Prodigal Summer: A Novel

by Barbara Kingsolver

  "Good, because I'm near 'bout dead," she said, moving up quickly behind the doe to help shove down with all her weight on its haunches. Once they had it down, Lusa pushed the sweat and unruly hair out of her eyes with the back of one hand before filling the next syringe.

  He watched. "Want to swap heads and tails? My part's way easier than yours."

  Now he asks, she thought. "No, you're working twice as hard as I am," Lusa said, steeling her sore biceps for the next punch and poke. "I'm just a wimp."

  He waited respectfully while the needle went in, then spoke. "No way, you're doing great. I've never seen a woman sit on so many animals in one day."

  At Lusa's nod they got up and let the doe saunter off. "Know what I'm dying for?"

  "A cold beer?" he asked.

  "A bath. Pew!" She sniffed her forearms and made a face. "These girls don't smell pretty."

  "They don't," Rickie agreed. "And they are the girls."

  By the time they'd finished all the does and the buck, which they saved for last, Lusa could hardly tolerate the smell of her own body. She turned on the hose bib by the barn for Rickie and walked around to get the big square bar of soap that was down below in the milking parlor. Her mind drifted back to the coyote. It had been so beautiful and strange, almost ghostly. Like a little golden dog, but much wilder in its bearing. If she could find just one other person in this county who didn't feel the need to shoot a coyote on sight, that would be something. Then she'd have a friend.

  When she came back around the corner of the barn she walked straight into a spray of cold water that caused her to shriek. A direct hit by Rickie.

  "I'm going to kill you," she said, laughing, wiping her eyes.

  "It feels good," he said, running the water over his head.

  "OK, then, here. You go first." She tossed him the soap and they took turns lathering themselves up and hosing each other down, enjoying a gleeful, chaste, slightly hysterical bath in their clothes. Some of the goats came over and put their noses through the fence to watch this peculiar human rite.

  "I can't get over their eyes," Lusa said as Rickie turned off the hose. She bent over and shook her head like a wet dog, sending water drops flying into the golden light of late afternoon.

  "Who, the goats?" He'd thought to strip off his dark-red T-shirt before hosing down, to keep it dry, and now he used it as a towel to dry his face. Lusa wondered if the display of his body was as ingenuous as it seemed. He was seventeen. It was hard to say.

  "They have those weird pupils," she said. "Little slits, like a cat's, only sideways instead of up and down."

  He rubbed his head violently with the shirt. "Yep. Funny eyes." He combed his dark hair back on the sides with his hands. "Kindly like they're from another planet."

  Lusa studied the faces of her girls at the fence. "Kind of cute, though. Don't you think? They grow on you."

  "Oh, boy, she's getting sentimental about goats." He tossed Lusa his shirt. "You need to get out more."

  She dried her face and arms with the frankly male-scented shirt, suddenly recalling Rickie's description of her dancing through the pasture waving a buck-scented rag in front of the does. This world was one big sexual circus, or so it seemed to the deprived. She balled up his shirt and threw it back. "For this I owe you big-time, Rick. If I'd known how hard today was going to be, I might have chickened out, but you stuck with me to the bitter end. Can I write you a check for some gas money, for your trouble?"

  "No, ma'am, you don't owe me a thing," he said, polite as a schoolboy. "Neighbors and family don't take money."

  "Well, your neighbor and aunt thanks you kindly. I don't have the cold beer you're thirsty for, but I could give you some lemonade or iced tea before you go home."

  "Sweet tea would hit the spot," he said.

  A bird called loudly from up in her fallow pasture behind the house--a dramatic "Wow-wheet!" in a voice as powerful and self-important as an opera singer's.

  "I'll swan, listen to that," Rickie said, struck motionless where he stood toweling his shoulders. "That was a bobwhite."

  "Yeah?"

  "You don't hardly hear them anymore. I don't think I've heard one since I was a little kid."

  "Well, that's good," Lusa said, impressed that Rickie had noticed a bird, had even declared its name. "Welcome back, Mr. Bob White. I can always use another man on the place." She picked up the box of empty glass vials and walked slowly to the house, feeling the extent of exhaustion not only in her arms but also in her thighs and lower back. She was getting acquainted with these sensations in her body, to the point where she almost enjoyed the tingling, achy release of lactic acid in her muscles. It was the closest thing to sex in her life, she thought, and gave in to a sad little laugh.

  When she came back outside with the cold jar of tea and a glass, Rickie had put on his shirt and was sitting on the lawn, barefoot among the dandelions with his long legs stretched straight out in front of him. He'd taken off his shoes and for some reason set them on top of the cab of his pickup truck.

  "Here you go," she said, collapsing on the grass beside him, but facing him, to hand him the jar and glass. She'd considered changing out of her wet clothes, but the contrast of cool dampness and warm sun felt wonderful on her limbs. She probably looked like a drowned rat, but she didn't care. She felt a friendly intimacy with Rickie after their long afternoon of sitting on goats together. She stretched her legs beside his, in the opposite direction, so her feet were next to his hipbones. Sitting this way gave her a childhood feeling, as if they were on a seesaw together, or inside an invisible fort. He poured a glass of tea, handed it to her, then turned up the jar and drained it in one long, awe-inspiring draft. Watching his Adam's apple bob made her think of all those huge pills going down all those goat gullets. Teenaged boys were just a loose aggregation of appetites.

  He produced a pack of smokes from somewhere--he must have gotten them out of his truck while she was inside, Lusa guessed, since he was entirely wet and they were not. He tipped the pack at her, but she held up her hand.

  "You stay away from me, you devil. I've kicked that nasty habit."

  He lit up, nodding enthusiastically. "'At's good. I should, too." He snapped his wrist to extinguish the match. "I was thinking about what you said, that you didn't care if you saw thirty or not. Thing is, I really do. I figure it all gets better after high school."

  "It does," Lusa said. "Trust me. Barring a few rocks in the road, it's all uphill from high school." She thought about this, surprised by the truth of it. "I can vouch for that. Even depressed and widowed and a long way from home, I like my life right now better than I liked it in high school."

  "Is that so?"

  "I think so."

  "You like the country, then. You like farming. You were meant for it."

  "I guess that's true. It's weird, though. I was born into such a different life, with these scholarly parents, and I did the best I could with it. I raised caterpillars in shoeboxes and I studied bugs and agriculture in school for as many years as they'll let you. And then one day Cole Widener walked into my little house and blew the roof off, and here I am."

  Rickie nodded, brushing a fly away from his eyebrow. She had her back to the low-slung sun, but he was looking into it. His skin was the color of caramelized sugar against his red shirt, and his dark eyes glowed in the slanted light. She picked a dandelion and smoothed its furry yellow face. White sap bled from its stem onto her fingers. She tossed it away. "I was mad at him for dying and leaving me here, at first. Pissed off like you wouldn't believe. But now I'm starting to think he wasn't supposed to be my whole life, he was just this doorway to me. I'm so grateful to him for that."

  Rickie smoked in silence, squinting into the distance. Lusa didn't mind whether he spoke or not, or whether he even understood. Rickie would just let her talk, anytime, about anything. It made him seem older than he was.

  "Did I tell you my parents are coming to visit?" she asked brightly. "Right before classes start in
the fall, when my dad has a week off."

  He looked at her. "That's good. You don't see much of your folks, do you?"

  "I really don't. It's like a state occasion; my mother doesn't travel very well since she had her stroke. She gets confused. But Dad says she's doing better--she's started on a new medicine, and she's walking better. If she can do the stairs, I'm going to try to talk him into leaving her here for a while. For a real visit. I miss my mother."

  He nodded absently. He had no earthly understanding of what it would feel like, Lusa realized, to be anything but completely surrounded and smothered by family.

  They heard the bobwhite again, declaring his name from the hillside. Lusa heard it not so much as "Bob White" but more like a confident "All right," with a rising inflection at the end, as if this were just the beginning of a long sentence he meant to say. She loved that he was there on her fallow pasture: he was not himself her property but rather a sort of tenant, depending on her for continued goodwill. In all her troubles she had never yet stopped to consider her new position: landholder. Not just a mortage holder, not just burdened, but also blessed with a piece of the world's trust. The condition forbidden to her zayda's people for more than a thousand years.

  After a decent interval, long enough to permit a change of subject, Rickie asked, "You're not worried about that coyote?"

  "Am I?" She drank half her glass of tea before answering. "You'll just think this is crazy, but no, I'm not. I mean maybe, at the worst, it could get one kid, and that wouldn't break me. I can't see killing a thing that beautiful just on suspicion. I'll go with innocent until proven guilty."

  "You may change your tune when you see it running off into the woods with that poor little kid squalling bloody murder."

  Lusa smiled, struck by his language. "Listen, can I tell you a story? In Palestine, where my people came from, about a million years ago, they had this tradition of sacrificing goats. To God, theoretically, but I think probably they ate them after the ceremony." She set her glass down, twisting it into the grass. "So, here's the thing. They'd always let one goat escape and run off into the desert. The scapegoat. It was supposed to be carrying off all their sins and mistakes from that year."

  Rickie looked amused. "And the moral of the story is what?"

  She laughed. "I'm not sure. What do you think?"

  "It's OK to let one get away?"

  "Yeah, something like that. I'm not such a perfect farmer that I can kill a coyote for the one kid it might take from me. There are ten other ways I could lose a goat through my own stupidity. And I'm not about to kill myself. So. Does that make sense?"

  He nodded thoughtfully. "If you say it does, I reckon it does." He went quiet, smiling to himself, admiring something off in the distance behind her back. Lusa hoped it was the butterflies in her weed patch down below the yard, though she knew enough of young men's minds to know that wasn't likely. She bent her knees, took hold of her clammy feet, and pulled off her shoes, realizing suddenly that wet sneakers were a wretched proposition. That would explain his sneakers on top of his truck.

  "You've got pretty feet," he observed.

  She stretched her legs out straight again and looked at her water-wrinkled toes, then up at him. "Oh, boy. You should get out more."

  He laughed. "Yeah, well. I have a confession to make. I think you look pretty sitting on the rear end of a goat, too. I've had the biggest crush on you all summer."

  Lusa bit her lips to keep from smiling. "I kind of gathered that."

  "I know. You think it's stupid."

  "What's stupid?"

  He reached over and brushed the damp hair out of her eyes, softly grazing the side of her face with his knuckles. "This. Me thinking about you this way. You don't know how much I think about it, either."

  "I think I may," she said. "It's not stupid. It scares me, though."

  He kept his hand against the side of her neck and said quietly, "I wouldn't hurt you for anything," and Lusa was terrified, feeling suddenly every nerve ending in her breasts and her lips. It would be so easy to invite him into the house, upstairs, to the huge, soft bed in which his grandparents had probably conceived his mother. How comforting it would be to be taken away from her solitary self and held against his solid, lovely body. His hands would become Cole's. Just for an hour the starvation that dogged her through every night and day could feast on real sensation instead of memory. Real taste, real touch, the pressure of skin on nipple and tongue. She shivered.

  "I can't even talk about this."

  "Why not?" he asked, dropping his hand to her knees. He ran his fingers down the inseam of her wet jeans from knee to hem, then clasped his whole hand gently around her bare ankle. She remembered, with acute pain, the sense of small, compact perfection she'd known inside her husband's large-limbed embrace. She looked at his hand on her ankle, then back at his face, trying to forge pain into anger.

  "Do I really have to tell you why not?"

  He held her eye. "Tell me you don't want me to make love to you."

  "God," she gasped, turning her head to the side with her speechless mouth open wide, scarcely able to breathe. Where had he learned to talk like that, the movies? She shook her head slowly from side to side, unable to keep her open mouth from smiling because of his face, his earnest determination to have her. She remembered how that felt, obsessive desire. Oh, God, those days in her Euclid apartment. There was no engine on earth whose power compared with the want of one body for another.

  "That's not a fair question," she said finally. "I would want you to, yes, if that were possible. I think I'd like it a lot. That's the truth, may lightning strike me dead, but now you know. Does it make anything better?"

  "To me it does. Damn!" He grinned a crooked smile she'd never seen except on the face of Cole Widener, in bed. "To me it's sweet. It's like getting an A on a test."

  She took his hand from her ankle, kissed his knuckles briskly like a mother repairing a child's hurt, then let the hand drop into the grass. "OK, good. You made the grade. Can we move on to another subject now?"

  "Like what? Like throwing a mattress in the back of my truck and heading for the river tonight?"

  "You're incorrigible."

  "Which means what, exactly?"

  "Which means you're seventeen going on eighteen and you've got hormones between your ears."

  "I might be that," he said. "I might be a lot of fun, too. You'll never know till you try."

  She sat with her arms tightly crossed, wishing she had bothered to change her clothes. "Drowned rat" was not the impression she was making in this wet shirt, evidently. He would be so appreciative, she thought miserably. It would be so easy to startle him with pleasures he'd remember for the rest of his life. But then again, maybe not, if he'd already set his standards by the magazines under his bed. Boys never knew what they lost on those magazine girlfriends.

  "I'll never know, then," she said, feeling a change in herself, a permanent shift onto safer ground. "I'm not denying it would be fun, maybe even more than fun. But it's completely out of the question, and if it comes up again I'll have to stop being your friend. I'm sorry I confessed I was attracted to you. You should just try to forget that."

  He looked at her with a neutral expression and nodded slowly. "Right," he said. "Fat chance."

  "Look. Don't take this the wrong way, Rickie, I like you for you, but also sometimes you remind me of Cole in ways that make me lose my bearings. But you're not Cole. You're my nephew. We're relatives."

  "We're not blood kin," he argued.

  "But we're family, and you know it. And, you're a minor. Just technically, for another few months maybe, but you are. I'm pretty sure what you're proposing would be a crime. Committed by me, against you. If they have capital punishment in this state, your mother and your aunts would probably see that I got the chair."

  He closed his eyes and said nothing. He seemed chastened, finally, by all of it: her tone, her words, the truth. Lusa felt both relieved and sad.


  "I'm sorry to be so blunt," she said. "I don't think of you as a child. You know that, right? If we were both two years older and you were somebody I'd just met, I'd probably go out with you."

  He lit another cigarette and gave his full attention to the business of smoking and staring off into the distance. At length he said, "I'll be sure to remind you of that two years from now when you're burning heavy with some guy around here."

  Lusa worked a small stone out of the ground and tossed it past her feet. "I can't even picture that, you know? From where I stand, it looks like a real dry county."

  "Well, you're not the Lone Ranger. All the girls at my school are hot to get pregnant and married so they can play house, but they seem like little girls. After I graduate I want to do something, like hitchhike to Florida and get a job on a fishing boat or something, you know? See what those palm-tree islands look like. And these girls with their big hair are all down at Kmart looking at the baby shoes going, 'Aren't these cute?' They're like cheerleaders for boringness."

  Lusa laughed. "And you and me, we're different, right? Two noble souls cast together in dubious circumstances till we can find somebody halfway appropriate to go out with."

  He nodded, grinning that damned lopsided grin. "That sounds about right."

  "Frankly, your prospects are better than mine. By the time my goats up here drop their kids, I predict you'll have met the girl of your dreams, and I'll be toast."

  "Don't bet on it."

  "I'll dance at your wedding, Rick. I'm betting on it."

  "I didn't get to dance at yours," he said. "You didn't invite me."

  "Next time I will," she said. "I promise. That was a big mistake, you know? Don't ever elope. The relatives never forgive you."

  "Relatives," he agreed. "What a pain."

  "Thank you." She looked at him then, hit by a sudden inspiration. "You know what we need to do, you and me? We need to go dancing. Do you like to dance?"

  He nodded. "Yeah. As a matter of fact, I do."

  "That's exactly what we need to do. Is there someplace around here where they have music on a Saturday night?"

  "Oh, sure, there's the college bar over in Franklin, Skid Row. Or we could drive over to Leesport. Cotton-Eye Joe's, they get good country bands in there." He was taking this proposal seriously.