Prodigal Summer

by Barbara Kingsolver

  Garnett would like to tell her a thing or two about God’s plan. That the creatures of this earth came to pass and sometimes passed on. That these matters were not ours to control if we were, as she claimed, merely one more species among our brethren, the animals. And if we were not the equal of animals, if we were meant instead to be masters and keepers of Eden, as the Bible said, then “lizards” were put here for a man to go bass fishing with, and that was that. She couldn’t have it both ways. It was all quite clear to Garnett. Yet his logic always cowered before her curt and snappy replies. He had actually thought, once or twice, of writing her a letter.

  He drove past the Pentecostal church, which had a spindly clump of joe-pye weed sprouting up in its parking lot. Oho! Too busy speaking in tongues and throwing babies to get out and weed their parking lot. Garnett smiled, feeling secure in his understanding of what God’s word did and did not mean to suggest. He felt a slight press of guilt, then, as he steered his truck onto Maple. He ought to tell Miss Rawley about those shingles in his garage. If only she were the least bit reasonable.

  There was the bank, there was the Esso. He was in town now. There was Les Pratt, who’d taught math at the high school when Garnett taught vocational agriculture. He waved, but Les was on the wrong side of the street. There was Dennis Grandy’s wife with all those children, who weren’t exactly dirty but never seemed quite clean.

  And there was Nannie Rawley! Her truck, anyway. Dear merciful heavens, could he not get away from her for at least one pleasant trip into town? That woman was stubborn as cockleburs and a rash of poison ivy.

  He slowed down to get a better look. It was her truck, parked in the Baptist church lot, where they let the Amish set up their farmers’ market on Saturdays. This was Friday, though. Yet it was them, all right, the Amish children in their sober black dresses and trousers, politely selling their produce. He didn’t see Nannie. He would maneuver his truck around the block and come back for a second look.

  Were there so many Amish now that they had to have markets on Saturdays and Fridays? They were a burgeoning people, that much he knew. They’d taken over a long row of farms on the other side of the river, he’d noticed last year. How were they managing so nicely, when every other farmer in the county was selling off his hayfields for house lots and looking for factory work? Well, the Amish weren’t in debt up to their ears on chemicals and equipment—which gave them an unfair advantage, Garnett supposed. Oh! He missed a stop sign, then slammed on the brakes a hair too late, but it was all right: the car got around him. For quite a while he’d wondered about those farms along the river, which were unreachable by car and accessible only by swinging bridges—long, narrow ones made of planks with just cables for handrails. It would take some courage to cross that gorge every day. He’d wondered how on earth a man would get his television or his wife’s refrigerator over there, or even a tractor, to a farm like that. Then Les Pratt had told him the answer in a single word: Amish.

  He rounded the corner and took another look at the Amish market. It was tempting to stop. He used to go nearly every Saturday before Nannie started showing up there with her apples or, in the early season, like now, her apple-blossom honey and basil-dasil and whatnot for sale. Evidently you didn’t have to be Amish; they shared the space with Nannie and a handful of other farmers from the upper end of the county. The only rule was that everything had to be organic. The Amish didn’t use any poisons, which seemed all right to Garnett if it was a religious matter. But Nannie’s presence among them had settled it: he couldn’t set foot in the place once she became a part of it, for now it was Organic, capital O, with its placid, irritating sense of holier-than-thou. So! No more stopping by on Saturday mornings to buy a delicious fresh pie and stand among these innocent youngsters with their neat stacks of vegetables, preserves, and rabbits. He missed them, he realized sadly, recognizing the same small ache that came when he thought of his boy’s face in innocent childhood—his own son barefoot with a fishing pole, the terrible mistakes all lying ahead of him still. Garnett missed hearing the Amish children count out his change in an accent that seemed vaguely foreign while he covertly looked at their feet, which were thickly callused, for they wore no shoes all summer long. He knew the Amish didn’t send their children to school, and technically he disapproved of what they called godly simplicity (actually simple backwardness). Yet he had a soft spot for those boys and girls. He wondered why the adults sent the children to town to do their selling. Were the adults elsewhere in town on other business, making the small, spare purchases they must surely need to make? (A rake, some kerosene, something like that, he imagined.) Did they feel the children would make better emissaries for representing their kind? Was it a play for sympathy? It seemed to run against their habit of isolation, Garnett thought. Letting these children come into town to watch other families pile out of station wagons, to see other children play with radios or the electronic thingamajigs they all carried in their pockets now while their mothers idly handled the melons—what were those Amish children learning to want, that they could never have?

  Half a block up from the market he slowed and pulled his truck into a parking spot on the side of the street. He sat for a while, considering his alternatives. He could go and buy a pie. They had the most wonderful pies. Apple, cherry, and something they called shoofly. But where in heaven’s name was Nannie Rawley? Her truck was there, and in front of it was a table with her kinds of things, the frills she’d gotten into when apples were out of season: lemon basil, lavender sachets, dried flowers—the sorts of things he considered so unnecessary that it embarrassed him to look at them. Where was she?

  He would walk down to the end of the block and do his errands at Little Brothers’, he decided. On the walk back, if the coast was clear, he would buy a pie. He would try to find one particular boy he remembered, with the stiff Dutch-boy haircut and the rabbits in a cage. He’d chatted with that young fellow and given him some advice about poultry. Ezra, that boy was. Or Ezekiel? Garnett mounted the concrete steps to Little Brothers’ with a light and steady heart, but things did not go well from that point on. Right on the threshold where Dink Little greeted him by name, he realized he’d forgotten his list. He patted his shirt pocket, ready to whip it out with a flourish in answer to Dink’s predictable “What’ challneed deday?” Then he patted his other pocket. But he’d changed his shirt, of course.

  “I just need to look around a minute, Dink,” Garnett replied, feeling sure he could quickly reconstruct his list as soon as he saw one of the items on the shelf. But he saw nothing he needed here. The musty, high-ceilinged store suddenly seemed more like an attic than a place of commerce: tall stacks of galvanized buckets leaned this way and that, mops leaned lazily against shelves full of floor polish. Stacks of green work gloves reached out toward him like a host of dismembered hands. He staggered sideways around a display of lawn mowers on sale and bumped his head on the sign above them that was so large and colorful it gave him a headache even without his reading it ( JUNE MOWER SALE 10 OFF ALL BRANDS! TORO! GREEN MACHINE! SNAPPER! JOHN DEERE!). Garnett felt so rattled he could hardly stand up. He set his sights on a wheelbarrow down at the end of an aisle and headed for it just to get himself away from the door and the register, out of sight, where he could think.

  If he took his time he would remember. Weed killer, of course! Roundup, one-gallon concentrate. He almost laughed aloud. It was coming back: Roundup, malathion, and paint markers for the trees, which he really shouldn’t buy; he had some in the barn.

  “Now does it sound like more of a whine, or more of a buzz? Because when the gearing pops out of whack, hit’ll do that on you.” One of the brothers up at the register was chatting with a customer. That would be Big, or Marshall. Dink always stayed by the door.

  “What I’m saying is I didn’t even hear it,” the customer argued. “I turned my back and it ran off down the hill.”

  Weed killer and malathion. He spied a bottle of malathion on a shelf midway down the
aisle past the galvanized buckets. Even though it was a spray bottle and not the size he needed, he walked over and seized it for courage. He was an old man lost in a hardware store, missing the fine print on all he surveyed; he needed to arm himself. What else had been on that list?

  “They don’t make them any bigger than that, or any meaner. Just a monster, and you’ll have to take my word for it,” the customer said.

  “Well, Big here’s the expert on big,” said Marshall.

  “Now, you boys aren’t listening to me,” the voice said coyly.

  The brothers were laughing to beat the band, but Garnett’s heart skipped a beat. He knew that voice. Good Lord in Heaven, was he meant to suffer like Job? It was Nannie Rawley.

  Garnett stood next to the wheelbarrow at the end of the aisle, listening. How could she be here when she’d been down the street selling froufrou at the Amish market ten minutes ago? Was she one of those Unitarian witches, whizzing around Egg Fork on a broomstick? He leaned forward and peered around a stack of galvanized buckets, looking for an escape path. He could just leave, go home, get his list, and come back in half an hour. There would still be time for fish dinner afterward. Pinkie’s stayed open till four.

  But there was no way out. The register was near the front door, and that was where she was, holding court, making her ridiculous small talk with Dink, Big, and Marshall. He nearly covered his ears, so unbearable was that voice to him. However entertaining it might be proving at the moment to the indolent Little brothers. They were laughing like a pack of hyenas.

  “Not a snapper!” one of them cried.

  “Yes, a snapper,” she replied, sounding both indignant and amused.

  Garnett sat down in the wheelbarrow and held his head in his hands. This was too much to bear. This was beyond even what he expected of Nannie Rawley, whose sole claim on any kind of decency was that she was generally not a rumormonger.

  “Law, I think I’da had to seen that to believe it,” said Marshall, practically doubled over with amusement.

  How could she do this to Garnett, her own good neighbor? How dared she ridicule him in public over that business with the snapping turtle? When the whole thing had been her fault!

  “It was her fault,” he said faintly, much too faintly to be heard, from his undignified post in the wheelbarrow. “Her weeds.”

  They were still braying like donkeys as they rang up her purchases—did it take all three Littles to ring up a blessed purchase? They were acting like schoolboys, making over her as if she were some beauty queen instead of a backbiting hag in a calico skirt. She had this whole town under her spell. Now she was asking for their advice about roofing compounds! Was there to be no end to this torment? Apparently she meant to stand there flirting all day, until Pinkie’s Diner closed and the chickens went home to roost.

  Garnett was going to have to march past them. This became clear. Suddenly all he could do was picture himself safely home at his kitchen table reading the farm news in the paper. That was where he wanted to be, more desperately than he desired any love or grace on this earth or beyond it: home. He wouldn’t even go to Pinkie’s. There was no point now. It was all-you-can-eat, and he’d lost his appetite.

  Garnett stood tall and marched toward the door, holding his spray bottle of malathion in front of him to clear the path. They turned to stare as he stalked wordlessly and with great dignity past the counter.

  “Why, Mr. Walker!” she cried.

  Well howdy-do to you, he thought. There you are, caught in your tracks, you old biddy, you and your gossipmongering friends. Let your sins keep you awake at night. He nearly knocked his head a second time on the June Mower Sale sign but remembered to duck—praise Jesus!—in the nick of time.

  He found his truck and was two blocks down the street past the Amish market before his heart stopped pounding in his ears. And he was beyond Black Store, halfway up Route 6 to his house, somewhere in front of Nannie Rawley’s farm frontage, when it occurred to him that her lawn mower was a Snapper. Her mower that he knew had been giving her trouble, which she’d purchased at Little Brothers’. A Snapper.

  He was parked in his own driveway before he realized he had shoplifted a bottle of malathion.

  {10}

  Moth Love

  Swallows looped and dived inside the barn, swooping from their nests in the rafters overhead toward the doorway and out into the bright-purple evening, where the low sun glinted off their streamlined, back-curved wings. They were like little fighter planes, angry at any intrusion, expressing their ire in motion like bullets. Every evening Lusa came into the barn to milk, and every evening the swallows responded this way. Like some people, she thought: short on sense, long on ambition. Sunset canceled all previous gains, and the world was good for a fresh fight every day.

  Her thoughts trailed off into a kind of trance as she milked and watched the barn swallows make their repetitious oval flights out over the flat surface of the pond, which the sunset had laminated with gold leaf. Suddenly she jumped, startling the cow. Little Rickie was standing in the doorway, all six and a half feet of him.

  “Hey, Rickie. How’s it going?” He ambled toward the stanchion where she sat on a stool working the udder to its end. Down here in the cellar of the barn where the stalls were, the roof was low. Little Rickie’s head nearly touched the rafters.

  “Good, I reckon.”

  “Well, good. How’s your family?”

  Rickie cleared his throat. “Fine, I guess. Dad sent me up to tell you we won’t be setting tobacco on Saturday. Tomorrow, I guess he means.”

  “No?” She looked up at him. “Why not? The ground is drying out. I walked out there on the tobacco bottom this afternoon, and it’s not that bad. In fact I called down there to tell him everything looked good for tomorrow, but nobody was home. I think the rain’s really stopped, finally.”

  Rickie looked as if he’d rather be anywhere in the county, pretty much, than in this barn talking with Lusa. A family trait. “Well, Uncle Herb said he’s got real busy with his calves. And Dad said you wasn’t all that interested in us setting your tobacco anyways, is what they said.”

  “Oh, I see. I’m supposed to go down there and apologize for my rash attempt at self-rule and beg them on bended knee to come set my tobacco.” She saw she was being punished: the tobacco had been their idea, and now they were using it against her. Lusa put her shaking hands on her knees to force some calm onto herself. Her sudden anger had upset the cow enough to stop her milk for the moment. There was nothing doing until she let down again. Cows were a lesson in patience.

  Rickie shrugged his shoulders inside his jean jacket, that particular movement owned by teenaged boys trying to fit their adult bodies. She shouldn’t speak her mind to this kid, she realized; he must already consider her a hysteric. A redhead, Cole used to say. The boy kept a nervous eye on Lusa while he shook a cigarette out of his pack and lit it. As an afterthought he held out the pack to her, but she shook her head.

  “No thanks, I don’t smoke. Which is a misdemeanor in this county, I gather.”

  He ran a hand through his thick black hair. “I don’t think Dad and them is wanting you to get on your knees and beg them or nothing.”

  “No,” she said. “I’m sorry for snapping. I didn’t mean that literally.”

  “Anyways it wouldn’t matter if you did, since Dad didn’t get sets from Jackie Doddard. There’s prolly none left in the whole county by now, I don’t reckon.”

  “Oh. Well, I guess that settles it. My goose is cooked.”

  She returned her hands to the cow’s udder and manipulated it gently to submission. There was no sound in the barn but the rhythmic ring of the milk stream against the metal bucket and the syncopated, soggy-sounding drips from the waterlogged joists where the roof had leaked. Every drip reminded Lusa of the barn-fixing money she didn’t have and now would not earn from tobacco.

  “Got some leaks,” Rickie said, looking up.

  “About three thousand dollars’ w
orth, I’m guessing. Maybe more, once they get into those rotten roof beams.”

  “Hay’s going to spoil.”

  “Oh, don’t worry about that. I probably won’t even get any hay mowed or put up in the barn this summer. The baler’s broken down, and the tractor’s probably going to be repossessed. I was thinking I’d just let the cows eat snow this year.”

  Little Rickie stared at her. His big body was a cool seventeen, but his face looked younger. What was wrong with her, why was she venting her ironic wrath on this child? He was only the messenger. She was shooting the messenger.

  “Hey,” he said. “I’m real sorry about, you know. Uncle Cole.”

  “Thank you. Me, too.” She exhaled slowly. “It hasn’t even been a month. Twenty-seven days. Seems like twenty-seven years.”

  He repositioned himself against one of the massive old chestnut posts that held up the upper floor of the barn. Upstairs where they hung the tobacco, the barn was lofty as a cathedral, but down here where the animals stayed it was friendly and close with the sweet, mixed smells of grain, manure, and milk.

  “Me and Uncle Cole used to go fishing. He ever tell you about that? We’d skip school together and go trout fishing up on Zeb Mountain. Man, it’s pretty up there. They’ve got trees so big you just about fall over from looking at them.”