Prodigal Summer: A Novel

by Barbara Kingsolver

  He turned his head to the side and received an unbidden picture of the rocks in his head, stashed out of harm's way for the moment but poised, surely, to roll back out and make trouble. Without meaning to, he also remembered the stack of green shingles in his garage, hiding there, burning a hole in his conscience like a cigarette dropped on a couch.

  {21}

  Moth Love

  One of the skills of grief that Lusa had learned was to hold on tight to the last moments between sleep and waking. Sometimes, then, in the early morning, taking care not to open her eyes or rouse her mind through its warm drowse to the surface where pain broke clear and cold, she found she could choose her dreams. She could call a memory and patiently follow it backward into flesh, sound, and sense. It would become her life once again, and she was held and safe, everything undecided, everything still new. His arms were real, carrying her over the threshold as he joked that she weighed more than one bag of groceries but less than two. Cicadas buzzed and the air was hot and sticky--June, just after the wedding. She still had on her blue rayon skirt but had taken off her stockings and shoes in the car on the drive down from Lexington. The light-blue skirt flowed like cool water over her thighs and his forearms as he carried her up the stairs. He stopped on the landing, kissed her there, and slid his hands under her so her whole weight was nothing held in his hands. She was weightless, floating in air with her back to the window and his strong arms beneath her thighs. The air around his head seemed to shiver with the combined molecules of their separate selves as he entered her and she gave in to the delirium of flight, this perfect love made on the wing.

  Sometimes the dream changed itself then, and his comforting presence had the silky, pale-green wings of the stranger who had first come to her after the funeral, on the night Jewel gave her the sleeping pill. He always said the same thing to her: "I know you." He opened his wings and the coremata rose from his abdomen, fragrant and intricately branched like honeysuckle boughs, and once again she felt the acute pleasure of being chosen.

  "You knew me well enough to find me here," she said.

  And his scent burst onto her brain like a rain of lights, and his voice reached across the distance without words: "I've always known you that well."

  He wrapped her in his softness, touched her face with the movement of trees and the odor of wild water over stones, dissolving her need in the confidence of his embrace.

  "Aunt Mary Edna says they're praying when they do that," Crys reported doubtfully.

  "I guess you could say that. Butterfly church."

  Lusa and Crys had stopped in the dirt road to admire another dense crowd of swallowtail butterflies congregated on the ground surrounding a muddy spot. Every fifty feet or so they came upon another of these quivering pools of black and yellow wings that rose and scattered as they approached, then settled again on the same spot after they'd passed by. It had rained again yesterday, so there was no shortage of puddles.

  "I'll tell you something, though," Lusa said. "It's a no-girls-allowed church. All those butterflies you see there are probably boys."

  "Why?"

  "What why? Because they have little peckers!"

  Crys yelped out her sharp bark of a laugh. Lusa lived for this, to crack her up. It had become her pet secret challenge, to try for these moments when you could see all the lights come on, ever so briefly, in this child's dark house.

  "I know what you meant," Lusa said. "Why do just the males do that. It's called puddling, believe it or not. That's what reallive bug scientists call it."

  "Yeah? Why do just the boy ones do it?"

  "They're sucking up a certain mineral or protein from the mud, some special thing butterflies need to be healthy. And then they actually give it to the girl butterflies, like a valentine."

  "How do they give it to them?"

  Lusa paused, then asked, "Do you know how babies get made?"

  Crys rolled her eyes. "He sticks his pecker in her pee hole and squirts in stuff and the baby grows in there."

  "O-kay, you know the story, all right. So that's how he gives her the minerals. When he gives her the baby-making stuff, he actually puts it together with this whole package of other goodies she likes. It's called the spermatophore."

  "Boy. That's weird."

  "Isn't it? You know what? Nobody else in Zebulon County knows that, except you and me. Even your teachers don't."

  She glanced up. "Really?"

  "Really. If you want to know about bugs, I can tell you things you will not believe."

  "Are you mad at me for saying 'pecker' and 'shit' and stuff?"

  "Nah, not at all. Hell, no," she swore, to make Crys laugh. "As long as you know where not to say those words. Like in church, or at school, or within one and a half miles of Aunt Mary Edna. But here, who cares? It won't hurt my ears."

  "Well, hot damn," the child declared. "Shit fire."

  "Hey. Don't use them all up in your first five minutes."

  Crys picked up a small stone and tossed it toward the crowd of butterflies, just to see them rise.

  "Come on," Lusa said, "let's hunt moths. Today I'm going to find you a luna moth or bust." They walked slowly toward the puddle, passing straight through the cloud of quivering butterflies the way Lusa remembered Superman walking between the molecules of a wall in the cartoons. She and Crys were hiking up the old cemetery road into the woods behind the garage, for no reason in particular, just out for a little adventure while Lowell napped on the parlor couch. Jewel was having a very bad day and had asked Lusa to watch them for the third time in two weeks. Lusa was happy to oblige, though she wondered what kind of a parental substitute she was--encouraging Crys to swear like a tinker, for instance. She didn't know the first thing about kids. But no one else in the family could get a word out of Crys at all. You get what you get in this world, as Hannie-Mavis had once told her. Lusa and Crys had gotten bad luck and the judgment of the righteous. And apparently, each other.

  "What's that?"

  Lusa looked into the woods where Crys pointed. Birdsong rang like bells in the rainwashed air, but Lusa couldn't see anything in particular. "What, that plant?"

  "Yeah, 'at booger one climbing up the trees."

  "'Booger one'?"

  Crys shrugged. "Uncle Rickie says 'em's boogers. Them vines that gets all over everwhere. He hates 'em."

  "This one's nice, though; it's supposed to grow here. It gets covered with white flowers at the end of summer, and then it makes millions of seedpods that look like little silver starbursts. It's called virgin's bower."

  "Virgin's like Jesus's mama, right?"

  "Right. Or any girl or woman who's never gotten the pecker business we were talking about."

  "Oh. Virgin's power?"

  "No, virgin's bower. It means her bed." Lusa smiled. "Same thing in this case, actually."

  Crys leapt ahead of Lusa with a dozen or so strange, stiff giant steps. She seemed to like trying out different ways of walking, which Lusa just watched, bemused. She was wearing the same outgrown pair of jeans she always wore now, and also, today, a strange, ragged creation over her T-shirt. It looked like a man's denim work shirt with its tail and sleeves cut to ribbons with a pair of scissors.

  "I like bugs better than flowers," Crys said decisively, after a while.

  "Good, then you're in luck, because I know a million times more about bugs than I do about flowers. And we're looking for a luna moth, remember? Look on the trunks of the trees, on the side that's in shade. Do you know what a hickory tree looks like? With the really shaggy bark?"

  Crys shrugged.

  "Luna moths especially like hickories. Those and walnuts. They lay their eggs on the leaves because that's what their caterpillars eat."

  "How come?"

  "That's just how their stomachs are made. They specialize. You can eat the seeds of wheat, for instance, but not the grass part."

  "I can eat all kinds of stuff."

  "Other animals should be so lucky. Most of them have pretty
specialized diets. Meaning they can eat only one exact kind of thing."

  "Well, that's dumb."

  "It's not dumb or smart, it's just how they're built, like you have two legs and walk on your feet. A dog probably thinks that's dumb."

  Crys didn't comment.

  "But yeah, specialization makes life more risky. If their food dies, they die. They can't just say, 'Oh, never mind, my tree went extinct, so now I'll just order a pizza.'"

  "Lowell has that."

  "Has what?"

  "The special-food problem."

  "Yeah?" Lusa was amused by this analysis of her brother. "What does he eat?"

  "Just macaroni and cheese. And chocolate malted-milk balls."

  "Well. That is a specialized diet. No wonder he didn't eat my lentil soup the other night. I should have put malted-milk balls in it."

  Crys let out a tiny laugh, just air escaping between her teeth.

  "Look here, on the mossy side of this tree. See these little white moths?" They both bent close as Lusa prodded gently at a translucent wing. The moth roused and crawled a few inches up the rough bark. Crys was backlit by the sun, so Lusa could see the pale down on her curved cheek, like the fuzz on a peach. There was a softness to her features in these moments of concentration that made Lusa wonder how so many adults--herself included--could ever take this child for a boy.

  She looked up. "What are they?"

  "These are called cankerworms. The worm stage got noticed first with these guys, so mama moth is stuck with not such a nice name. She's kind of pretty, though, isn't she?" Lusa let it crawl onto her finger, then held it up and blew on it lightly, sending it fluttering in a crooked arc toward another tree. Crys stood for a minute longer watching its sleepy colleagues on the tree before she was willing to move on. "How come you know so much about bugs?" she asked.

  "Before I married your uncle Cole and moved here, I used to be a bug scientist. In Lexington. I did experiments and learned stuff about them that nobody knew before."

  "They got a lot of bugs in Lexington?"

  Lusa laughed. "As many as anywhere, I guess."

  "Huh. Aunt Lois said you's a miner."

  "A miner?"

  "Gold miner."

  Lusa puzzled over this. "Oh. A gold digger." She sighed. This time she was sure Crys hadn't meant to hurt her.

  "Is it true?" Crys asked.

  "Nope. No gold mines for me, past or future. Aunt Lois has got her head up her butt on that particular subject."

  Crys closed her mouth in a tight, conspiratorial grin and rolled her eyes at Lusa. They were finding their ways of living with the judgment of the righteous.

  "This is a good spot, let's look up here," Lusa said, pointing up a steep embankment to a grassy clearing above the road, bathed in dappled light. They'd come as far up this road as she wanted to go. They shouldn't stray too far from the house since Lowell was napping alone. Also, Lusa really didn't want to face the family cemetery that waited around the next bend. Cole wasn't in it, but too many other Wideners were.

  Crys was already scrambling ahead of her through the plumes of the daylilies that had escaped from someone's garden long ago and were now as common as weeds. They were pretty, though. Their straplike leaves spilled like waterfalls over the banks, crowned with circles of bright orange-eyed flowers and long, graceful buds. They grew in bobbing rows along nearly every unmowed roadside in the county, punctuated with the intermittent purple-pink of sweet peas. Before they started to bloom a few weeks ago, Lusa had never noticed either one of these plants. The whole county was one big escaped flower garden.

  Crys yanked the head off one of the lilies as she mounted the bank. "Watch this." She rubbed its center against her chin before tossing the bedraggled flower on the ground.

  "Very nice. Now you've got an orange beard," Lusa observed.

  Crys attempted an evil grin, touchingly childish. "Like the devil."

  "You know what that is, that orange stuff? Pollen. You know what pollen is?"

  She shook her head.

  "Spe-erm." Lusa exaggerated the word thrillingly.

  "Eew, yuck." She wiped her chin fiercely.

  "Don't worry. It won't make you get pregnant and have flowers." She walked past her to the edge of the clearing where a stand of hickories had caught her eye. She began to search the trees' north sides systematically, moving deeper into the woods.

  Crys trailed along behind her at a little distance. "D'you think it's, like, going to hail?" she seemed to be asking.

  Lusa glanced up at the bits of sky she could see between trees. "No way. There aren't any rain clouds in the sky."

  "I'm talking about hail," the child insisted.

  Lusa moved deeper into the woods, scanning limbs and the undersides of leaves with a practiced eye. "It takes a big storm to bring hail. Why do you care, anyway? You don't have a crop in the ground."

  "Hail, I said!"

  There was enough frustration in her voice to bring Lusa out of her own thoughts and make her turn around. Crys had her feet planted and was glaring at her, aggravated.

  "What about hail?"

  "Hail!" the child said, frankly annoyed. "Where the devil's at."

  Lusa slowly turned over this mystery. "Are you asking me about hell?"

  The child shrugged. "Just forgit it."

  "Well, I'm sorry. I guess we kind of missed our moment there to talk about the afterlife." Crys had tromped ahead, yanking sassafras leaves off the bushes as she passed.

  "I'm just curious," Lusa said, catching up to her. "How do you tell the difference between 'hail' that falls from the sky and 'hail' where the devil is?"

  Crys stopped and looked up at her, stupefied. "Duh! They're spailed different!"

  "Oh," Lusa said. "Duh."

  Crys studied her for a moment. "Aunt Lusa, did you know you talk really funny?"

  "Yeah. It's starting to sink in."

  Lusa cajoled Crys into sparing the sassafras bushes and helping her look for a luna instead. "It will be the biggest green moth you can imagine. They're amazing." Crys seemed unwilling to believe in the possibility of finding magic, here or anywhere, but she did come running when Lusa finally let out a yelp and cried, "Oh, look, look, look!"

  "Where?"

  "Way up there--it's too high for us to get. Do you see it, though? Right in the crotch of that branch sticking out."

  Crys squinted, seeming less than impressed. "We could poke it with a stick."

  "You don't want to hurt it," Lusa argued, but she'd already had the same thought and was twisting a long, skinny limb off an oak sapling. She reached as high as she could, jumping a little, waving the switch like a broom to brush against the hickory trunk just below where the luna rested with its wings serenely folded. It twitched a little and took flight. They watched it dip and climb, dip and climb, high into the branches until it was gone.

  Lusa turned to Crys, her eyes shining. "That was a luna."

  Crys shrugged. "So?"

  "So? So what? You want it should sing, too?" Crys laughed, and Lusa felt a little startled. They took her by surprise, these moments when her zayda slipped right past her father's guard into her own tongue. "Come on, let's go look in the grass for things we can get our hands on." She led the way back to the grassy clearing on the bank above the road and flopped down in the center of it. She was content for a minute just to lean back on her elbows and look at the toes of her sneakers and past them, down through the enticing woods. She'd been cooped up in the house or weeding or mowing or checking the health of her goats for too many days. She ought to get herself into the woods more often. The grass in this clearing was a little damp--she could feel it soaking her shorts--but the sun felt so good. She closed her eyes and tilted her face toward the sky.

  "What's this one?"

  Lusa leaned over and looked closely at the shield-shaped green bug that Crys had coaxed onto her wrist. "Southern green stinkbug," Lusa pronounced.

  Crys studied it closely. "Does it stink?"


  "That's a matter of opinion."

  "Is it kin to that red and black one we found on the peach tree?"

  "The harlequin bug? Yes, it is, as a matter of fact. Same family, Pentatomidae." She looked at Crys, surprised. "That's very good. You have a really good eye for this, did you know that? You're a good observer, and you remember things well."

  Crys flicked the bug off her wrist and rolled over onto her stomach, looking away from Lusa. She parted the grass carefully with her hands, here and there, like an animal grooming its kin. Lusa left her alone, rolling over to study her own patch of grass. Crys eventually gave up the chase and lay on her back, staring into the treetops. After a while she declared, "You could cut down all these trees and make a pile of money."

  "I could," Lusa said. "Then I'd have a pile of money and no trees."

  "So? Who needs trees?"

  "About nineteen million bugs, for starters. They live in the leaves, under the bark, everywhere. Just close your eyes and point, and you're pointing at a bug."

  "So? Who needs nineteen million bugs?"

  "Nineteen thousand birds that eat them."

  "So? Who needs birds?"

  "I do. You do." She so often wondered whether Crys was really heartless or only trying to be. "Not to mention, the rain would run straight down the mountain and take all the topsoil off my fields. The creek would be pure mud. This place would be a dead place."

  Crys shrugged. "Trees grow back."

  "That's what you think. This forest took hundreds of years to get like this."

  "Like what?"

  "Just how it is, a whole complicated thing with parts that all need each other, like a living body. It's not just trees; it's different kinds of trees, all different sizes, in the right proportions. Every animal needs its own special plant to live on. And certain plants will only grow next to certain other kinds, did you know that?"

  "Sang only grows under a sugar maple tree."

  "What does? Ginseng? Where'd you learn that?"

  She shrugged again. "Uncle Joel."

  "So he's a sang digger, is he?"

  She nodded. "Him and his friends like to go up 'air on the mountain and dig it up. There's a lady up 'air hollers at 'em for it, too. You're not supposed to dig it up. He says she's prolly fixing to shoot his hide if she catches him one more time."