Prodigal Summer

by Barbara Kingsolver

  “So I’ll get those sent off to Shel,” Jewel said after a minute. “Just to get that part squared away. I’ll do that today. I’ve been putting it off.”

  “Nobody could blame you,” Lusa said, and then they sat still again while the clock out in the hallway chimed half past the hour. Lusa collected several questions in the silence, but she waited until Jewel opened her eyes again before asking them. It was impossible to be too eager about any of this. She tried to talk slowly.

  “Do you even know where Shel is? And will he sign the papers?”

  “Oh, yeah, I know where he’s at. He moves around a lot, but the state’s got a garnishee on his wages. See, I had to go to court for that, after he took off. Any employer that writes him a paycheck has to take out three hundred dollars a month and send it to me. That’s how I keep track of him.”

  “Gosh,” Lusa said. She had never remotely pictured Jewel in court, standing up to her abandonment. She could imagine the gossip that must have generated. And there were people in this county who would shun Jewel to the end of her life on account of it.

  “That’s exactly why he’d sign off his claim to the kids,” Jewel said. “So he could quit paying. I think he’ll sign in a heartbeat. But would you want him to?”

  Lusa studied Jewel’s furrowed brow, trying to follow the quick turns this conversation had made. “Would I take the kids without the money, you mean?” She thought about it for less than ten seconds. “It’s the safest thing. Legally, I think it would be best. Because I’d like to be able to put their names on the deed to this farm. So it would go to them, you know, after me.” She felt a strange movement in the air as she said this, a lightness that grew around her. When she gathered the will to look up at Jewel again, she was surprised to see her sister-in-law’s face shining with tears.

  “It just seems right to do that,” Lusa explained, feeling self-conscious. “I’m thinking I’d add ‘Widener’ to their names, if that’s all right with you. I’m taking it, too.”

  “You don’t have to. We all got over that.” Jewel wiped her face with her hands. She was smiling.

  “No, I want to. I decided a while ago. As long as I live on this place, I’m going to be Miz Widener, so why fight it?” Lusa smiled, too. “I’m married to a piece of land named Widener.”

  She got up and sat on the arm of the green chair so she could put her arm gently across Jewel’s shoulders. They both sat looking out the window at the yard and the hayfield behind it, across which Lusa had received her husband’s last will and testament. Today her eyes were drawn to the mulberry tree at the edge of the yard, loaded with the ripe purple fruits that Lowell had christened “long cherries” when he discovered and gorged himself on them, staining his teeth blue. At this moment in the summer the mulberry had become the yard’s big attraction for every living thing for miles around, it seemed. It dawned on Lusa that this was the Tree of Life her ancestors had woven into their rugs and tapestries, persistently, through all their woes and losses: a bird tree. You might lose a particular tree you owned or loved, but the birds would always keep coming. She could spot their color on every branch: robins, towhees, cardinals, orchard orioles, even sunny little goldfinches. These last Lusa thought were seed eaters, so she didn’t know quite what they were doing in there; enjoying the company, maybe, the same way people will go to a busy city park just to feel a part of something joyful and lively.

  “I’m going to have to talk to my sisters about it,” Jewel said suddenly. “The other sisters,” she amended.

  “Oh, sure. I know. Please don’t feel any hurry or pressure or anything. God knows I don’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings. If they don’t think I’m in a position.”

  “You’re in a position.”

  “Well, I don’t know. I’ve never had any idea how I fit into this family picture.”

  “You have an idea, honey. More than you think.” Jewel pressed her lips together in thought, then spoke again. “They’ll act hurt for a minute, because they have to. But as soon as we leave and close the door behind us, they will praise the Lord. We will all praise the Lord.”

  {25}

  Predators

  For the rest of her own life and maybe the next one after, Deanna would remember this day. A cool snap had put a sudden premonition of fall into the air, a crisp quality she could feel with her skin and all the rest of her newly heightened senses: she could smell and taste the change, even hear it. The birds had gone quiet, their noisy summer celebration hushed all at once by the power of a cold front and the urge rising up in their breasts to be still, gather in, wait for the time soon to come when they would turn in the darkness on a map made of stars and join the vast assembly of migration. Deanna clung to her perch on the rock, feeling the same stirring in her breast, a sense of finished business and a longing to fly. She had climbed up onto a lichen-crusted boulder fifty feet above the spot where the trail ended at the overlook. From here she could look down on everything, the valley of her childhood and the mountains beyond it. If she stood and spread her arms, it seemed possible she would sail out beyond everything she’d yet known, into new territory.

  From the branches behind her she heard a sociable gathering of friends hailing each other with their winter call: chicka dee-dee-dee! The chickadees, her familiar anchors. Deanna would not fly away today; this thrill was only something left over from childhood, when a crisp turn in the weather meant apple time, time to hunt for paw-paws in Nannie’s woodlot. At some point between yesterday and today the air had gone from soggy to brittle. The Virginia creeper on the cabin had begun to turn overnight; this morning she’d noticed a few bright-red leaves, just enough to make her pause and take note of history. This was the day, would always be the day, when she first knew. She would step somehow from the realm of ghosts that she’d inhabited all her life to commit herself irrevocably to the living. On the trail up to this overlook today she had paid little mind to the sadness of lost things moving through the leaves at the edges of her vision, the shadowy little wolves and the bright-winged parakeets hopping wistfully through untouched cockleburs. These dispossessed creatures were beside her and always would be, but just for today she noticed instead a single bright-red berry among all the clusters of green ones covering the spicebushes. This sign seemed meaningful and wondrous, standing as a divide between one epoch of her life and the next. If the summer had to end somewhere, why couldn’t it be in that one red spicebush berry beside the path?

  She slipped the small, borrowed mirror—his shaving mirror—from her back pocket and looked closely at her face. With the fingertips of her left hand she touched the slightly mottled, darker skin beneath her eyes. It was like a raccoon’s mask, but subtler, spreading from the bridge of her nose out to her cheekbones. The rest of her face was the same as she remembered it, unmoved if not untouched. Her breasts were heavier; she could feel that change internally. She turned her face to the sun and slowly unbuttoned her shirt, placing his hands like ghost fingers where hers were now. His touch on her skin would be a mantle she could shed and put on again through the power of memory. Here on this rock in the sun she let him enter her like water: the memory of this morning, his eyes in hers, his movement like a tide pushing the sea against the sand of its only shore. Her body’s joy was colored darker now from knowing that each conversation, every kiss, every comforting adventure of skin on skin might be the last one. Each image stood still beside its own shadow. Even the warmth of his body sleeping next to her afterward was a dark-brown heat she stroked with her fingers, memorizing it against the days when that space would be cold.

  Fifty feet below her was the overlook where she’d nearly ended her life in a fall two years ago, and then, in May, where she’d fallen again. Sweet, he’d said. Did you ever see a prettier sight than that right there? And she’d replied, Never. She was looking at mountains and valleys, all keeping their animal secrets. He was looking at sheep farms.

  She touched her breast and took up the mirror again to look closely at
the deep auburn color of her aureole. It seemed like a miracle that skin could change like this in color and texture in such a short time, like caterpillar skin taking on the color and texture of moth. Briefly, as if testing the temperature of water, she touched her abdomen just under her navel, where the top button of her jeans no longer conceded to meet its buttonhole. Deanna wondered briefly just how much of a fool she had been, for how long. Ten weeks at the most, probably less, but still. She’d known bodies, her own especially, and she hadn’t known this. Was it something a girl learned from a mother, that secret church of female knowledge that had never let her in? All the things she’d heard women say did not seem right. She had not been sick, had not craved to eat anything strange. (Except for a turkey. Was that strange?) She’d only felt like a bomb had exploded in the part of her mind that kept her on an even keel. She’d mistaken that feeling for love or lust or perimenopause or an acute invasion of privacy, and as it turned out it was all of those, and none. The explosion had frightened her for the way it loosened her grip on the person she’d always presumed herself to be. But maybe that was what this was going to be: a long, long process of coming undone from one’s self.

  Deanna tried to imagine the night of her own conception, something she’d never before had the courage to consider. The rumpled Ray Dean Wolfe making love to the mother she’d never known. That woman had been flesh and blood—a person who’d moved like Deanna, maybe, who’d walked too fast, or dreaded thunder, or bitten the ends of her hair when she was too happy or too sad. A woman who’d gripped life in naked embrace and gone on living past any hope of survival.

  Deanna had not been a fool, she decided. She’d just lacked guidance in matters of love. Lacking a mother of her own, she’d missed all the signs.

  Nannie had done her best, and that wasn’t bad—just a broader education, by far, than most daughters were prepared for. Nannie Rawley, as reliable and generous as her apple trees, standing in her calico skirt in the backyard calling Deanna and Rachel down out of a tree, not for fear of their climbing but because she could occasionally offer them something better, like cider or a pie. Only then. They’d lived in trees, Rachel low to the ground on a branch where Deanna put her for safekeeping while she herself climbed enough for the both of them, mounting the scaffold limbs like the girl on the flying trapeze. If she looked down, there was Rachel, peering up through the leaves with her sweet, sleepy eyes and her lips parted in eternal wonder, permanently in awe of her airborne sister.

  “What made Rachel that way?” she’d asked Nannie, only once. The two of them were up on the hill behind the orchard.

  Nannie answered, “Her genes. You know about genes.”

  Deanna was an adolescent girl who loved science and read more books than anyone she knew, so she said yes, she did.

  “I know,” Nannie said quietly, “you want a better answer than that, and so do I. For a long time I blamed the world. The chemicals and stuff in our food. I was reading about that when I was carrying her, and it scared me to death. But there’s other ways of looking at Rachel.”

  “I love her how she is,” Deanna said. “I’m not saying I don’t.”

  “I know. But we all wish she didn’t have so many things wrong with her, besides her mind.”

  Deanna waited until Nannie decided to speak again. They were walking uphill through an old, weedy hayfield. Deanna was taller than Nannie now, had passed her around her twelfth birthday, but by walking ahead of her on this steep hill Nannie had regained the advantage.

  “Here’s how I think about it,” Nannie said. “You know there’s two different ways to make life: crossing and cloning. You know about that from grafting trees, right?”

  Deanna nodded tentatively. “You can make a cutting of scionwood from a tree you like and grow it out into a new one.”

  “That’s right,” Nannie said. “You call that a scion, or a clone. It’s just the same as the parent it came from. And the other way is if two animals mate, or if two plants cross their pollen with each other; that’s a cross. What comes of that will be different from either one of the parents, and a little different from all the other crosses made by those same parents. It’s like rolling two dice together: you can get a lot more numbers than just the six you started with. And that’s called sex.”

  Deanna nodded again, even more tentatively. But she understood. She followed the path through the tall grass that Nannie was tramping down in front of her.

  “Sexual reproduction is a little bit riskier. When the genes of one parent combine with the genes of the other, there’s more chances for something to go wrong. Sometimes a whole piece can drop out by mistake, or get doubled up. That’s what happened with Rachel.” Nannie stopped walking and turned around to face Deanna. “But just think what this world would be if we didn’t have the crossing type of reproduction.”

  Deanna found she couldn’t picture the difference, and said so.

  “Well,” Nannie said, pondering this, “probably for just millions of years there were little blobs of things in the sea, all just alike, splitting in two and making more of themselves. Same, same, same. Nothing much cooking. And then, some way, they got to where they’d cross their genes with one another and turn out a little variety, from mutations and such. Then starts the hullabaloo.”

  “Then there’d start to be different kinds of things?” Deanna guessed.

  “More and more, that’s right. Some of the kids turned out a little nicer than the parents, and some, not so hot. But the better ones could make even a little better. Things could change. They could branch out.”

  “And that was good, right?”

  Nannie put her hands on her knees and looked Deanna earnestly in the eye. “That was the world, honey. That’s what we live in. That is God Almighty. There’s nothing so important as having variety. That’s how life can still go on when the world changes. But variety means strong and not so strong, and that’s just how it is. You throw the dice. There’s Deannas and there’s Rachels, that’s what comes of sex, that’s the miracle of it. It’s the greatest invention life ever made.”

  And that was it, the nearest thing to a birds-and-bees lecture she’d ever gotten from Nannie, the nearest thing to a mother she had. It was a cool fall day—September, probably—and they were making their way through the hillside field that had gone derelict since Nannie took over running the farm. It was full of sapling apple trees sprouted from seeds left here in the droppings of the deer and foxes that stole apples from the orchard down below. Nannie claimed that these wild trees were her legacy. The orchard trees planted by her father were all good strains, true to type, carefully grown out from cuttings so they’d be identical to their parent tree. All the winesaps in the world were just alike. But Nannie’s field saplings were outlaws from seeds never meant to be sown, the progeny of different apple varieties cross-pollinated by bees. Up here stood the illegitimate children of a Transparent crossed with a Stayman’s winesap, or a Gravenstein crossed with who knew what, a neighbor’s wild apple or maybe a pear. Nannie had stopped mowing this field and let these offspring raise up their heads until they were a silent throng. “Like Luther Burbank’s laboratory,” was how she’d explained it to an adolescent girl who wanted to understand, but Deanna could think of them only as Nannie’s children. On many an autumn Saturday, the two of them had beat their way through the grass of this overgrown field from one tree to the next, tasting apples from these wild trees, the renegade products of bee sex and fox thievery. They were looking for something new: Nannie’s Finest.

  Deanna knew what to do; she had a plan. This was the first week of August, which meant Jerry would be coming up soon with her groceries and mail. She could send a letter back to town with him. Instead of putting on a stamp, which she wasn’t even sure she had, she’d draw a map of Egg Fork Creek and Highway 6 on the back of the envelope so Jerry could find the orchard and deliver it straight. Deanna smiled to think of Nannie’s opening the envelope with the map on the back. Maybe she would pause
first to study that line of blue ink connecting Deanna’s cabin to her own orchard, like a maze in a child’s puzzle book painstakingly completed. Maybe, just from that, Nannie would be able to guess the contents of the message inside.

  Deanna already knew how the letter would begin:

  Dear Nannie,

  I have some news. I’m coming down from the mountain this fall, in September, I think, when it starts to get cold. It looks like I’ll be bringing somebody else with me. I wonder if we could stay with you.

  {26}

  Old Chestnuts

  Garnett was on his way home from a trip to town, thinking about the fish at Pinkie’s Diner and whether it had been as good as usual, and just arriving at the place where Egg Fork joined up with Black Creek and the road dipped into a little piece of woods, when he was stopped by an animal in the road. There it stood in broad daylight, causing Garnett to brake hard and stop completely. It was a dog, but not a dog. Garnett had never seen the like of it. It was a wild, fawn-colored thing with its golden tail arched high and its hackles standing up and its eyes directly on Garnett. It appeared to be ready to take on a half-ton Ford pickup truck with no fear of the outcome.

  “Well, then,” Garnett said aloud, quietly. His heart was pumping heartily, not from fear but from astonishment. The creature was looking into his eyes as if it meant to speak.

  It turned its head back toward the side of the road it had come from, and out of the weeds crept a second one, walking slowly. Its tail was held lower, but its color and size were about the same. It hesitated out in the open, then picked up its pace and crossed the road quickly at a neat trot. The first one turned into line behind it and followed, and they both disappeared into the chickory at the edge of the road without so much as a glance back at Garnett. The blue-flowered weeds parted and then closed like curtains in a movie house, and Garnett had the strangest feeling that what he’d witnessed was just that kind of magic. This was no pair of stray dogs dumped off bewildered beside the road and now trying to find their way back to the world of men. They were wildness, and this was where they lived.