The Bean Trees

by Barbara Kingsolver

  I felt numb, as if I had taken some drug. "And you picked the lives of those seventeen people over getting your daughter back?" I said. "Or at least a chance at getting her back?"

  "What would you do, Taylor?"

  "I don't know. I hate to say it, but I really don't know. I can't even begin to think about a world where people have to make choices like that."

  "You live in that world," he said quietly, and I knew this, but I didn't want to. I started to cry then, just tears streaming out all over and no stopping them. Estevan put his arm around me and I sobbed against his shoulder. The dam had really broken.

  I was embarrassed. "I'm going to get snot on your clean shirt," I said.

  "I don't know what it is, snot."

  "Good," I said.

  There was no way on earth I could explain what I felt, that my whole life had been running along on dumb luck and I hadn't even noticed.

  "For me, even bad luck brings good things," I told him finally. "I threw out a rocker arm on my car and I got Turtle. I drove over broken glass on an off ramp and found Mattie." I crossed my arms tightly over my stomach, trying to stop myself from gulping air. "Do you know, I spent the first half of my life avoiding motherhood and tires, and now I'm counting them as blessings?"

  Turtle showed up in the doorway again. I don't know how long she had been there, but she was looking at me with eyes I hadn't seen on her since that night on the Oklahoma plain.

  "Come here, pumpkin," I said. "I'm okay, just sprung a leak, don't you worry. Do you want a drink of water?" She shook her head. "Just want to cuddle a few minutes?" She nodded, and I took her on my lap. Snowboots jumped onto the sofa again. I could feel the weight of him moving slowly across the back and down the other arm, and from there he curled into Estevan's lap. In less than a minute Turtle was asleep in my arms.

  When I was a child I had a set of paper dolls. They were called the Family of Dolls, and each one had a name written on the cardboard base under the feet. Their names were Mom, Dad, Sis, and Junior. I played with those dolls in a desperate, loving way until their paper arms and heads disintegrated. I loved them in spite of the fact that their tight-knit little circle was as far beyond my reach as the football players' and cheerleaders' circle would be in later years.

  But that night I looked at the four of us there on the sofa and my heart hurt and I thought: in a different world we could have been the Family of Dolls.

  Turtle wiggled. "No," she said, before she was even awake.

  "Yes," I said. "Time for bed." I carried her in and tucked her under the sheet, prying her hand off my T-shirt and attaching it to her yellow stuffed bear, which had a pink velvet heart sewed onto its chest.

  "Sleep tight, don't let the potato bugs bite."

  "Tato bite," she said.

  When I came back Snowboots had moved from Estevan's lap and curled into the little depression where I had been. I sat in the space between them with my feet tucked under me. I no longer felt self-conscious, though I could feel almost a pull, like a flow of warm water, at the point where our knees touched.

  "It seems like, if you get to know them well enough, everybody has had something awful happen to them. All this time I've been moping around because of having the responsibility of Turtle forced on me, and now I feel guilty."

  "That responsibility is terrible if you don't want it."

  "Oh, big deal. The exact same thing happened to about sixty percent of the girls in my high school, if not the whole world."

  "If you look at it that way," he said. He was falling asleep.

  "I guess that's just the way the world has got to go around. If people really gave it full consideration, I mean, like if you could return a baby after thirty days' examination like one of those Time-Life books, then I figure the entire human species would go extinct in a month's time."

  "Some people wouldn't send them back," he said. "I would have kept Ismene." His eyes were closed.

  "Did you get up in the middle of the night to do the feeding and diapering?"

  "No," he said, smiling a little.

  "I can't believe I'm even asking you that. Does it hurt you a lot to talk about Ismene?"

  "At first, but not so much now. What helps me the most is to know her life is going on somewhere, with someone. To know she is growing up."

  "Sure," I said, but I knew there was another side to this, too. Where she was growing up, what they would raise her to be. I thought of Turtle being raised by Virgie Mae Parsons, learning to look down her nose and wear little hats, and then I got it mixed up with police uniforms. A little later I realized I had been asleep. We both rolled in and out of sleep in a friendly way. You can't be nervous if you're sleeping on the same sofa with somebody, I thought. Letting your mouth fall open any old way.

  Snowboots jumped off the sofa. I heard his claws scratch the carpet as he covered up his sins.

  "Why did they call you Nutters?" I remember Estevan asking at some point. I thought and thought about it, trying to fight my way out of some dream where Turtle and I were trying to get to the other side of a long, flat field. We had to follow the telephone wires to get to civilization.

  "Nutters," I said finally. "Oh, because of walnuts. In the fall, the kids that lived in the country would pick walnuts to earn money for school clothes."

  "Did you have to climb the trees?" Estevan amazed me. That he would be interested in details like that.

  "No. Basically you waited till they fell, and then picked them up off the ground. The worst part was that to get the hulls off you'd have to put them in the road for cars to run over, and then you'd pick the nuts out of the mess. It stained your hands black, and then you were marked. That was the worst part, to go to school with black hands and black fingernails. That was proof positive you were a Nutter."

  "But otherwise you would have no new clothes."

  "Right. So you were damned if you didn't and damned if you did. I guess the ideal thing," I conjectured, half dreaming, "would have been to get clothes with good, deep pockets." I meant so that you could hide your hands, but I had a picture in my mind of skirts and trousers with pockets full of pounds and pounds of walnuts. Ten cents a pound is what we got for them. A hundred and fifty pounds equaled one pair of Levi's.

  Later I woke up again, feeling the pressure of Snowboots's feet walking down my leg, then hearing them thump on the floor. Estevan and I were curled like spoons on the sofa, his knees against the backs of my knees and his left hand on my ribs, just under my breast. When I put my hand on top of his I could feel my heart beating under his fingers.

  I thought of Esperanza, her braids on her shoulders. Esperanza staring at the ceiling. She would be lying on a cot somewhere, sweating the poison out of her system. Probably they had given her syrup of ipecac, which makes you keep throwing up until you can feel the sides of your stomach banging together. All of Esperanza's hurts flamed up in my mind, a huge pile of burning things that the world just kept throwing more onto. Somewhere in that pile was a child that looked just like Turtle. I lifted Estevan's hand from my ribcage and kissed his palm. It felt warm. Then I slid off the sofa and went to my own bed.

  Moonlight was pouring in through the bedroom window like a watery version of my mother's potato soup. Moon soup, I thought, hugging myself under the covers. Somewhere in the neighborhood a cat yowled like a baby, and somewhere else, closer by, a rooster crowed, even though it was nowhere near daybreak.

  TEN

  The Bean Trees

  Even a spotted pig looks black at night. This is another thing Mama used to tell me quite often. It means that things always look different, and usually better, in the morning.

  And they did. Mattie called first thing to say that Esperanza was going to be all right. They hadn't pumped her stomach after all because she hadn't taken enough to do much harm. I made Estevan a big breakfast, eggs scrambled with tomatoes and peppers and green chile sauce, and sent him home before I could start falling in love with him again over the breakfast dishes. Turtle
woke up in one of those sweet, eye-rubbing moods that kids must know by instinct as a means of saving the human species from extinction. Lou Ann came home from the Ruiz family reunion singing "La Bamba."

  It's surprising, considering Roosevelt Park, but we always heard birds in the morning. There must be transients in the bird world too, rumple-feathered outcasts that naturally seek out each other's company in inferior and dying trees. In any case, there were lots of them. There was a type of woodpecker that said, "Ha, ha, ha, to hell with you!" I swear it did. And another one, a little pigeony-looking bird, said, "Hip hip hurroo." Lou Ann insisted that it was saying "Who Cooks for Who?" She said she had read it in a magazine. I had a hard time imagining what kind of magazine would go into something like that, but I wasn't about to argue. It was the first time I could remember her hanging on to her own opinion about something--Lou Ann not normally being inclined in that direction. One time in a restaurant, she'd once told me, a waiter mistakenly brought her somebody else's dinner and she just ate it, rather than make trouble. It was beef shingles on toast.

  Gradually Lou Ann and I were changing the house around, filling in the empty spaces left behind by Angel with ABC books and high chairs and diaper totes and all manner of toys, all larger than a golf ball. I had bought Turtle a real bed, junior size, from New To You. We turned the screen porch in the back into a playroom for the kids, not that Dwayne Ray did any serious playing yet, but he liked to sit out there strapped in his car seat watching Turtle plant her cars in flowerpots. The fire engine she called "domato," whereas the orange car was "carrot." Or sometimes she called it "Two-Two," which is what I had named my Volkswagen, after the man who profited from my rocker arm disaster.

  I had considered putting Turtle's bed out there on the porch too, but Lou Ann said it wouldn't be safe, that someone might come along and slash the screen and kidnap her before you could say Jack Robinson. I never would have thought of that.

  But it didn't matter. The house was old and roomy; there was plenty of space for Turtle's bed in my room. It was the type of house they called a "rambling bungalow" (the term reminded me somehow of Elvis Presley movies), with wainscoting and steam radiators and about fifty coats of paint on the door frames, so that you could use your thumbnail to scrape out a history of all the house's tenants as far back as the sixties, when people were fond of painting their woodwork apple green and royal blue. The ceilings were so high you just learned to live with the cobwebs.

  It wasn't unreasonably hot yet, and the kids were bouncing around the house like superballs (this was mainly Turtle, with Dwayne Ray's participation being mainly vocal), so we took them out to sit under the arbor for a while. The wisteria vines were a week or two past full bloom, but the bees and the perfume still hung thick in the air overhead, giving it a sweet purplish hue. If you ignored the rest of the park, you could imagine this was a special little heaven for people who had lived their whole lives without fear of bees.

  Lou Ann was full of gossip from her weekend with the Ruiz cousins. Apparently most of them spoke English, all the men were good-looking and loved to dance, and all the women had children Dwayne Ray's age. She had about decided that every single one of them was nicer than Angel, a conclusion to which they all heartily agreed, even Angel's mother. A large portion of the flock were preparing to move to San Diego.

  "I can't believe it," she said, "first Manny and Ramona, you remember, the friends I told you about that saw the meteor shower? And now two of Angel's brothers and their wives and kids. You'd think they'd discovered gold out there. Angel used to always talk about moving to California too, but I'll tell you this right now, Mama would have had an apoplectic. She thinks in California they sell marijuana in the produce section of the grocery store."

  "Maybe they do. Maybe that's why everybody wants to live there."

  "Not me," Lou Ann said. "Not for a million, and I'll tell you why, too. In about another year they're due to have the biggest earthquake in history. I read about it someplace. They say all of San Diego might just end up in the ocean, like noodle soup."

  "I guess the sharks will be happy," I said.

  "Taylor, I swear! These are my relatives you're talking about."

  "Angel's relatives," I said. "You're practically divorced."

  "Not to hear them tell it," Lou Ann said.

  Turtle was staring up at the wisteria flowers. "Beans," she said, pointing.

  "Bees," I said. "Those things that go bzzzz are bees."

  "They sting," Lou Ann pointed out.

  But Turtle shook her head. "Bean trees," she said, as plainly as if she had been thinking about it all day. We looked where she was pointing. Some of the wisteria flowers had gone to seed, and all these wonderful long green pods hung down from the branches. They looked as much like beans as anything you'd ever care to eat.

  "Will you look at that," I said. It was another miracle. The flower trees were turning into bean trees.

  On the way home Lou Ann went to the corner to buy a newspaper. She was seriously job-hunting now, and had applied at a couple of nursery schools, though I could just hear how Lou Ann would ask for a job: "Really, ma'am, I could understand why you wouldn't want to hire a dumb old thing such as myself."

  Turtle and I walked the other way, since we needed to stop in at the Lee Sing Market for eggs and milk. Lou Ann refused to set foot in there these days, saying that Lee Sing always gave her the evil eye. Lou Ann's theory was that she was mad at her for having had Dwayne Ray instead of a girl, going against some supposedly foolproof Chinese method of prediction. My theory was that Lou Ann suffered from the same disease as Snowboots: feeling guilty for things beyond your wildest imagination.

  In any case, today Lee Sing was nowhere to be seen. She often went back to check on her famous century-old mother, the source of Mattie's purple beans, whom neither Lou Ann nor I had ever laid eyes on, though not for lack of curiosity. According to Mattie no one had sighted her for years, but you always had the feeling she was back there.

  Lee Sing had left her usual sign by the cash register: BE BACK ONE MINUTE, PLEASE DO NO STEAL ANY THING. LEE SING. I spotted Edna Poppy in paper goods, the next aisle over from the dairy case. As best I could see, Edna was sniffing different brands of toilet tissue.

  "Edna! Miss Poppy!" I called out. When I needed to call her by name I generally hedged my bets and used both first and last. Her head popped up and she seemed confused, looking all around.

  "It's me, Taylor. Over here." I came around into the aisle where she had parked her cart. "Where's Mrs. Parsons today?" I stopped dead in my tracks. Edna had a white cane.

  "Virgie is ill in bed with a croup, I'm sorry to say. She sent me out to get fresh lemons and a drop of whiskey. And of course a few other unmentionables." She smiled, dropping a package of orange toilet paper into the cart. "Can you tell me, dear, if these are lemons or limes I have?" She ran her hand over her goods and held up a lopsided plastic bag of yellow fruits.

  Edna Poppy was blind. I stood for a minute staring, trying to reorganize things in my mind the way you would rearrange a roomful of furniture. Edna buying all her clothes in one color, ever since age sixteen. Virgie's grip on her elbow. I remembered the fantasy I'd constructed the day of our dinner party: Edna happily discovering red bobby pins in the drugstore. I'd had it completely wrong. It would have been Virgie Mae who found them, plucked them down off the rack of Oreo-cookie barrettes, and purchased them for her friend.

  "Are you with me, dear?"

  "I'm sorry," I said. "Lemons. They're kind of small, but they look just fine."

  When I got home I asked Lou Ann if she knew. She insisted I was making the whole thing up. "Is this a joke?" she kept asking. "Because if it is, it's a sick one."

  "It's not a joke. She had a white cane. She asked me if what she had was lemons or limes. Think about it, the way she kind of looks over your head when she talks. The way Virgie leads her around. How Virgie always says everybody's name when the two of them come into a room."


  Lou Ann was horrified. "Oh my God," she said. "Oh my merciful heavens, I feel about this big. When I think about all the times I've just bounced over there and said, 'See ya this! See ya that! Thanks for keeping an eye on Dwayne Ray.'"

  "I don't think she'd mind. Her eyes are her hands. And virgie. She has her own special ways of keeping an eye on things," I told Lou Ann, and this seemed to make her feel better.

  On Monday afternoon I asked if it would be okay if I went up to see Esperanza. I had never been upstairs at Mattie's and for some reason I felt it was off limits, but she said fine, to go on up. I went through the cramped study, which of course was still piled high with Mattie's dead husband's magazines (I knew by now that he had been dead many years, so it seemed unlikely that his mess would clear up any time soon) and on up the staircase into Mattie's living room.

  It had the same crowded, higgledy-piggledy look as the office downstairs, though the stuff here had more to do with everyday living: junk mail, bills, pencils, magazines with color pictures of people like Tom Selleck and the President (not Jesus), a folded newspaper with a half-worked crossword puzzle, the occasional pliers or screwdriver. It was the type of flotsam and jetsam (a pair of words I had just learned from the dictionary) that washes up on your coffee table, lies around for a week or so, and then makes way for whatever comes in on the next tide.

  Every surface was covered: tables, chairs, walls. Over the fireplace there was a big cross made up of hundreds of small, brightly glazed pieces of tile, each one shaped like something: a boy, a dog, a house, a palm tree, a bright blue fish. Together they all added up to a cross. I had never seen anything like it.

  The wall across from the fireplace was covered with pictures of every imaginable size and shape. There were snapshots of people squinting into the sun, a few studio portraits of children, pictures of Mattie flanked by other people, all of them dark and shorter than herself. There were a number of children's drawings. I remembered Mattie telling me when we'd first met that she had "something like" grandchildren around, how that had struck me as such a peculiar thing to say.