Prodigal Summer

by Barbara Kingsolver

  He didn’t like to say. Forever. “Twenty years, maybe.”

  “You never saw a doctor for it?” she asked.

  “At first I thought it must be something awful gone wrong inside my head,” he confessed. “I didn’t want to know. Then the years went by, and it didn’t kill me.”

  “It won’t; it’s just a nuisance. BPV is what they call it. ‘Benign positional vertigo,’ or something close to that. I can’t remember. Rachel had it bad. Usually old people get it, but you know, everything on Rachel that could fall apart, did. Look here, here’s what you do. It’s simple. Lie down here on this log.”

  He protested, but she already had him by the shoulders and was guiding him down onto his back. “Turn your head to the side, as far as it will go. Let it drop backward a little, down off to the side. That’s right.” He gasped and clutched at her hands like a baby when the dizziness descended again, worse than ever. No matter how he braced for it, that feeling of careening through space never failed to terrify him.

  “It’s OK, that’s good,” she crooned, holding on to his hand with one of hers while she cupped her other palm behind his head, steadying him. “Stay there if you can stand it, just hold right still till it stops.” He did as he was told. It was a minute, maybe two, before the world slowed and arrested its dance.

  “Now,” she said, “roll your head straight back till it starts up again. Don’t be scared. Go slow, and freeze when it hits you.”

  He became so terribly aware of her hands. She was holding his head in her competent, tender grip like a mother, pressing his face against her skirt. It was all he could think about as he passed through one more bout of dizziness, then turned his head and endured another. He wondered if he would ever be able to look Nannie Rawley in the eye after this.

  “You’re almost done,” she said. “Now. Listen. I’m going to help you. Sit straight up and tilt forward like this.” She put her chin on her chest to demonstrate. “Ready?”

  She helped lift him back to a sitting position and guided his head forward. He waited, feeling a strange sensation of reassembly in his head. When it passed he relaxed his shoulders, raised his head, and looked around at a world that seemed to have been made new. She watched him intently. “OK,” she said. “You’re done.”

  “Done with what?”

  “You’re fixed. Try looking up.”

  He was skeptical, but he did it, cautiously. He felt a feint of movement, but it was small. Compared with the usual, it was hardly anything. No real dizziness. He looked at her, astonished. “Are you a witch? What did you just do to me?”

  “It’s the Something maneuver—Epley, maybe?” She smiled. “Rachel and I discovered it by accident. I used to roll her around and tickle her to distract her from her dizzy spells. Then a long time later Dr. Gibben told me there was an easier way to do it, and a name for it. You’ll have to do it again, every so often. Maybe every day at first.”

  “What did you fix?”

  “It’s caused by these little tiny crystals—”

  “Ohhh! Don’t even tell me. If it’s your hocus-pocus theory of everything.”

  “No, now, listen. It’s little hard crystals like rocks that form in the balance-what’s it thingamabob inside your ear. That’s a scientific fact.”

  “Well, how did they get there?”

  “Some people just get them, that’s all I can tell you. What do you want me to say, that they’re caused by orneriness? Listen here, old man, did I fix you up, or not?”

  Garnett felt chastened. “Did.”

  “All right, then, listen to me for a change. You’ve got you some little rocks in there that float around and make trouble if you tilt your head the wrong way. The trick is to roll them up into a dead-end corner where they can’t get out and bother you.”

  “Are you sure? Is this real, what you’re telling me?”

  “Real as rain, Mr. Walker.”

  “All these years?”

  “All these years, that’s been your trouble. You’ve had rocks in your head.”

  They sat without speaking for a long while, listening to the gasoline-powered sounds of an oak turning into a cord of wood. At length she asked, “Would you like to walk up on the hill with me and see those two chestnuts? Would it do you any good to have two more seed sources for your breeding program?”

  “Do you have any idea?” he asked, amazed and excited once again. He’d momentarily forgotten the chestnuts. “It would double the amount of genetic variation I have now. I would have a faster, healthier project by a mile, Miss Rawley. If I had flowers from those two trees.”

  “Consider them yours, Mr. Walker. Anytime.”

  “Thank you,” he said. “That’s very kind of you.”

  “Not at all.” She folded her hands on her lap.

  Garnett could picture the two old chestnuts up there, anomalous survivors of their century, gnarled with age and disease but still standing, solitary and persistent for all these years. Just a stone’s throw from his property. It was almost too much to believe. He dared to hope they still had a few flowers clinging on, this late in the summer. What that infusion of fresh genetic material would do for his program! It was a miracle. In fact, now that he thought about it, if those trees had been shedding pollen all along they might already have helped him out, infusing his fields with a little bit of extra diversity. He thought he’d been working alone. You just never knew.

  He turned his head to the side and received an unbidden picture of the rocks in his head, stashed out of harm’s way for the moment but poised, surely, to roll back out and make trouble. Without meaning to, he also remembered the stack of green shingles in his garage, hiding there, burning a hole in his conscience like a cigarette dropped on a couch.

  {21}

  Moth Love

  One of the skills of grief that Lusa had learned was to hold on tight to the last moments between sleep and waking. Sometimes, then, in the early morning, taking care not to open her eyes or rouse her mind through its warm drowse to the surface where pain broke clear and cold, she found she could choose her dreams. She could call a memory and patiently follow it backward into flesh, sound, and sense. It would become her life once again, and she was held and safe, everything undecided, everything still new. His arms were real, carrying her over the threshold as he joked that she weighed more than one bag of groceries but less than two. Cicadas buzzed and the air was hot and sticky—June, just after the wedding. She still had on her blue rayon skirt but had taken off her stockings and shoes in the car on the drive down from Lexington. The light-blue skirt flowed like cool water over her thighs and his forearms as he carried her up the stairs. He stopped on the landing, kissed her there, and slid his hands under her so her whole weight was nothing held in his hands. She was weightless, floating in air with her back to the window and his strong arms beneath her thighs. The air around his head seemed to shiver with the combined molecules of their separate selves as he entered her and she gave in to the delirium of flight, this perfect love made on the wing.

  Sometimes the dream changed itself then, and his comforting presence had the silky, pale-green wings of the stranger who had first come to her after the funeral, on the night Jewel gave her the sleeping pill. He always said the same thing to her: “I know you.” He opened his wings and the coremata rose from his abdomen, fragrant and intricately branched like honeysuckle boughs, and once again she felt the acute pleasure of being chosen.

  “You knew me well enough to find me here,” she said.

  And his scent burst onto her brain like a rain of lights, and his voice reached across the distance without words: “I’ve always known you that well.”

  He wrapped her in his softness, touched her face with the movement of trees and the odor of wild water over stones, dissolving her need in the confidence of his embrace.

  “Aunt Mary Edna says they’re praying when they do that,” Crys reported doubtfully.

  “I guess you could say that. Butterfly church.”

/>   Lusa and Crys had stopped in the dirt road to admire another dense crowd of swallowtail butterflies congregated on the ground surrounding a muddy spot. Every fifty feet or so they came upon another of these quivering pools of black and yellow wings that rose and scattered as they approached, then settled again on the same spot after they’d passed by. It had rained again yesterday, so there was no shortage of puddles.

  “I’ll tell you something, though,” Lusa said. “It’s a no-girls-allowed church. All those butterflies you see there are probably boys.”

  “Why?”

  “What why? Because they have little peckers!”

  Crys yelped out her sharp bark of a laugh. Lusa lived for this, to crack her up. It had become her pet secret challenge, to try for these moments when you could see all the lights come on, ever so briefly, in this child’s dark house.

  “I know what you meant,” Lusa said. “Why do just the males do that. It’s called puddling, believe it or not. That’s what real-live bug scientists call it.”

  “Yeah? Why do just the boy ones do it?”

  “They’re sucking up a certain mineral or protein from the mud, some special thing butterflies need to be healthy. And then they actually give it to the girl butterflies, like a valentine.”

  “How do they give it to them?”

  Lusa paused, then asked, “Do you know how babies get made?”

  Crys rolled her eyes. “He sticks his pecker in her pee hole and squirts in stuff and the baby grows in there.”

  “O-kay, you know the story, all right. So that’s how he gives her the minerals. When he gives her the baby-making stuff, he actually puts it together with this whole package of other goodies she likes. It’s called the spermatophore.”

  “Boy. That’s weird.”

  “Isn’t it? You know what? Nobody else in Zebulon County knows that, except you and me. Even your teachers don’t.”

  She glanced up. “Really?”

  “Really. If you want to know about bugs, I can tell you things you will not believe.”

  “Are you mad at me for saying ‘pecker’ and ‘shit’ and stuff?”

  “Nah, not at all. Hell, no,” she swore, to make Crys laugh. “As long as you know where not to say those words. Like in church, or at school, or within one and a half miles of Aunt Mary Edna. But here, who cares? It won’t hurt my ears.”

  “Well, hot damn,” the child declared. “Shit fire.”

  “Hey. Don’t use them all up in your first five minutes.”

  Crys picked up a small stone and tossed it toward the crowd of butterflies, just to see them rise.

  “Come on,” Lusa said, “let’s hunt moths. Today I’m going to find you a luna moth or bust.” They walked slowly toward the puddle, passing straight through the cloud of quivering butterflies the way Lusa remembered Superman walking between the molecules of a wall in the cartoons. She and Crys were hiking up the old cemetery road into the woods behind the garage, for no reason in particular, just out for a little adventure while Lowell napped on the parlor couch. Jewel was having a very bad day and had asked Lusa to watch them for the third time in two weeks. Lusa was happy to oblige, though she wondered what kind of a parental substitute she was—encouraging Crys to swear like a tinker, for instance. She didn’t know the first thing about kids. But no one else in the family could get a word out of Crys at all. You get what you get in this world, as Hannie-Mavis had once told her. Lusa and Crys had gotten bad luck and the judgment of the righteous. And apparently, each other.

  “What’s that?”

  Lusa looked into the woods where Crys pointed. Birdsong rang like bells in the rainwashed air, but Lusa couldn’t see anything in particular. “What, that plant?”

  “Yeah, ’at booger one climbing up the trees.”

  “‘Booger one’?”

  Crys shrugged. “Uncle Rickie says ’em’s boogers. Them vines that gets all over everwhere. He hates ’em.”

  “This one’s nice, though; it’s supposed to grow here. It gets covered with white flowers at the end of summer, and then it makes millions of seedpods that look like little silver starbursts. It’s called virgin’s bower.”

  “Virgin’s like Jesus’s mama, right?”

  “Right. Or any girl or woman who’s never gotten the pecker business we were talking about.”

  “Oh. Virgin’s power?”

  “No, virgin’s bower. It means her bed.” Lusa smiled. “Same thing in this case, actually.”

  Crys leapt ahead of Lusa with a dozen or so strange, stiff giant steps. She seemed to like trying out different ways of walking, which Lusa just watched, bemused. She was wearing the same outgrown pair of jeans she always wore now, and also, today, a strange, ragged creation over her T-shirt. It looked like a man’s denim work shirt with its tail and sleeves cut to ribbons with a pair of scissors.

  “I like bugs better than flowers,” Crys said decisively, after a while.

  “Good, then you’re in luck, because I know a million times more about bugs than I do about flowers. And we’re looking for a luna moth, remember? Look on the trunks of the trees, on the side that’s in shade. Do you know what a hickory tree looks like? With the really shaggy bark?”

  Crys shrugged.

  “Luna moths especially like hickories. Those and walnuts. They lay their eggs on the leaves because that’s what their caterpillars eat.”

  “How come?”

  “That’s just how their stomachs are made. They specialize. You can eat the seeds of wheat, for instance, but not the grass part.”

  “I can eat all kinds of stuff.”

  “Other animals should be so lucky. Most of them have pretty specialized diets. Meaning they can eat only one exact kind of thing.”

  “Well, that’s dumb.”

  “It’s not dumb or smart, it’s just how they’re built, like you have two legs and walk on your feet. A dog probably thinks that’s dumb.”

  Crys didn’t comment.

  “But yeah, specialization makes life more risky. If their food dies, they die. They can’t just say, ‘Oh, never mind, my tree went extinct, so now I’ll just order a pizza.’”

  “Lowell has that.”

  “Has what?”

  “The special-food problem.”

  “Yeah?” Lusa was amused by this analysis of her brother. “What does he eat?”

  “Just macaroni and cheese. And chocolate malted-milk balls.”

  “Well. That is a specialized diet. No wonder he didn’t eat my lentil soup the other night. I should have put malted-milk balls in it.”

  Crys let out a tiny laugh, just air escaping between her teeth.

  “Look here, on the mossy side of this tree. See these little white moths?” They both bent close as Lusa prodded gently at a translucent wing. The moth roused and crawled a few inches up the rough bark. Crys was backlit by the sun, so Lusa could see the pale down on her curved cheek, like the fuzz on a peach. There was a softness to her features in these moments of concentration that made Lusa wonder how so many adults—herself included—could ever take this child for a boy.

  She looked up. “What are they?”

  “These are called cankerworms. The worm stage got noticed first with these guys, so mama moth is stuck with not such a nice name. She’s kind of pretty, though, isn’t she?” Lusa let it crawl onto her finger, then held it up and blew on it lightly, sending it fluttering in a crooked arc toward another tree. Crys stood for a minute longer watching its sleepy colleagues on the tree before she was willing to move on. “How come you know so much about bugs?” she asked.

  “Before I married your uncle Cole and moved here, I used to be a bug scientist. In Lexington. I did experiments and learned stuff about them that nobody knew before.”

  “They got a lot of bugs in Lexington?”

  Lusa laughed. “As many as anywhere, I guess.”

  “Huh. Aunt Lois said you’s a miner.”

  “A miner?”

  “Gold miner.”

  Lusa puz
zled over this. “Oh. A gold digger.” She sighed. This time she was sure Crys hadn’t meant to hurt her.

  “Is it true?” Crys asked.

  “Nope. No gold mines for me, past or future. Aunt Lois has got her head up her butt on that particular subject.”

  Crys closed her mouth in a tight, conspiratorial grin and rolled her eyes at Lusa. They were finding their ways of living with the judgment of the righteous.

  “This is a good spot, let’s look up here,” Lusa said, pointing up a steep embankment to a grassy clearing above the road, bathed in dappled light. They’d come as far up this road as she wanted to go. They shouldn’t stray too far from the house since Lowell was napping alone. Also, Lusa really didn’t want to face the family cemetery that waited around the next bend. Cole wasn’t in it, but too many other Wideners were.

  Crys was already scrambling ahead of her through the plumes of the daylilies that had escaped from someone’s garden long ago and were now as common as weeds. They were pretty, though. Their straplike leaves spilled like waterfalls over the banks, crowned with circles of bright orange-eyed flowers and long, graceful buds. They grew in bobbing rows along nearly every unmowed roadside in the county, punctuated with the intermittent purple-pink of sweet peas. Before they started to bloom a few weeks ago, Lusa had never noticed either one of these plants. The whole county was one big escaped flower garden.

  Crys yanked the head off one of the lilies as she mounted the bank. “Watch this.” She rubbed its center against her chin before tossing the bedraggled flower on the ground.

  “Very nice. Now you’ve got an orange beard,” Lusa observed.

  Crys attempted an evil grin, touchingly childish. “Like the devil.”

  “You know what that is, that orange stuff? Pollen. You know what pollen is?”

  She shook her head.

  “Spe-erm.” Lusa exaggerated the word thrillingly.

  “Eew, yuck.” She wiped her chin fiercely.

  “Don’t worry. It won’t make you get pregnant and have flowers.” She walked past her to the edge of the clearing where a stand of hickories had caught her eye. She began to search the trees’ north sides systematically, moving deeper into the woods.