Prodigal Summer

by Barbara Kingsolver

  “What are they like, lynx?” She tried not to sound like a jealous child.

  “Oh, baby, there’s a cat you’d love. They’re just like you.”

  “How’s that?”

  He grinned, thinking about it. “About three parts pissed off to four parts dignified. They’re gorgeous. If you find one caught in a trap line and let it go, it won’t scramble around and run, nothing like that. It’ll just stand there glaring at you for a minute, and then turn around real slow and just strut away.”

  She could picture it. “Don’t you get it? To kill a natural predator is a sin.”

  “You’ve got your rules, I’ve got mine.”

  She sat up to look at him. “Right. But then there’s the world, which has got these rules nobody can change. That’s what’s wrong with people: they can’t see that.”

  “And what rule of the world says it’s a sin to kill a predator?”

  “Simple math, Eddie Bondo, you know this stuff. One mosquito can make a bat happy for, what, fifteen seconds before it starts looking for another one? But one bat might eat two hundred mosquitoes in a night. Figure it out, where’s the gold standard here? Who has a bigger influence on other lives?”

  “OK already, I get it,” he said. “Chill.”

  “Chill yourself,” she said. “I didn’t make up the principles of ecology. If you don’t like them, go live on some other planet.” Doing my best to run this guy off, she thought. But she couldn’t go on biting her tongue. She needed this conversation.

  “Fine,” he said. “But if I’m a bug rancher it’s my right to shoot the bats off my ranch.”

  She leaned back against the pillow. “What you’re thinking about coyotes doesn’t make a lick of sense. They’re way more important to their natural prey than they are to livestock. I bet there’s not one rancher in the whole American West who’s gone under because of coyote predation.”

  “Maybe not gone under,” he said.

  “It’s just fear, looks to me like. A bunch of macho ranchers scared of a shadow.”

  “You’ve got no idea how tough ranching is.”

  “I don’t see you ranching sheep, Eddie. I don’t think I can give you the high ground here.”

  “I’ll inherit fifteen hundred acres one day,” he said, sounding unconvinced, and she wondered what divides of kinship were concealed in that flat statement, what dreads and expectations, what it was costing him to hold his place in his family. As the daughter of a farmer who’d lost his land, she felt only measured sympathy.

  “Right,” she said. “You’ll settle down with the little wife, raise up sheep till you’re old, that’s the plan? Just this one little thing, you need to run around and shoot every coyote in the world first?”

  He shrugged, refusing to absorb her irony. “I’ve still got some time. I like to get around, see a lot of country.”

  Shoot every coyote, screw every woman, see the world, she thought: the strategy of prolonged adolescence. But that wasn’t fair; he was also kind. He’d worked hard this morning to provision her nest, bringing armloads of firewood like bouquets. She tried to put aside the misery of thinking too much. “Well, you’re being true to your school,” she said. “Willing to travel great distances to make the world safe for Wyoming sheep.”

  “You make fun, but you don’t know. Sheep ranching needs all the help it can get. You’re right on the edge of busted all the time.”

  “What don’t I know? You start down that mountainside and you’ll come to the edge of a field, OK? From that point on, you can’t walk right or left without stepping on some family that’s lost its farm to bad luck, bad weather, chestnut blight, change, economics, the antitobacco lobby. You name it, there’s some farmer I know who got eaten by it. But they’re not bitter. They go to work at Toyota and forget about it.”

  “They don’t forget about it,” said Eddie Bondo. “They just don’t have an enemy they can look at through a rifle sight.”

  She looked at him for a long time. Thought of her father, drinking to diffuse his grief in the last year before they sold out. If he’d had something to shoot at, what would he have done?

  “I can’t say you’re right,” she said finally. “You don’t know that.”

  “If there’s coyotes moving into this country now, they’ll get shot at.”

  “I know that. I think about it all the time.”

  “So they’re here. You know where they are.”

  She returned his clear-eyed gaze. “Is that why you’re hanging around me? You’re trying to get information?”

  His green eyes went dark, a turmoil under the surface briefly revealed. “If that’s what you think, I’ll get my boots on and leave right now.”

  “I don’t know if it’s what I think. I’ve never known what to think since the first day you showed up here. But if that’s what you’re after, you should go.”

  “If that were what I was after, I’d be a fool. I know there’s coyotes denned up around here someplace where I can’t get a bead on them, and not for love nor money are you going to give me a clue.”

  “That’s the story.”

  “Deanna, don’t you think I know that?”

  “If I trusted you I would show you where they are, but I don’t. Not in that way, not that kind of trust.”

  “You already told me that. The first day up there on the mountain when I found you tracking that bobcat. You told me what the deal was. I accepted.”

  “I did?”

  “You did.”

  “So what are we doing here?”

  “Having breakfast in bed,” he replied. “Trying to catch a moth without harming one scale on its fuzzy little head.”

  She examined his beautiful face and the exquisite planes of his body, wishing she could look inside him to see what mixture of love and anger and deception resided there, in what proportions. “How old are you?” she asked him.

  He seemed surprised. “Twenty-eight. Why? How old are you?”

  She hesitated, surprised at herself. Sat forward and drew the covers close around her. It was the first time in her life she’d felt uneasy owning her age. Nearly twenty years older than this man—it made no sense.

  “I don’t want to say.”

  “Damn, girl, get over that. Look at you. It takes more than thirty years to tune an engine to run like that.”

  “Way more than thirty,” she said. “More than forty.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, really.”

  She thought she saw a flicker of surprise, but he covered well. “So, you’re ninety-seven. You’re my grandma. Come here, Granny, I want to rub the rheumatism out of your bones.” As he pulled her down close to him the fire cracked again, flaring brilliant orange in the stove’s small, round window. She could see the flame reflected in his eyes.

  “I want to tell you something,” she said, holding his stare. “You’re a good tracker, but I’m a better one. If you find any coyote pups around here and kill them, I’ll put a bullet in your leg. Accidentally.”

  “That true?”

  She knew it wasn’t, but maybe he didn’t. “Absolutely. I might even follow you a ways to do it, if I had to. That’s the kind of accident I’m talking about.”

  “A leg. Not between my eyes?”

  “No.”

  He smiled and rolled away from her onto his back, clasping his hands behind his head. “OK, then, I’m fairly warned.”

  “Fairly warned,” she agreed.

  She got out of bed, trembling internally from the effort of acting so tough. She slipped her long flannel gown over her head and shook it down over her body like a cocoon. She took a widemouthed plastic cup from the kitchen cupboard and an envelope from the stack of papers on her desk. She turned it over: an old letter from Nannie Rawley, the only person who still wrote her here. She went to the window and pulled back the curtain gently, sending the disturbed moth back into its frenetic charge at the glass. On the curtain it had left a double row of tiny eggs, as neat as a double-
stitched seam. It made Deanna sad to see such a last, desperate stab at survival. She’d read that some female moths could mate with many different males, save up all their sperm packets, and then, by some incomprehensible mechanism, choose among them after the boys were long gone—actually deciding whose sperm would fertilize the eggs as she laid them. Deanna studied this little moth’s earnest work on the curtain. Maybe she’d been holding out for some perfect guy she believed was still out there. Too late now.

  “You poor thing,” she said quietly, “quit bashing your brains out, you’ve earned your freedom.” Carefully she placed the cup over the moth, then slid the letter between the cup’s mouth and the glass. The trapped creature clicked against the hard plastic, but it wasn’t human hands, so the scales shouldn’t rub off. Deanna stepped barefoot into her unlaced boots and clumped outside, negotiating the door with her elbow, feeling Eddie Bondo’s eyes on her as she went. A lynx, was that really how he saw her? She didn’t feel that elegant or self-contained. He made her talk too much.

  The day was gorgeous. This was summer, surely. These morning chills would soon be gone for good, dissolved into the heat of breeding season. She inhaled: even the air smelled like sexual ecstasy. Mosses and ferns were releasing their spores into the air. Birds were pressing the unfeathered brood patches on their breasts against fertile eggs; coyote pups, wherever on earth they lived, were emerging for their first lessons in life. Deanna stood at the edge of the porch and raised the paper from the lid of the cup, giving the cup a gentle heave to send the moth on its way. It tumbled and struggled in the bright air, then swerved clumsily upward for several seconds, grasping at sudden freedom.

  A phoebe darted out from the eaves and snapped the moth out of the air. In a vivid brown dash she was gone again, off to feed her nestlings.

  {12}

  Old Chestnuts

  Dear Miss Rawley,

  I have been greatly troubled by a suspicion that occurred to me last Friday, June 8, in the Little Bros. Hardware. I could not help but overhear (though I did not wish to, but the conversation was quite unavoidably audible) your remarks to the Little bros. concerning a “snapper.” I was wondering whether this conversation referred to your lawn mower, since I am aware this is a brand of mower commonly used in this region and sold by Little Bros. Or is it possible you were discussing a certain event, previously known only to the two of us, involving a snapping turtle?

  I write to ask you this, Miss Rawley, not because it is a matter of any great concern to me, but because in keeping with the Lord’s counsel I feel I should advise you it is a sin that does not rest lightly on any soul, to slander the good name of a neighbor who has worked long and hard these many years to serve with wisdom and dignity his county (vo-ag teacher for 21 yrs, 4-H adviser more than 10 yrs) and his Lord.

  Sincerely,

  Garnett S. Walker III

  P.S. On the matter of setting free the “lizards” sold at Grandy’s bait store on the grounds that some of them belong to species that are vanishing from our region, having given it some thought, I propose three questions:

  1) Are we humans to think of ourselves merely as one species among many, as you always insist in our discussions of how a person might live in “harmony” with “nature” while still managing to keep the Japanese beetles from entirely destroying his trees? Do you believe a human holds no more special authority in this world than, say, a Japanese beetle or a salamander? If so, then why is it our duty to set free the salamanders, any more than it is the salamander’s place to swim up to the state prison in Marion and liberate the criminals incarcerated there?

  2) Or are we to think of ourselves as keepers and guardians of the earth, as God instructed us to do in Genesis 1:27–30, “So God created man in his own image;…and God blessed them and said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it!…Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed which is upon the face of the earth, and every tree in which is the fruit of a tree-yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat. And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth’”—such as salamanders, Miss Rawley—“‘wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat’; and it was so.” If the Holy Bible is to be believed, we must view God’s creatures as gifts to his favored children and use them for our own purposes, even if this occasionally causes this one or that one to go extinct after a while.

  3) If one species or another of those muddly little salamanders went extinct, who would care anyway?

  Just wondering,

  GW III

  That was it exactly, he thought. That was telling her. Garnett licked the envelope and pressed it shut, feeling more pleased with himself than he had in many years. As he walked out his front door and down the drive to his mailbox he whistled “Pretty Saro,” casting it up to the mockingbird on the grain shed so he might catch up a few of Garnett’s notes and weave them into his merry hymn to the day.

  {13}

  Predators

  Why would you use the word windfall to describe something lucky?” Eddie Bondo asked, revealing a peevish edge to his personality that she’d not yet seen.

  It was a fair question. She paused to scratch the back of her neck as they fought their way through the impossible maze of sideways trees: now the mosquitoes were finding them. Deanna had made an unlucky choice in an otherwise perfect morning, and they’d ended up here, climbing tediously through the horizontal labyrinth of an enormous windfall. As nearly as she could figure it out, one huge pine struck by lightning on the hilltop had taken down a whole hillside of its brethren by means of their intertwined limbs. Since she’d chosen the route, she was still trying to pretend this was fun.

  “A windfall would be lucky,” she ventured, “if you’d been meaning to spend six weeks sawing down all these trees for lumber.”

  “Well, I wasn’t,” he stated.

  They’d come out this morning in search of molly-moochers, as people here called them. He’d laughed at this funny pair of words (as he laughed at her “oncet” and “twiced” and “I might could”) but got interested when she explained what they were. Morels were hardly more than a legend out on the arid pine slopes of the West, but here they were real, and he wanted to taste them. She was happy to take him looking. Officially she wasn’t supposed to harvest anything out of these woods, but mushroom populations were in no danger in the National Forest, and now was the wrong time to find them anyhow. Her dad had taught her to hunt them in mid-May when oak leaves were the size of squirrels’ ears. Even the ravenous will of Eddie Bondo couldn’t make one appear in the third week of June. But they’d come looking because that was how it was with him. Some days he packed up and was gone, temporarily or for good she never quite knew, but when he was here he was here; if they began a day by waking up delighted together in her bed, it was going to be a new adventure, another reason to ignore her notebooks and the trails she was supposed to maintain. Most days they neglected the trails altogether to clamber into the mountain’s wildest places, straight up or down slopes so steep they had to ascend on all fours and descend on the seats of their jeans, sliding like bobsledders on the slick leaves. They discovered groves and clearings even Deanna hadn’t known before, where deer browsed quietly on moss and new leaves.

  They were reaching the edge of the tangle. Deanna peered through, swatting a mosquito and rubbing her scratched-up knee. The day was warm, but she regretted her shorts at the moment. She could see now where they were: not very far from the Egg Creek trail. She retied her braid into a double knot to keep it out of the branches and pushed on to the end of this tedious maze.

  As they emerged from the pine needles, they startled up a grouse, whose coppery tail flashed as its plump body soared horizontally with a noise like an outboard motor. Deanna stood still with her hand flat on her heart, which raised an equivalent ruckus. Grouse always made such an explosion. She wished she could have seen their chickenish cousins the heath hens, w
ho used to strut around in clearings with their feathers standing straight up, inflating the yellow balloons on their necks to make booming sounds you could hear for miles. Not anymore, of course. In the same plaintive tone her single friends in grad school used to complain that all the best men were married, Deanna felt like whining, “All the best animals are extinct.”

  “Is there a season on those?” Eddie asked, marveling at the grouse, his earlier irritation now gone without a trace. She gave him a look, didn’t answer. Grouse were fairly rare here. More often she discovered flocks of hen turkeys gabbling quietly in the woods, battering the undergrowth with their wings as they struggled into low branches. They’d seen some yesterday, in fact. And there was one big old tom they often saw in the early morning strutting alongside the Forest Service road, alone, steering clear of female companionship. She unknotted her braid and let it fall down her back while she considered the best route out of here. Eddie Bondo had begun to whistle.

  “Shhh!” she hissed suddenly. Someone or something was there in the pines above them. She waited a second to see if it moved like a deer or a man.

  Man.

  “Hey, buddy,” she called. “How you doing today?”

  From the dark-green boughs he came forward: tall and a little potbellied, with gray hair down to his shoulders and a small-bore rifle, dressed out for jungle combat. It always killed her how these guys dressed. Like a deer would be impressed by the uniform.

  He was squinting at her. “Deanna Wolfe?”

  “Yeah?” She squinted back. She’d be darned if she could name him. She could memorize Latin names and birdcalls, but the guys she’d gone to high school with all kind of blended together.

  “Sammy Hill,” he offered finally.

  “Sammy, sure,” she said, as if that had been on the tip of her tongue. Sammy Hill, could she possibly forget a name like that? “Dee-anna Wolfe,” he repeated, directing his pleasure mainly at her legs. “I heard you’s up here. I heard you near ’bout got eat by a bear.” He spoke too loudly, maybe nervous, or possibly a little deaf. A lot of guys lost their hearing on tractors and mowing machines.