Prodigal Summer

by Barbara Kingsolver

  In the early-morning light, moving fast down the Bitter Creek trail, she stopped for a minute to listen. Nothing, only silence. Or rather, every kind of sound except what she was listening for. Plenty of noise rustling up from the dry leaves around her feet—that would be a lizard making itself sound as big as a bear. She walked on, knowing now what to listen for and knowing she would hear it. All spring she’d been waiting while her imagination filled with voices that made the small hairs stand up on the back of her scalp: those classic howls to the moon, the yips and polyphonic cries she’d studied on cassette tapes till she’d worn them to crinkled, transparent cellophane. She was beginning to fear she’d worn out her mind the same way, waiting in these mountains, leaning into the silent nights, eventually deciding that the one sound she longed for was not going to come. Here it wasn’t necessary for them to speak. Not like out west, where they would have to call to each other from the tops of desert hills for the joy of their numbers because they were so plentiful. They’d have to remind one another of who they were, how many families, and where they stood. Here there was just one single family, and it knew exactly where it stood. Best to keep quiet.

  The hardest work of Deanna’s life had been staying away from that den, protecting it with her absence. Sometimes she’d felt sure they were gone, maybe headed south toward the Blue Ridge. She tried to believe that was for the best, but really there would be no safe haven for this family. Wherever these coyotes went, they’d have the hatred of farmers to contend with. Here on this isolated mountain they had the strange combination of one protector and one enemy. She didn’t trust her power to bargain for their safety. In the six weeks of her acquaintance with Eddie Bondo, including both his presence and his absences, she’d hedged and evaded. Now he’d seen them, and she’d spent last night curled miserably in her chair near the wood stove, thinking, while he snored. By morning her bones ached and her mind was raw, but she was ready to lay her cards on the table.

  “I’m going down the hill this morning, alone,” she’d said. “If you follow me, you’re off this mountain for the rest of your life or mine. Whichever lasts longer.”

  Without a word he’d packed some cold biscuits in his pack, hitched it over his shoulder, and hiked out whistling along the Forest Service road, in the opposite direction from Bitter Creek. Deanna stood for several minutes looking at his hat, which he’d left hanging on the peg by the door, and at his gun propped in the corner. Then she dressed and flew down the trail, free at last to go see. Now she could listen and not be afraid of hearing the voices that could give away their presence. For all those weeks she’d been holding her breath, listening and wanting not to hear. How had she let that happen?

  She stopped again, this time hearing only the manic laughter of a woodpecker pair having too much fun, moving sideways through the woods, hopping over each other from one tree trunk to the next. For a minute she watched this pileated woodpecker couple playing checkers with themselves. They were huge, as big as flying black cats, and impossible to ignore with their big, haughty voices and upswept red crests. She received a vision of ghosts, imagined for a moment the ivory bills—dead cousins to these pileated woodpeckers—who had been even bigger, with nearly a three-foot wingspan and a cold, white-eyed stare. Lord God birds, people used to call them, for that was what they’d cry when they saw one. Never again.

  Now, beneath the laughter of ghosts, she began to hear the intermittent vocalizations of the coyotes. She moved toward the sound, another slow hundred steps down the trail, stopping finally in a place where she could peek through rhododendrons and get a clear view of the den. The place had altered since spring; now the woods were thick with leaves. Air and light moved differently, and the den had changed, too. The bank below the cave was an apron of bare dirt, ridged with so many tiny claw marks it looked like light-brown corduroy. She thought she saw some movement inside the dark grin of the den’s mouth, but then nothing, only stillness. She counted her own heartbeats to pass a minute, then more minutes, and convinced herself she’d actually seen no movement. There had been pups here, that was sure from all the claw marks on the bank, but it was too late, she began to believe. She’d missed them by one day; they’d grown up and gone.

  Then she saw a rustling movement in the huckleberry thicket a little distance from the opening. A long, low whine pulled at her heart, an irresistible appeal. An adult was in that thicket, the mother or one of the beta females calling the children out. Instantly they appeared all together in the opening, a row of bright eyes beneath a forest of tiny, pointed ears. Deanna tried to count, but there were too many, and they moved in a rambunctious swarm of ears and tails: more than six, she decided, and fewer than twenty. They tumbled over one another out the doorway as the female approached with something in her teeth, a dark, small thing she tossed into their midst. A wake of tiny growls and yips erupted, and the little golden furballs hopped like popcorn in a kettle. Puppies, she thought; they were nothing but puppies. But kittenlike, too, in the way they were pouncing and playing with the half-living vole that had just been delivered to their schoolyard. Deanna sank down on her knees, into the childhood summers when neighbors had brought litters of pups in boxes and the barn cats had delivered their kittens practically into her hands. Without self-consciousness her body became a child’s, her teeth holding her braid in her mouth for silence and her hands on her chest to keep her heart from bursting.

  She wished so hard for her father, it felt like a prayer: If I could only show him this, oh, please. Let him look down from Heaven, whatever that means, let him look up through my eyes from the cells of genesis he planted in me, let him see this, because he would understand it perfectly. Love was one thing he always knew when it looked him in the face.

  She wondered if there was anyone alive she could tell about these little dogs, this tightly knotted pack of survival and nurture. Not to dissect their history and nature; she had done that already. What she craved to explain was how much they felt like family.

  {14}

  Old Chestnuts

  Garnett turned up the hot water and let it scald the muscles shielding his shoulder blades. What an ache he had back there, as if some schoolyard bully had landed a haymaker squarely on his backbone.

  He sighed. This life was getting to be too much for one old man. It wasn’t so much the work; he loved messing with his chestnut trees. People presumed it was awfully tedious to bag all the flowers in the spring, do the careful cross-pollinating, collect the seeds, and plant the new seedlings, but every inch of that was exciting to Garnett because any of those seeds might grow up to be his blight-resistant chestnut tree. Every white bag slipped over a branch tip, every shake of pollen, each step carried the hope of something wondrous in the making. A piece of the old, lost world returning, right before his eyes.

  No, what got him lately was the running into one problem after another, this farm and all its history dragging him down. The farm was a darn junkyard hiding its menace under a thin skin of grass. Every farm around here was, to tell the truth. He’d seen a young couple with a real estate agent looking over the farmhouse down by Oda Black’s, and he’d been tempted to holler at them out the window of his truck, “Come looking for some history, have you? Well, this here’s the story of how Old Man Blevins buried himself in debts and broke-down machinery, and it’s just waiting to tangle up whoever steps on it next.”

  Well, of course he hadn’t told them anything, and they’d buy. They had that strenuously foolish look of city people; the woman was dressed more like a man than the man. Soon they’d be finding out what Garnett knew by heart: on an old farm, every time you sink a spade to plant a tree, you’re going to hit some old piece of a broken dish, a length of leather harness, some rusted metal, maybe even a cannonball! When Garnett was a schoolboy his father used to bring cannonballs home from somewhere and the boys would play with them till they ended up forgotten in the orchard or buried in their mama’s flower patch, lying in wait to wreak havoc fifty years later on
a tiller, a mower blade, or some other piece of equipment costing a day’s work and too much money to repair.

  This morning his plan had been modest: to finish clearing out the edge of the back field along the fencerow to make room for a single new row of trees. He thought the worst of it would be clearing the weeds, but no. He’d wrecked his bush hog and then his tiller blade. Half buried in that slim patch of ground he’d found six old fenceposts all wrapped up in barbed wire, evidently just thrown down there after they pulled them out to put in the new fence, back in the forties. Once he’d wrestled all that out, he’d discovered underneath it enough nails and carriage bolts scattered around to fill a bucket three times (and three times had carried it to his trash pile in the garage, now growing monstrous). Then, beneath all that, the entire metal chassis of an old wagon—and the worst was still yet to come! All in a mess at the end of the fencerow he’d uncovered a huge roll of black plastic with something heavy inside, which Garnett began to fear would turn out to be a body (he’d already found everything else there was today, so why not?). But no, it was clumps of white powder, possibly rock salt, though he wasn’t sure. Something his father had meant to throw away when Garnett was still a boy. That was the trouble with their thinking back in those days: “away” simply meant “out of sight somewhere,” for someone else to run into further down the road. Garnett was fed up to the teeth with it all, and he still hadn’t cleared the ground he’d meant to have laid open by midmorning, and now what? Good grief, that was his telephone ringing.

  He turned off the shower and listened. Yes, there it was, the telephone on the little hall table just outside the bathroom door, ringing off the hook.

  “Hold your horses!” he cried, not very pleased to have to cut his shower short and scurry around drying his head and wrapping himself in a towel. He stepped gingerly out onto the floorboards in the cool hallway and yanked up the receiver.

  “Hello,” he said, as pleasantly as he could manage while patting down his wet hair. He didn’t feel right to be chatting with anyone, even a wrong number, looking like this.

  “Hello, Mr. Walker?”

  It was a woman. Not from around here, either; she had a townish sound to her, that way they have of hurrying up every single word.

  “Speaking,” he said.

  She seemed uncertain for a moment, and he prayed she’d hang up, but then she launched into it: “I was wondering if I could ask you some questions about goats. I’m interested in getting started on kind of a semi-large-scale meat-goat operation, but I don’t really have much capital, and some people directed me to you. They said you were the man to talk to, the regional goat maven, and you might even know how to get me started with some…I don’t know how to put this.” She breathed. “OK, plain talk? I’m wondering if you know anybody who’d give me goats for free. To get me started.”

  Garnett collected himself: the Regional Goat Maven, caught with a towel around his waist and his hair standing up like a chicken in the rain.

  “Goats,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “May I ask where you are located? That would be the first consideration.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. I forgot my manners. This is Lusa Landowski, I live on the old Widener place, my husband was Cole Widener.”

  “Oh, Mrs. Widener. I was awfully sorry to hear about your husband. I would have been at the funeral, but there were…there are some considerations between our families. I expect you’ve heard all about that.”

  She was silent for a few seconds. “You’re related to us somehow, aren’t you?”

  “By marriage,” he said. “Distantly.”

  “I’m sorry; my nephew mentioned it, but I’d forgotten. That’s right, one of my sisters-in-law is a Walker. I think.” She laughed, sounding rather jolly for a new widow. “I’m still learning what it’s like to live among six hundred relatives. I’m new to all this—I’m from Lexington.”

  “And that would be where you plan on raising the goats?”

  “Oh no, here. I’m trying to keep this farm solvent, which would be the point of this goat business, if I can do it. I’m not at all sure I can, or whether it’s crazy to try.”

  “Oh? Now, don’t you have beef cattle up there on the Widener place?”

  She sighed, now sounding not jolly at all. “Cattle just seem to be a losing proposition for me, with all you have to put into them. The Ivermec and everything, and I know I’m also supposed to check the cows to see if they’re pregnant, but a cow pelvic examination I know from nothing. I’m scared to get close to them. I’m a small woman, and they’re so huge.” She gave an embarrassed laugh. “I guess I’m not much of a farmer yet. I can’t even get my hay baler working. Two of my brothers-in-law have this leased-out cattle empire, so I could sell them my cattle, I’m thinking. Get into a smaller breed.” She paused. “I was thinking I could handle goats.”

  “Well. You seem to have a plan, at least.”

  “It’s a lot to go into; I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to get into personal business, but listen, maybe this isn’t a good time for you to talk. I’m sorry to be bothering you.”

  “Oh, it’s no bother at all,” he said, shifting from one bare foot to the other, feeling a draft, and no wonder: under the skimpy towel he was naked as a jaybird. He thought he heard someone rapping at his front door. Oh, dear, was it a delivery? He wasn’t expecting a delivery.

  “Oh, well, that’s good,” she said, laughing a little. “At least you haven’t said flat out that I’m crazy—yet. I was hoping to kind of pick your brain. If I could.”

  “Well, pick away,” said Garnett, miserably. He heard the knock again, more insistent.

  “First of all, do you think it’s realistic for me to try to get free goats? How would I go about that?”

  “I’d suggest you run an ad in the newspaper. You’re liable to find yourself with more goats than you know what to do with.”

  “Really? You agree that people are dying to get rid of them, then. Which I guess ought to tell me there’s no money in it, if I had any sense.”

  “I can’t really encourage you, Mrs. Widener. There’s not a man in this county who’s made a dollar off a goat, in my recollection.”

  “That’s what my nephew said. But it seems to me the problem is marketing. Like everything else in farming, so I’m starting to learn. Nobody here knows what to do with a goat, they won’t even eat them, and we’re oversupplied. My nephew said we’d had kind of a goat plague on Zebulon County a while back. Why is that?”

  Garnett closed his eyes. Was all this really happening? Some mysterious intruder was banging down his front door, a strange woman from Lexington was attempting to uncover his most embarrassing secret, his back ached like the dickens, and his bare buttocks were hanging out in the breeze. He did not wish he were dead, exactly, just maybe peacefully asleep in his bed, with all the lights out.

  “Mr. Walker? Are you still there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is this…are you just thinking I’m some nut?”

  “Oh, no, not at all. Your question about the surplus goats isn’t an easy one to answer. Six or seven years ago, they started out as a whole slew of Four-H projects that kind of overgrew themselves. That’s the best way I can describe it. A mistake that grew like Topsy. I was supposed to be supervising these young folks and should have steered them into hogs or poultry, but my wife had just died—you can understand, being a widow yourself. And my neighbor has a very hard grudge against goats of any kind, and I had a spell of poor judgment there. That’s the only way I can describe it.”

  “Mr. Walker, you don’t have to go into that, I’m not a reporter or anything. I’m not even that nosy compared to most people around here. I’m just looking for some free goats.”

  “Try an ad in the paper, then, that’s what I suggest. But don’t give out your address in the paper.”

  “No?”

  “Goodness, no, or people will just dump any kind of animal on you, and you’ll be sorry. Do you h
ave a pickup truck, Mrs. Widener?”

  “Sure.”

  “Well, then, list your telephone number in the ad, but don’t make any mention of the Widener place. Just a phone, and ask people to call you. If they have what you’re looking for, then you go pick up the animals yourself. But first ask them some questions. Do you have a pencil and paper?”

  “Just a minute.” He heard her clunk down the phone and walk across a floor. He wondered which room she was in. Upstairs, or down? Maybe the kitchen. They’d had the wedding right in the front hallway, with the girl walking slowly down those beautiful steps in her little white shoes and short white bridal dress. She’d looked about thirteen. They’d intended to have it out in the yard, but the weather had turned cold and rainy at the last minute. He remembered all of it. Ellen was sick. He hadn’t thought about that for years: she’d had a terrible headache, and they’d had to leave early. It was probably connected with the cancer, they just didn’t know it yet.

  “OK, I’m back.”

  “Oh,” he said, startled. “What was I saying?”

  “When people call, I should ask them about their goats…what?”

  “Oh, yes. First, you want meat goats, do you? Not for milking?”

  “Definitely for meat.”

  “All right, then, you want to produce slaughter kids.”

  “I guess that’s right. In time to sell by, oh, maybe around the end of the year or something like that, I was kind of thinking.”

  “Oh. Then you have no time to waste.”

  “Is it even possible? To get them to breed at this time of year?”

  “It’s not the right time for them, but there is a way to make it happen. If you can be sure they haven’t been around a buck for all of last fall and winter, they’ll be ready to come into season now. I guarantee it.”

  “Is that reasonable to expect? That people will have does that haven’t been with a buck?”