the knock again, more insistent.

  "First of all, do you think it's realistic for me to try to get free goats? How would I go about that?"

  "I'd suggest you run an ad in the newspaper. You're liable to find yourself with more goats than you know what to do with."

  "Really? You agree that people are dying to get rid of them, then. Which I guess ought to tell me there's no money in it, if I had any sense."

  "I can't really encourage you, Mrs. Widener. There's not a man in this county who's made a dollar off a goat, in my recollection."

  "That's what my nephew said. But it seems to me the problem is marketing. Like everything else in farming, so I'm starting to learn. Nobody here knows what to do with a goat, they won't even eat them, and we're oversupplied. My nephew said we'd had kind of a goat plague on Zebulon County a while back. Why is that?"

  Garnett closed his eyes. Was all this really happening? Some mysterious intruder was banging down his front door, a strange woman from Lexington was attempting to uncover his most embarrassing secret, his back ached like the dickens, and his bare buttocks were hanging out in the breeze. He did not wish he were dead, exactly, just maybe peacefully asleep in his bed, with all the lights out.

  "Mr. Walker? Are you still there?"

  "Yes."

  "Is this...are you just thinking I'm some nut?"

  "Oh, no, not at all. Your question about the surplus goats isn't an easy one to answer. Six or seven years ago, they started out as a whole slew of Four-H projects that kind of overgrew themselves. That's the best way I can describe it. A mistake that grew like Topsy. I was supposed to be supervising these young folks and should have steered them into hogs or poultry, but my wife had just died--you can understand, being a widow yourself. And my neighbor has a very hard grudge against goats of any kind, and I had a spell of poor judgment there. That's the only way I can describe it."

  "Mr. Walker, you don't have to go into that, I'm not a reporter or anything. I'm not even that nosy compared to most people around here. I'm just looking for some free goats."

  "Try an ad in the paper, then, that's what I suggest. But don't give out your address in the paper."

  "No?"

  "Goodness, no, or people will just dump any kind of animal on you, and you'll be sorry. Do you have a pickup truck, Mrs. Widener?"

  "Sure."

  "Well, then, list your telephone number in the ad, but don't make any mention of the Widener place. Just a phone, and ask people to call you. If they have what you're looking for, then you go pick up the animals yourself. But first ask them some questions. Do you have a pencil and paper?"

  "Just a minute." He heard her clunk down the phone and walk across a floor. He wondered which room she was in. Upstairs, or down? Maybe the kitchen. They'd had the wedding right in the front hallway, with the girl walking slowly down those beautiful steps in her little white shoes and short white bridal dress. She'd looked about thirteen. They'd intended to have it out in the yard, but the weather had turned cold and rainy at the last minute. He remembered all of it. Ellen was sick. He hadn't thought about that for years: she'd had a terrible headache, and they'd had to leave early. It was probably connected with the cancer, they just didn't know it yet.

  "OK, I'm back."

  "Oh," he said, startled. "What was I saying?"

  "When people call, I should ask them about their goats...what?"

  "Oh, yes. First, you want meat goats, do you? Not for milking?"

  "Definitely for meat."

  "All right, then, you want to produce slaughter kids."

  "I guess that's right. In time to sell by, oh, maybe around the end of the year or something like that, I was kind of thinking."

  "Oh. Then you have no time to waste."

  "Is it even possible? To get them to breed at this time of year?"

  "It's not the right time for them, but there is a way to make it happen. If you can be sure they haven't been around a buck for all of last fall and winter, they'll be ready to come into season now. I guarantee it."

  "Is that reasonable to expect? That people will have does that haven't been with a buck?"

  "There are probably a hundred families in this county keeping a handful of goats in their backyard. And people don't generally like billies that close to the house--they have quite a stout odor. Have you ever smelled a billy goat, Mrs. Widener?"

  "Not that I recall," she confessed.

  "Well, if you had, you would remember it. It's an odor that appeals to a nanny goat, evidently, but not to human beings. Most people only want to keep the does around."

  "All right. Good."

  "So what you'll want is does--three-and four-year-olds are the best, nothing a whole lot older. Get as many does as you think you can handle, but watch out for bucks. You'll only want one, with your does. Mrs. Widener, can you tell a buck from a doe?"

  She laughed. "Mr. Walker, I'm ignorant, but I'm not stupid."

  "Well, of course not. I just meant...you are from Lexington."

  He heard her breathe in sharply as if to speak, but then she paused. "OK, just one buck," she said finally. "Got it."

  "Well, but you might as well get a spare or two. Once in a while you'll get a buck that doesn't perform, so you may as well have a few on reserve. You'll have to keep them in a separate pasture, out of sight."

  "Gentlemen-in-waiting," she said.

  Was that a bawdy joke? He didn't know what was what anymore; kids laughed at you even when you said a simple word like queer. But she didn't seem to be laughing. She sounded more earnest than most of the boys he'd had in 4-H.

  "Now, if your does really haven't been pastured with a buck since before last fall, they'll come into season right away, just a day or two after you put the buck in the field. Some people think it helps to rub down the buck with a rag and then walk around waving it in the she-goats' noses. But I never thought that was really necessary."

  "So that's the first thing I'll ask people when they call: 'Have you got does? And are they now or have they ever been pastured with a buck?' Right?"

  "That's right," he said.

  "If they are, I should just pass?"

  "That's up to you. If you want kids by the end of the year, you should."

  There was a pause. She seemed to be writing something down. "OK. And the next question?"

  "What kind of goats are they? You'll want Spanish, or Spanish crossed with what they call brush goats, which is what most people have around here. Meat goats, just ask if they're meat goats. Your Saanens, your Swiss dairy goats, anything somebody's milking, that's probably an animal you don't want."

  "OK. What else, you said the age was important?"

  "Nothing over five years, nor less than one hundred pounds."

  Again, she was taking notes. "What else?"

  "Well, of course, you want them healthy. You don't want parasites. Look them over when you go to pick them up. If you're not one hundred percent satisfied with the looks of them, don't take them."

  "That's going to be hard," she said. "To turn up my nose at somebody's offer of free animals? Beggars can't be choosers."

  "That's why you have your truck. You go to them. They're the beggars, they're hoping you'll take the useless beasts off their hands. You'll decide."

  "Oh, you're righ
t. That's a very good way to look at it. Thank you, Mr. Walker, you've been extremely helpful. Do you mind if I call you back if I have more questions? I'm kind of learning as I go here."

  "Not at all, Mrs. Widener. Good luck to you, now."

  "Thanks."

  "Bye-bye."

  He hung up the phone and cocked an ear toward the front hallway downstairs. Still clutching the towel around his waist with one hand, he tiptoed over to the window and peered out, though he didn't expect to see anything new in back of the house. Who could have been at his door? He dressed very quickly in the doorway to the landing, a place in his house where he seldom tarried, and it gave him pause when he glanced up and caught his reflection inside the chestnut frame of the antique mirror that hung there. He felt he had seen a ghost, but not of himself: it was the mirror frame that provoked him, his surviving face circumscribed by the remains of that extinct tree.

  He padded down the stairs in his leather slippers, since he'd left his muddy boots outside the door to clean later, feeling too tired and fed up to do it when he came in from the field. His trousers, covered with green cockleburs, he'd folded over a kitchen chair, dreading the chore of picking them. The sharp burrs would prick his fingertips and leave them with a dull, poisoned ache. Garnett believed that if the Almighty Father had made one mistake in Creation, it was to give us too darn many cockleburs.

  At the front door he opened the screen and poked out his head, then looked to the left and the right. Nobody. There were his boots side by side, still waiting muddily by the door. No car in the driveway, no delivery truck or any sign that one had been here. Usually the big UPS truck backed up on the grass and left an awful, curved scar of mud there. That boy they'd hired to drive it had more earring holes than brains in his head.

  Garnett stepped out on the porch and squinted through his cloudy corneas at the heavy afternoon air, as if he might be able to decipher traces left in it. He didn't get unexpected visitors very often. Never, in fact--nor unexpected phone calls, for that matter, but mercy, when it rained it poured. Someone had been here, and he'd missed him. It wasn't an easy thing for him to let go of.

  Then he saw the pie on his porch swing. A berry pie, just sitting there, taking in the day. It had the pretty little slits in the top from which a berry pie bleeds its purple fluids--oh, what heavenly mysteries were created by female hands. Blackberry pie was his favorite. Ellen had always made one with the first fruits harvested from the fencerows, after ceremoniously sending him out with a pail on the third Saturday of June. Garnett glanced at the sky briefly, asking God what kind of a trick this was.

  He went over to take a closer look. It was a pie, all right--fresh. Even if his eyes could trick him, his nose never did. Stuck underneath it, wafting a little in the breeze, was a small collection of papers. He slipped the thin squares of paper out from under the pie, along with a sealed envelope, and scowled at the whole mess. The squares of paper were receipts. Good grief, was someone charging him for this pie? No, they were his receipts, one from Little Brothers' and one from Southern States, probably taken out of the small metal box just inside the front door where he always emptied his pockets and tended to let his receipts pile up until tax time. But there were words on the back of these, written in an extremely small, tidy hand. A note, attached to a letter in a sealed envelope.

  He looked around the empty porch. Someone had brought him this pie, stood there banging on his door for fifteen minutes while that Widener woman rattled on endlessly about goats, and then finally given up and written him a note and left the pie. Who would do such a thing? As if he didn't know. With a sinking feeling he carried the note inside, pie and all, catching the door with his elbow. He set the pie inside a cupboard where he wouldn't be looking at it while he read the note, and then he fetched his reading glasses and sat down at his kitchen table to read. First, the note on the scraps of receipt:

  Mr. Walker,

  Well, you needn't to waste a stamp and two hours of Poke Sanford's time--think of that poor fellow having to carry a letter from your box down to the P.O. and back out the same road again to mine! I'm right next door. You could knock. That's what I meant to do today. I had a letter written up to give you in case I couldn't think of everything [...and here the note continued onto the second receipt] or if you weren't in the mood to chat, but really I hoped to say most of this in person. But now you aren't home. Oh, fiddle. Your truck is here. Where are you? I'll just leave you the pie and the letter. Cheer up, Mr. Walker. I hope you enjoy them both.

  Your neighbor, Nannie Rawley

  Next Garnett tore open the long white envelope and slid out the handwritten letter folded inside. He noticed that his hands were shaking when he did it. Cheer up indeed.

  Dear Mr. Walker,

  Since you asked, yes, I do believe humankind holds a special place in the world. It's the same place held by a mockingbird, in his opinion, and a salamander in whatever he has that resembles a mind of his own. Every creature alive believes this: The center of everything is me. Every life has its own kind of worship, I think, but do you think a salamander is worshiping some God that looks like a big two-legged man? Go on! To him, a man's a shadowy nuisance (if anything) compared to the sacred business of finding food and a mate and making progeny to rule the mud for all times. To themselves and one another, those muddly little salamander lives mean everything.

  Of all things, I'd never expect you, Garnett Walker III, to ask, "Who cares if one species is lost?" The extinction of one kind of tree wreaked pure havoc on the folks all through these mountains--your own family more than any other. Suppose some city Yank said to you, "Well, sir, the American chestnut was just one tree--why, the woods are full of trees!" You'd get so mad you'd spit. It would take you a day and a night to try and explain why the chestnut was a tree unlike any other, that held a purpose in our world that nothing else can replace. Well sir, the loss of one kind of salamander would be a tragedy on the same order to some other creature that was depending on it. It wouldn't be you this time, but I assume you care about all tragedies, not just the ones that affect the Walker fortunes. Do you recall how they mentioned in the paper last year about all the mussel shells in our river going extinct? Well, Mr. Walker, now the mailman tells me he saw on a nature show that every kind of mussel has to live part of its little life as a parasite on the gills of a different kind of minnow. If the right minnow isn't there at the right time, well, sir, that's the end of the story! Everything alive is connected to every other by fine, invisible threads. Things you don't see can help you plenty, and things you try to control will often rear back and bite you, and that's the moral of the story. There's even a thing called the Volterra principle that I read about in my orcharding journal, which is all about how insecticide spraying actually drives up the numbers of the bugs you're trying to kill. Oh, it's an aggravation and a marvel. The world is a grand sight more complicated than we like to let on.

  Just think: if someone had shown you a little old seedling tree potted in a handful of dirt coming in on a ship from Asia all those years ago, asked you to peek into it, and remarked, "These piddly little strands of fungus will knock down a million majestic chestnut trees, starve out thousands of righteous mountain folk, and leave Garnett Walker a bitter old man," would you have laughed?

  If God gave Man all the creatures of this earth to use for his own ends, he also counseled that gluttony is a sin--and he did say, flat out, "Thou shalt not kill." He didn't tell us to go ahead and murder every beetle or caterpillar that wants to eat what we eat (and, by the way, other insects that pollinate what we eat). He did not mean for us to satisfy our every whim for any food, in every season, by tearing down forest to make way for field, ripping up field to make way for beast, and transporting everything we can think of to places it doesn't belong. To our dominion over the earth, Mr. Walker, we owe our thanks for the chestnut blight. Our thanks for kudzu, honeysuckle, and the Japanese beetle also. I think that's all God's little joke on us for getting too big for our br
itches. We love to declare that God made us in his image, but even so, he's three billion years old and we're just babies. I know your opinion of teenagers, Mr. Walker; just bear in mind that to God, you and I are much younger, even, than that. We're that foolish, to think we know how to rule the world.

  I'm partial to the passage from Genesis you quoted, but I wonder if you really understand it. God gave us every herb-bearing seed, it says, and every tree in which is the fruit of a tree-yielding seed. He gave us the mystery of a world that can re-create itself again and again. To you the fruit shall be food, he's saying, but just remember, to the tree it's a child. "And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat." He's looking out for the salamanders there, you see? Reminding us that there's life in them, too, and that even weeds and pond algae are sacred because they're salamander food. You're a religious man, Mr. Walker. Seems to me you'd think twice about spraying Roundup all over God's hard work.

  Never mind. We all have our peeves. Myself, I hate goats (as you well know), and I sorely despise snapping turtles. I'm sure God loves them as much as he loves you or me, but I've got new baby ducklings on my pond, and an evil old turtle in there is gobbling them down like the troll under the bridge. I can't stand it. There was one duckling I loved best, white with a brown wing (I named him Saddle Shoe), and yesterday while I stood and watched, that turtle came up right underneath and yanked down poor Shoe as he flapped and wailed for Mama. I bawled like a baby. I'd shoot that old S-O-B in the head if I had a gun and the heart to use it, so help me! But I have neither, and God knows that is surely for the best.