Prodigal Summer

by Barbara Kingsolver

  Garnett squinted. This man looked so slack he could be dead. He didn’t look young, though. Young people, Garnett had observed, often gave the impression of having too little gumption to hold up their heads. But this fellow didn’t even seem to have a head. He was hunkered down with his arms crossed in front of him on the fence and an old, dusty-looking fedora pulled down over his ears. His whole body leaned against his arms in an unnatural way, like a pole leaning against a fence. Everything about him appeared unnatural, in fact, from the way his arms in the blue work shirt bent in curves, as if his elbows were rubber instead of hinges, to the trunklike aspect of his big lumpy legs in those jeans. Garnett got the strangest feeling, as if he’d turned up in somebody else’s dream wearing no clothes. He felt a blush creep down the front of his neck, though there was no one here to witness it. Thanks be to the Lord for that, no witnesses. He set his gun down gently on its butt end, with its bore against the trunk of the cherry, and stepped through the gate, a few paces onto Nannie’s side, to get a better look at the face.

  But of course there was no face. There was just a stuffed pillowcase with a hat on it, stuck down into a stuffed shirt and pants. Garnett recalled the locust rail and crossbeam Nannie had been nailing together in her garage. He nearly fell to his knees. For the last two days he’d been burning up with suspicion and ire and jealousy. Yes, even that. He’d been jealous of a scarecrow.

  He turned to leave before things got worse.

  “Garnett Walker!” she cried, coming around the corner of her house in a hurry.

  He sighed. Between Garnett and Nannie, things always did get worse. He should know that by now. He should just give in. There was no paddling upstream against this river. “Hello, Miss Rawley.”

  She stopped short, with her hands on her hips. She was wearing a skirt, probably getting ready to go to the market. She always prettied herself up a little for market day, in her calico skirt and her braids. She looked quizzical as a little bird, with her head cocked to the side. “I thought I heard somebody over here calling me,” she said.

  Garnett looked at his hands. Empty. “I was coming over to see if you needed help. Any help loading up your truck for the Amish market. I know how it is for you this time of year. When the winesaps start to come in.”

  He could have laughed, for how surprised she looked.

  “With winesaps,” he added emphatically, “when it rains, it pours.”

  She shook her head. “Well, will wonders never cease.”

  “I’ve lived next door to an orchard for the better part of eighty years,” he prattled on, sounding foolish even to himself. “I have eyes. I can see it’s enough work to break a donkey’s back.”

  She looked at him sideways. “Are you angling for another pie?”

  “Now, look here, I don’t think that’s fair. Just because I’ve offered to help you out, you don’t have to act like the sky’s falling. It’s not the first time.”

  “No,” she said. “You gave me the shingles, too. Those were a godsend.”

  “I think it would be fair to say I’ve been a good neighbor lately.”

  “You have,” she agreed. “You’ll have to forgive me if it all takes a while to sink in. I’m just blessed off my rocker these days. I’ve come into an embarrassment of riches.”

  He wondered what that could possibly mean, and whether it was polite to ask. “I didn’t know you had relatives anywhere,” he tried. “To inherit from.”

  She laughed, laying her hands flat on the front of her skirt “That’s just what I’ve done,” she said, “I’ve inherited a relative. Two of them, in fact.”

  Garnett became a little confused, thinking briefly of the man hanging around on the fence, who of course was no man at all, with no interest in anyone’s inheritance. He waited for Nannie to explain—which she always did, if you waited long enough.

  “Deanna Wolfe,” she said simply. “She’s coming to live with me.”

  Garnett thought about this. “Ray Dean’s girl?” he asked, feeling briefly, nonsensically jealous of the young Ray Dean Wolfe, who’d courted Nannie for more years than most people now stayed married. Nannie had been so happy in those days, you could hear her singing on any day but a rainy one. But Ray Dean Wolfe was buried in the cemetery now.

  “That’s right, his girl Deanna. She’s like a daughter to me. You knew that.”

  “I thought she’d gone to live up in the mountains here somewhere, working for the government.”

  “She did. She’s been up there in a cabin living all by herself for two years. But now she’s taking a leave from her job and coming back down. And here’s the part you have to sit down for: she’s going to have a baby.”

  “Well, that is a shock.” He squinted up toward the mountains. “How did that happen, do you think?”

  “I don’t know, and I don’t care. I don’t care if the daddy’s a mountain lion, I’m going to have a grandbaby!”

  Garnett shook his head, clucking his tongue. Nannie looked like the cat that’d swallowed the canary. Women and grandbabies, there was nothing on this earth to beat it. Like Ellen fretting on her deathbed over that child of Shel’s. And now there were two of them, a boy and the girl. That Lexington gal with her goats had called him up on the telephone, plumb out of the blue, and announced that she wanted to bring those kids over to see his farm. They wanted to see the chestnut trees. His trees.

  “I’ve got grandchildren, too,” he told Nannie.

  “You always did,” she said. “You’re just too high-handed to bother learning their names.”

  “The girl’s name is Crystal, and the boy’s Lowell. They’re coming over here on Saturday.” How Garnett had plucked those names from the mossy crevices of his memory, even he would never know. “I was thinking I might be able to teach them how to bag flowers and make crosses,” he added. “On my chestnut trees. To help me keep it all going.”

  To his great satisfaction, Nannie looked stunned. “How did that happen?” she asked finally.

  “Well, I don’t think a mountain lion had much to do with it.”

  She stood looking at Garnett with her mouth open. If she wasn’t careful, he thought, she’d get a bee in there. Then her eye caught on something behind him, and she frowned. “What’s that over yonder leaning on the tree in the fencerow?”

  He turned and looked. “Oh. That’s my shotgun.”

  “I see. And might I ask what it’s doing over there?”

  Garnett studied it. “Not very much. Just leaning up against the tree, it looks to me like.”

  “All right, how did it get there, then?”

  “It came out to have words with this fellow who’s been leaning up against your fence for the last couple of days.”

  She laughed. “Oh, this is Buddy. I don’t believe you’ve met.”

  “Well, Buddy gave us a little bit of a worry.”

  She narrowed her eyes at Garnett. “Is that right?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “And you came over to make sure I was all right, is that what you’re telling me? You came over here with your shotgun to protect me from my scarecrow?”

  “I had to,” Garnett said, spreading his hands, throwing himself on her mercy. “I didn’t care for the way Buddy was looking at you in your short pants.”

  Now Nannie looked more than stunned; she looked lightning-struck. She stared at him until a smile broke out and spread over her face like the sun coming out after a storm. She walked to him with her arms out like a sleepwalker’s, put those arms around his waist, and hugged him tightly with her head resting against his chest. It took him a minute and a half before he thought to put his arms around her shoulders and keep them there. He felt as stiff as old Buddy—as if he, too, had nothing inside his shirt and pants but newspaper and straw. But then, by and by, his limbs relaxed. And she just stayed there like a calm little bird inside the circle of his arms. It was astonishing. Holding her this way felt like a hard day’s rest. It felt like the main thing he’d been n
eeding to do.

  “Mr. Walker. Garnett. Will wonders never cease,” she said once again, and to be certain they did not, Garnett held her there. She turned her face up and looked at him. “And here I’m finally going to have a grandbaby in my house, and you’re going to have two. You’ve always got to have the last word, don’t you?”

  “Now, Nannie. You’re a difficult woman.”

  She laid the side of her face against his frail old heart, where the pink shell of her ear could capture whatever song it had left.

  “Garnett. You’re a sanctimonious old fart.”

  {29}

  Predators

  The roar of rain, pounding rain on the cabin’s tin roof, was loud enough to drive a mind to madness. It occurred to Deanna that if she screamed, she probably wouldn’t hear herself. She opened her mouth and tried it. She was right.

  She sat on the bed, hugging her knees to her chest. Trying not to think of it as the bed, she’d pulled up the blankets and propped pillows against the wall to make it into a couch or something—someplace to get comfortable that wasn’t bed. Inside this white roar she felt as cabin-fevered and trapped as she’d been in the dark of last winter. She plucked at a hole in the toe of her sock, picked up a book, put it down again. For hours she’d tried to read, but the noise had reached a point of drowning out all hope of concentration. She covered her ears with her hands for some relief, and listened to the different roar created by her cupped hands. A throbbing whoosh, the sea in a seashell—she remembered hearing it for the first time on a beach. She and Dad and Nannie had gone to Virginia Beach two summers in a row. A hundred and ten years ago, and a hundred and nine.

  It wasn’t the ocean, of course, but the tide of her own circulation pulsing inside her, sound carried through bone to her eardrums. Deanna shut her eyes and listened harder, trying to hear some small difference now that her heart was pumping her blood through an extra set of arteries. She’d been craving some proof, but the change so far seemed to inhabit her body only ethereally, like a thought or a magic charm. For now she would have to live with magic.

  When she dropped her hands from her ears, the rain seemed even louder. Flashes of lightning brightened the window in an irregular but steady way, like fireworks. The thunder she couldn’t hear, but its vibrations reached her through the floor, shuddering up the legs of the iron bed. She considered climbing under the blankets and covering her head with the pillows, but that would be bed, alone, and the awful trembling would still reach her. There was no escape, and this storm was growing closer. It was only four o’clock in the afternoon, but the sky was dark as dusk, and darkening deeper by the minute. An hour ago Deanna had decided she’d never seen a storm like this in these mountains in all her life. And that was an hour ago.

  Surprised, she remembered her radio. It offered no practical assistance, but it would be company. She jumped up and crossed to the desk to retrieve the little radio from the bottom drawer. She turned it on, held it next to her ear, heard nothing. She studied the thing, located the dial that controlled the volume, and turned it all the way up, but still not a crackle. Batteries, she thought: they’d go dead over time just sitting around. She ransacked the drawer for more batteries, knowing perfectly well she always forgot to put these on her list. Finally she scavenged the ones from her little flashlight, the spare she kept on the shelf by the door.

  Lightning hit then, so close to the cabin that she could actually hear its crack above the rain’s roar. The sound and light were simultaneous; that was here. Probably one of the tall poplars on the hill above the cabin. Just what she needed now, a tree falling on her. Her fingers trembled as she turned over the radio and pried open its back to fish out the old batteries and pop in new ones. “Plus, minus,” she said aloud, lining up the poles, her voice completely inaudible to her ears. Even that was terrifying, like a darkness so dark it looked the same with eyes open or shut. She’d had moments of panic in that kind of darkness, wondering whether she’d gone blind, and now it occurred to her that this might be what deafness was like. People assumed it was silence, but maybe it was this, a solid white roar.

  She tried the radio again. If she held the little holes against one ear and covered the other, she could hear sounds. Just static at first. It was a tedious business to adjust the tuning, listen, and adjust again, trying to find the Knoxville station, but at last she heard a faint, tinny music of a type she couldn’t categorize. She waited awhile to let her ear adjust to this kind of sound. It had been a long time since she’d heard anything other than bird music. Music was something she’d have to relearn, she decided, like learning to speak again after a stroke. There were so many things to bewilder her lying ahead. Electricity, with all those little noises it made inside a house. And people, too, with all the noises they made. Labor and childbirth would be the least of her worries.

  She tried to think about Nannie. No worries there; she knew how that would be. To take her mind from this frightening high isolation, she pictured herself within the genuine shelter of Nannie Rawley’s place, the kindness of that leafy orchard. Longing for comfort and rest, she forced her thoughts through the rooms of Nannie’s house, out into the familiar trees and even up into the long grass of Nannie’s wilding field, where she’d first learned about the connection between sex and God’s Creation.

  She’d been half listening to the tinny music for longer than she realized when a different, louder sound brought her attention back to the radio: the long, discordant drone of a weather-service warning. She shifted on the bed and listened as hard as she could for what came next. Tornado watch. Oga County, Ing County, names she couldn’t make sense of—Bin, Din, Fin, Hinman, that was it: Logan and Hinman counties, heading northwest. She dropped the radio to her lap. This was it, then, a real end-of-summer hellbender, the tail of the season’s first hurricane coming this way. She sent out one small, final hope for Eddie Bondo, the last she would ever allow herself: that he’d had time to get out of these mountains before this storm came down.

  She got up and walked around the room, trying to find spots where the reception improved. She discovered it was better in the doorway, even better out on the porch. The roar on the roof wasn’t as bad out there, either. She stayed close in under the eave to avoid getting drenched and settled cautiously into the old green chair with her head held stiffly, just so, like a patient in a neck brace, to keep the sound of human speech in her ear. She’d gone two years without news but now couldn’t bear another minute without it. It was music now, though. Yes, that was right, that was how they did it: “Emergency, urgent, all life must stop!” and then back to the commercials and corny love songs. The world was coming back to her. She put the radio on her lap and shut it off to save the batteries, which she might need later. Then jumped up and went inside to make sure she had candles where she could find them and the kerosene lamp trimmed and ready to light. Why? She stopped herself, trying to reason a way out of this panic. It was going to be dark, storm or no storm, like every night of the year. Why did she suddenly need four candles laid out side by side with matches at the ready? She wished she could laugh at herself; it would be so much better than this bleak knot of panic in her stomach. What had changed, when she used to be so fearless? But she knew what had changed. This was what it cost to commit oneself to the living. There was so much to lose. She went back outside to the green chair and put the radio to her ear again, leaned her head back, tried to listen. Still music. She turned off the radio, then leaned forward, opened her mouth, and screamed a long, fulfilling howl she could hear pretty well:

  “DAMN YOU, EDDIE BONDO!”

  Why today, of all the days there were? Did he have a built-in barometer that told him when the weather ahead was getting stormy? She put her arms around herself and leaned back, letting herself be embraced by this dear old broken-down chair. Today or tomorrow or yesterday, it was all the same, she had to believe that was true. She had weathered storms on her own before and could weather this one. She considerately retracted th
e damnation. Truly, she had needed for him to go before the air got any denser between them. Her secret was getting hard to keep, and keep it she must, there had never been any question about that. Better for this child, better for everybody, that he not know what he’d left behind—and so he never would. She would tell people in Egg Fork, because they sure would ask, that the father of her child was a coyote.

  Deanna smiled. She really would. And Nannie would stand by her story.

  He’d left with his mind unchanged. If anything hurt Deanna, it was that she’d made no dent, had never altered his heart to make room in it for a coyote.

  She’d gone out this morning before dawn for one of her restless walks and had come home at last to the startling absence she’d been waiting for. His pack, his hat, his gun, everything gone this time, she knew in an instant. He’d touched nothing of hers, had left the cabin exactly as it had been three months ago—yet it seemed it must have enlarged, to hold such significant emptiness.

  It was several hours later when she opened her field notebook and found his note inside, her only memento of Eddie Bondo—or so he would always believe. A farewell with just enough sting to let her know she needn’t wait for his return. On the empty page she’d marked with this date, he had recorded his own observation:

  It’s hard for a man to admit he has met his match. E.B.

  She’d wondered for most of the day whether he meant her, Deanna, or the untouchable coyotes. Which one of them had been too much for Eddie Bondo?

  Finally she decided it didn’t matter. She tore the page out of her book so she wouldn’t have to see it again, then ripped it into tiny pieces that she piled in a corner of her sock drawer for the mice to use when they lined their winter nests. Only then, closing the drawer, did she understand. In his young man’s way, he was offering up his leaving as a gift. Meeting his match was a considerable concession. He was leaving them both alone, Deanna and the coyotes. No harm would come to anything on this mountain because of him.