Prodigal Summer: A Novel

  He was watching her, waiting for whatever was inside to come out, and she did the best she could. "Even if you never touch meat, you're costing something its blood," she said. "Don't patronize me. I know that. Living takes life."

  A fierce hiss came from inside the pot, inspiring her to listen for a minute to this turkey's last lament.

  "Good, we agree on that," he said. "Living takes life."

  "But it can be thoughtful. A little bit humble about the necessity, maybe. You can consider the costs of your various choices. Or you can blow big holes in the world for no better reason than simple fear."

  He held her eye. "I'm not afraid of a coyote."

  "Then leave it...the hell...alone."

  They glared at each other through the trembling haze of heat above the fire.

  "Why does it come down to this?" he asked.

  "Because I'm going to change your mind or die trying."

  "Die trying, then. Because you can't and you won't change my mind. I'm a ranching boy from the West, and hating coyotes is my religion. Blood of the lamb, so to speak. Don't try to convert me, and I won't try to convert you."

  "I won't go shoot your lambs in the head, either."

  "You are, though," he said. "In a way you are. If you're trying to save those bastards, you're slaughtering lambs."

  She uncrossed her arms and threw a handful of dry grass into the fire, watching each strand light up and glow like the filament of a lightbulb. "If you only knew."

  "Knew what?"

  "You said you'd read my thesis. You promised me you would, one time."

  He shook his head, grinning. "You never give up."

  "You did. You gave me your word."

  "I must have been trying to get you into bed."

  "I think we were already there."

  He leaned sideways, looking at her around the edge of the flames. "Likely."

  "So?"

  "So? Tell me why I should read it." Still on his heels, he made his way around the fire pit like some bent-kneed insect and stopped a few feet away from her. "What will I learn about coyotes that I don't already know in my mean little fearful heart?"

  "That they have one of the most complex vocal systems of any land mammal. That they live on rodents and fruits and seeds and a hundred other things besides lambs."

  "Lambs are on the list, though."

  "Lambs are on the list."

  "I already knew that."

  She tossed another handful of grass into the fire. "OK. And they have elaborate courting rituals that involve a lot of talking and licking, and they bring each other presents of food. Meat, especially."

  He looked at the pot on the fire, and then at Deanna.

  "And once they form a pair bond," she said, "it's usually for life."

  "And I'm supposed to admire that?"

  "You're not supposed to feel any way about it. It's just information."

  He nodded. "OK, what else?"

  "They're the most despised species in America. Even the U.S. Government is in the business of killing them, to the tune of maybe a hundred thousand animals a year, using mainly cyanide traps and gunning from helicopters. Not to mention the good work done by your pals at the predator-hunt extravaganzas."

  "Yep. Go on."

  "And after a hundred years of systematic killing, there are more coyotes now than there have ever been, in more places than they ever lived before."

  "There. Stop right there. Why is that?"

  "It's a mystery, isn't it? We kill grizzlies, wolves, blue whales, and those guys slump off toward extinction as fast as they can. Darn coyotes, though, they're more trouble. I think the Indians are right: they're downright tricky."

  "And?"

  "And the more we attack them, the more of them there are. I can't tell you exactly why, but I have a lot of ideas."

  "Give me one good guess."

  "OK. Coyotes aren't just predators, they're also a prey species. Unlike the blue whale or the grizzly, they're real used to being hunted. Their main predator before we came along was wolves. Which we erased from the map of America as fast as we could."

  "Oh."

  "Yeah, oh is right. Wolves. There's no such thing as killing one thing, that's what I'm trying to tell you. Every dead animal was somebody's lunch or somebody's population control."

  He took up a longer stick and jabbed at the framework of burning logs surrounding the pot, sending an impressive display of sparks swirling high into the air.

  "Will you quit that?" she said, laying a hand on his arm. "You're going to burn down the woods. Just leave it alone."

  "I'm trying to get the coals to settle."

  "Gravity does that." This fire can burn itself, she wanted to tell him, without a man in charge of it. "My dad used to say if you play in the fire, you'll pee in the bed."

  "Worth it," Eddie said firmly, jabbing and sending up more sparks.

  "Quit it," she said, taking away his stick. "Here, sit, you're making me nervous."

  He sat with his shoulder against hers. They listened to the elaborate sounds of the fire and the cooking bird. There was even a high, musical whistle--steam escaping from somewhere. Deanna's hunger had grown to a sweet, gnawing ache in her belly.

  "So we helped them out by killing the wolves," he said, unexpectedly. "And what's your next good guess?"

  "It's not a guess, it's a fact. Coyotes breed faster when they're being hunted."

  He stared straight ahead, into the fire. "How?"

  "They have bigger litters. Sometimes they'll even share a den, so where you'd normally see just the alpha female breeding, now one of her sisters breeds, too. They work in family groups, with most of the adults helping to raise one female's young. It might be that when some adults are killed out of a group, there's more food for the young. Or maybe there's a shift in the reproductive effort. Something happens. What we know for sure is, killing adults increases the chances of survival for the young."

  "Wow."

  She turned toward him. "Hey, Eddie Bondo."

  He turned to face her. "What?"

  "Boo. Life's not simple."

  "So I'm told."

  "Hey. Read the book. It'll keep you on the edge of your seat. My major professor claimed he remained conscious through the whole two hundred pages."

  Eddie looked back at the fire. "I don't think I'm going to care for the ending."

  The moon was up somewhere, and big, just a little past full. It hadn't yet climbed above the mountains that shadowed this hollow, but the sky was collecting a brightness Deanna could sense through her closed eyelids. She willed her body to find a flat plane of repose instead of turning and turning like a rolling pin on a piecrust. On these sleepless nights she got the blanket in a tangle that left Eddie exposed to the elements.

  They'd dragged the mattress outside before collapsing on it in a turkey-stuffed delirium. But she'd always slept outside in summer, whenever the nights were warm enough; moonlight didn't usually disturb her sleep. Nothing usually disturbed her sleep. She'd never known insomnia before these last few weeks. She'd never known falling asleep in the daytime, either. Something had gotten her out of whack. Deanna wasn't sure whether these worries roaming her brain were keeping her awake nights or whether they had just moved into the vacant apartment of an insomniac head.

  The urge to roll over consumed her like pain, she couldn't resist it any longer, so she moved cautiously from her side to her back. Immediately that felt uncomfortable, too. She tried to forget her body, her immensely full stomach, and Eddie beside her--all these troublesome symptoms of being human. She tried, slowly, to inhale and absorb this night instead. It was an extraordinary time to be awake, if you gave in to it: these hours of settled darkness when the insects quieted and the air cooled and scents rose delicately out of the ground. She could smell leaf mold, mushrooms, and the faint trace of a skunk that must have come poking around the turkey bones in the woods right after she and Eddie fell into bed and she fell asleep, hard, briefly, before popping i
ndelibly awake again.

  Now her brain settled on phoebe worries: they might have scared the mother off her nest before dark, or a baby might have fallen out, something that had already happened twice. The fledglings were nearly old enough to fly and slightly bigger even than adults now because of their fluffy juvenile feathers--big enough to make it way too crowded in there. Two days in a row, Deanna had picked up a fallen nestling off the ground and tucked it back in on top of its siblings. Eddie claimed a bird wouldn't return to a nest once a human had touched it; Deanna knew better from experience, but she let the mother bird answer. She swooped back onto her nest just seconds after Deanna stepped away from it.

  Please gather your feathered courage and fledge soon, she beseeched these babies, for they were getting to be a handful. She'd been tiptoeing around underneath the phoebe nursery for weeks and forcing Eddie to do the same. This mother had already lost her first brood to their carelessness, and it was too late in the season for her to start again if this one failed. In a few more days, maybe tomorrow, their worries would be over. These children would stretch their wings and leave home for good.

  She flexed her left foot against a cramp and fought the urge to roll over onto her stomach. Impossible to keep still in this mess of blankets. The only thing to do with such a restlessness was get up and keep it company. She would walk in the woods. There would be enough light with this moon, once it had crested the mountaintop. But first she would check on the phoebes. Taking great care not to disturb Eddie, she got up quietly, found her boots next to the mattress, pulled on her jeans and buttoned them under her night shirt, then went into the cabin to fetch the flashlight. She moved very quietly around to the porch to take a peek. The flashlight wouldn't disturb the mother if she was on the nest; this late at night it wouldn't make her fly. Deanna searched the eave for the neat, round mound of woven grass. As she'd dreaded, the mother's brown-feathered head and little pointed beak weren't there where they ought to have been. Quickly she checked the porch floor for fallen angels, but none were there. She went inside and brought out the ladderback chair, then climbed up carefully, steadying herself with one hand on the roof joist. Nothing! The inside of the nest was a tidy pocket, perfectly empty. How could that be? Deanna had watched the mother catch bugs all afternoon, a slave to those four huge appetites. They wouldn't fledge at night. So where were they? She shone the beam on the floor again, searching all around the legs of the chair and farther away, in case they'd traveled as far as the edge of the porch in a feathery little panic. Nothing.

  She clicked off the flashlight and thought a minute. Clicked it back on again. With the focused halo of light she scanned every inch of the top of the joist all the way out to the end of the eave, then searched along the other rafters. She passed over and then came back to what looked like a pile of black tubing. Studied it. Found the small, round, wide-set eyes shining back at her, perched smugly on top of the partially coiled body. She swept the light very slowly down the dark body until she found them: four discernible lumps.

  She breathed hard against the urge to scream at this monster or tear it down from the rafters and smash its head. Breathed three more times, blowing out hard through her lips each time, feeling a faint coil of nausea inside her anger. This was her familiar, the same blacksnake that had lived in the roof all summer, the snake she had defended as a predator doing its job. Living takes life. But not the babies, she cried in her mind. Not these; they were mine. At the end of the summer the babies are all there will be.

  She climbed down from the chair, clicked off the flashlight, and headed out into the woods, tense with fury and sadness. She didn't understand how far her emotions were running away with her until she felt the coolness of tears running down her face. She wiped them with the heel of her hand and kept walking, fast, away from the cabin and the scent of fire and flesh, up into the dark woods. What was this uncontrollable sorrow that kept surging through her body like hot water? In the last few days she had cried over everything: phoebes, tiredness, the sound of a gunshot, the absence of sleep. Idiotic, sentimental tears, female tears--what was this? Was this what they meant by hot flashes? But they didn't feel hot. Her body felt full and heavy and slow and human and absent, somehow, just a weight to be carried forward without its enthusiastic cycles of fertility and rest, the crests and valleys she had never realized she counted on so much. Deadweight, was that what she was now? An obsolete female biding its time until death?

  Why did she feel so miserable about this? She'd never entirely approved of human beings and all their mess to begin with. Why would she have wanted to make more of them?

  Halfway up the hillside she stopped to wipe her eyes and nose on the hem of her nightshirt. When she turned back toward the cabin she understood that the moon must have risen behind her. The trees on the opposite side of the hollow were washed in brilliant white light. They glowed like a fairy forest or a hillside of white birches far from home. She breathed in slowly. This was what she had. The beauty of this awful night. She listened for small yips in the distance, something to put in her heart beside the lost phoebes and the dread of another full moon rising with no more small celebrations from her body, ever again. She kept herself still and tried to think of coyote children emerging from the forest's womb with their eyes wide open, while the finite possibilities of her own children closed their eyes, finally, on this world.

  {20}

  Old Chestnuts

  Garnett paused halfway up the hill to take a rest. His heart was beating harder than seemed entirely necessary. He could hear the grumble and whine of the boy's chain saw already at work up there. She would be there, too, by now. They'd agreed to meet at noon to work out dividing the firewood and so on, and it was fourteen after, if his watch could be trusted. Well, she could wait. He was her elder; she could have a little respect. He sat down on a log next to the creek, just for a minute.

  A damselfly lit on the tip of a horsetail reed very close to his head, near enough for him to see it well. He couldn't remember looking at one of these since he was a boy--they'd called them snake doctors--and yet, after all those years, here one was. Probably they'd been flittering around this creek all along, whether he paid them any notice or not. He leaned closer to inspect it: it was just about like a dragonfly, except that its wings folded back when it sat still instead of sticking out to the sides. This one's wings were black, not quite opaque but sheer like lace, with a pearly white dot at each wingtip. It reminded Garnett somehow of the underthings of women he'd known long ago, back when women wore garter belts and other contrivances that took some time and trouble to remove. Maybe women still did wear such things. How would he know? Ellen had been dead eight years, and for decades before that he certainly had had no occasion to learn about women's undergarments. He was a faithful man, a good Christian, and Ellen had been, too. She'd believed in the kind of sturdy cotton you could hang on the line without shame.

  Now, why on earth was he sitting here in the woods thinking about women's underthings? He felt deeply embarrassed and prayed hastily to the Lord to forgive the unpredictable frailties of an old man's mind. He found his feet and headed on up the hill.

  She was there, all right, having some kind of jolly conversation with the boy, who had put down the chain saw and fallen into her thrall as people always did. Like lambs to the slaughter, Garnett thought, but he found himself unexpectedly amused by the sight of this immense young hoodlum nodding courteously to the tiniest gray-haired woman ever to stalk the woods in a long skirt and hiking boots. They both turned to greet him.

  "Mr. Walker! Now, you remember Oda's son Jarondell, don't you?"

  "Of course. My regards to your mother." Remember Jarondell, he thought. That was a name for you. He was more likely to remember the expiration date on his can of Sevin dust.

  "We were discussing maybe taking down a few more of these leaners," she told Garnett. "As long as we've got Jarondell up here. That cherry down the path, for one. It's over so far, I'd be surprised if it
made it to the end of summer."

  Oh, dear Lord, that cherry! Garnett had forgotten all about it, had sat right under it five minutes ago when he paused to rest by the creek. He'd forgotten to worry about the tree falling on him! The thought set him nearly into a panic, so that he was much too aware of the beating of his heart. He laid a hand on his chest.

  "What's wrong? Are you attached to that cherry?" She watched him with a worried look, causing him a strong and unwelcome recollection of the day she'd bent over him in the grass and declared that he hadn't had a stroke, he had a turtle.

  "Goodness, no," he said huffily. "That's fine, you might as well take that tree down. It's a danger and a nuisance."

  She looked relieved. "Oh, I wouldn't go that far. It's just a tree." Her eyes twinkled. "Now of course you'll agree that if Jarondell gets it to fall on my side of the creek, the firewood is all mine."

  How that woman loved to aggravate him! She was like a little banty hen just spoiling for a fight. Garnett forced a smile, or the nearest thing to it. "That sounds fair."

  She gave him a second look before turning back to Oda's boy (already he'd forgotten the name). The boy stood with his muscular arms crossed and his shaved head gleaming like that Mr. Clean-Up man on Ellen's ammonia bottles, so tall and strapping that Nannie had to shade her eyes from the sun when she looked up at him, though of course that didn't slow her down any. She talked nonstop, pointing this way and that and up into the trees as they chatted (did she not realize they were paying this boy by the hour?). She seemed very interested in the process of felling trees. But of course, that was Nannie Rawley. She was interested in what your dog ate for dinner. Garnett shook his head dramatically--for no audience, it turned out, since she and the boy had already forgotten he was there. He might as well be a tree himself. When the chain saw roared up again, he had to raise his voice considerably to get her attention. "If you get the cherry," he called, "then this one is going to be mine, I gather."