Prodigal Summer: A Novel

  What might bring a Wyoming sheep rancher to the southern Appalachians at this time of year was the Mountain Empire Bounty Hunt, organized for the first time this year. It'd been held recently, she knew, around the first day of May--the time of birthing and nursing, a suitable hunting season for nothing in this world unless the goal was willful extermination. It had drawn hunters from everywhere for the celebrated purpose of killing coyotes.

  {2}

  Moth Love

  Lusa was alone, curled in an armchair and reading furtively--the only way a farmer's wife may read, it turns out--when the power of a fragrance stopped all her thoughts. In the eleventh hour of the ninth day of May, for one single indelible instant that would change everything, she was lifted out of her life.

  She closed her eyes, turning her face to the open window and breathing deeply. Honeysuckle. Lusa shut the book on her index finger. Charles Darwin on moths, that was what she'd been lost in: a description of a virgin Saturnia carpini whose scent males flocked to till they covered her cage, with several dozen even crawling down Mr. Darwin's chimney to find her. Piles of Lusa's books on the floor were shoved halfway out of sight behind this old overstuffed chair, the only spot in the house she had claimed as her own. When she first moved in she'd dragged this chair, a strange thing upholstered in antique green brocade, across the big bedroom to the tall, south-facing window, for the light. Now she leaned forward in her seat and moved her head a little to see out through the dusty screen. Far away at the opposite edge of the hayfield her eye caught on Cole's white T-shirt and then made out the rest of him there, the forward-arching line of his body. He was leaning out from the tractor seat, breaking off a branch of honeysuckle that had climbed into the cedary fencerow high enough to overhang the edge of the field. Maybe that plume of honeysuckle was just in his way. Or maybe he was breaking it off to bring back to Lusa. She liked to have a fresh spray in a jar above the kitchen sink. Survival here would be possible if only she could fill the air with scent and dispatch the stern female ghosts in that kitchen with the sweetness of an unabashed, blooming weed.

  Cole was nearly a quarter of a mile away across the bottom field, tilling the ground where they'd soon set tobacco. It seemed unbelievable that his disturbance of the branch could release a burst of scent that would reach her here at the house, but the breeze was gentle and coming from exactly the right direction. People in Appalachia insisted that the mountains breathed, and it was true: the steep hollow behind the farmhouse took up one long, slow inhalation every morning and let it back down through their open windows and across the fields throughout evening--just one full, deep breath each day. When Lusa first visited Cole here she'd listened to talk of mountains breathing with a tolerant smile. She had some respect for the poetry of country people's language, if not for the veracity of their perceptions: mountains breathe, and a snake won't die till the sun goes down, even if you chop off its head. If a snapping turtle gets hold of you, he won't let go till it thunders. But when she married Cole and moved her life into this house, the inhalations of Zebulon Mountain touched her face all morning, and finally she understood. She learned to tell time with her skin, as morning turned to afternoon and the mountain's breath began to bear gently on the back of her neck. By early evening it was insistent as a lover's sigh, sweetened by the damp woods, cooling her nape and shoulders whenever she paused her work in the kitchen to lift her sweat-damp curls off her neck. She had come to think of Zebulon as another man in her life, larger and steadier than any other companion she had known.

  But now there was her husband across the field, breaking off the honeysuckle branch to bring back to her. She was sure of it, for he'd tucked it between his thigh and the padded seat of the Kubota. Its cloud of white flowers trembled as he bounced across the plowed field, steering the tractor with both hands. His work on the lower side was nearly done. When he returned to the house for his late-morning coffee and "dinner," as she was learning to call the midday meal, she would put the honeysuckle branch in water. Maybe they could talk then; maybe she would put soup and bread on the table and eat her bitter words from earlier this morning. They argued nearly every day, but today had already been one of their worst. This morning at breakfast she'd nearly made up her mind to leave. This morning, he had wanted her to. They had used all the worst words they knew. She closed her eyes now and inhaled. She could have just let him laugh, instead, at her fondness for this weedy vine that farmers hated to see in their fencerows.

  This week's gardening column in the paper was devoted to the elimination of honeysuckle. That had been the jumping-off point for their argument:

  "'Be vigilant! The project will require repeated applications of a stout chemical defoliant,'" she'd read aloud in her version of a stupid, exaggerated mountain burr that she knew would annoy Cole. But how could she help herself? It was the county Extension agent who wrote this awful column called "Gardening in Eden," whose main concern, week after week, was with murdering things. It stirred up her impatience with these people who seemed determined to exterminate every living thing in sight. Grubbing out wild roses, shooting blue jays out of cherry trees, knocking phoebe nests out of the porch eaves to keep the fledglings from messing on the stairs: these were the pastimes of Zebulon County, reliable as the rituals of spring cleaning.

  And he had said, "If you're making fun of Zebulon County, you're making fun of me, Lusa."

  "This I need to be told?" she'd snapped. As if, sitting in this kitchen where she felt the disapproving presence of his dead mother, she could forget where he'd grown up. Cole was the youngest of six children, with five sisters who'd traveled no farther than the bottom of the hollow, where Dad Widener had deeded each daughter an acre on which to build a house when she married, meanwhile saving back the remainder of the sixty-acre farm for his only son, Cole. The family cemetery was up behind the orchard. The Wideners' destiny was to occupy this same plot of land for their lives and eternity, evidently. To them the word town meant Egg Fork, a nearby hamlet of a few thousand souls, nine churches, and a Kroger's. Whereas Lusa was a dire outsider from the other side of the mountains, from Lexington--a place in the preposterous distance. And now she was marooned behind five sisters-in-law who flanked her gravel right-of-way to the mailbox.

  Silently then, after snapping at him, she'd watched Cole eat his breakfast for a while before slapping down the offending newspaper and getting up to face her work, stepping out the kitchen door to retrieve yesterday's milk from the cool back porch. She was still in her slippers and seersucker nightshirt at that point; they hadn't been out of bed for an hour yet, and the fog was still lifting above the creek. An Io moth rested on the screen, her second-favorite moth, whose surprising underwings were the same pinkish gold as her hair. (Her favorite would always be Actias luna, ethereal green ghost of the upper forests.) "Worn out from your big night of love," she scolded, "that's what you get"--but of course he'd had no choice. All the giant silkworm family, the Ios and lunas she admired, did their eating as caterpillars and as adult moths had no mouths. What mute, romantic extravagance, Lusa thought: a starving creature racing with death to scour the night for his mate.

  She picked up the milk and handled it carefully, noting that it was nicely set, ready to separate. There wasn't but a gallon. They kept only one milk cow for the homemade butter and cream Cole liked, and milked her only in the evenings now. Lusa had shocked everyone with her proposal of eliminating the inconvenient four A.M. milking by putting up the cow with her calf in the barn overnight. She could even pasture mother and calf together and skip milking altogether if she needed to drive to Lexington for a weekend (did it take a scientist to think of this?). On days when Lusa wanted to milk, they simply pushed the calf into a pasture separate from his mother so her udder would be full by evening. Cole's sisters disapproved of this easy arrangement, but Lusa felt smug. If they'd spent their girlhoods as slaves to the twice-daily milkings, that was not Lusa's problem. She had her own ways of doing a thing. She'd neatly mastered the d
omestic side of farming in less than a year, and Cole loved her cooking more than he'd loved his mother's. Now, as she stood at the sink dipping the skimmer and watching the cream flow smoothly over the rim in a stream so thin it was nearly green, she had an inspiration: fat bouquets of savoy spinach stood ready for picking in her backdoor garden. Sauteed in butter with sliced mushrooms, a bay leaf, and this cream, they'd make for a fragrant, sensuous soup Cole would love. She could have it ready by noon when he came in for his dinner. She would concentrate on soup, then, and try to let this argument go by.

  But Cole wouldn't do it. "Why don't you write the garden column for the newspaper, Lusa?" he'd goaded her from the breakfast table. "Think of all you could teach us sorry-ass bumpkins."

  "Cole, I have to concentrate on what I'm doing here. Do we have to fight?"

  "No, dear. I'm just sorry," he said, not sorry at all, "that I'm not from someplace fancy where people keep their dogs in the house and their gardens in window boxes."

  "Will you ever let it go? Lexington's not fancy. People there just have more to read and write about than killing the honeysuckle in their hedgerows."

  "They needn't to bother. They don't have hedgerows. Every city yard I ever saw ended in the flat killing mulch of a sidewalk."

  In many species of moths, Darwin had observed, the males prefer to inhabit more open territory, while the females cling under cover. She and Cole were a biological cliche, was that it? A male and female following their separate natures? She glanced up from her waterfall of cream, wondering how to gentle down this thing between them.

  "A city person is only part of who I am," she said quietly. The lines they drew in argument were always wrong; he put her in a camp she hadn't chosen. How could he understand that she'd spent her whole sunburnt, freckled childhood trapped on lawn but longing for pasture? Spent it catching butterflies and moths, looking them up in her color-keyed book and touching all the pictures, coveting those that hid in wilder places?

  He cracked his knuckles and locked his hands behind his head. "Lusa, honey, you can take the girl out of the city, but you can't take the city out of the girl."

  "Shit," she said aloud, giving in to pure irritation. Did he actually think he was clever? She'd mishandled the skimmer and dropped it too low, right at the end, giving up most of the cream she'd just skimmed. Now it would take another half day to separate again. She tossed the skimmer into the sink. "For this I spent twenty years of my life in school." She turned to face him. "I'm sorry my education didn't prepare me to live here where the two classes of animals are food and target practice."

  "You forgot 'bait,'" he drawled.

  "It's not funny, Cole. I'm so alone here. You have no idea."

  He picked up the paper and folded it back to the beef prices. So that would be that. Her loneliness was her own problem, and she knew it. The only people she ever talked to, besides Cole, were all in Lexington. When he suggested that she make friends here, she could picture only the doe-eyed, aggressively coiffed women she saw in Kroger's, and then she'd run to the phone to snipe about small-town life with Arlie and Hal, her former lab mates. But lately their support had run out on Lusa, to the tune of embarrassing phone bills: What's the problem, exactly? You're not happy, so walk away, you've got feet. Get back here while you can still recover your grant money.

  She set herself to the task of sterilizing the milk utensils, trying to forget Arlie and Hal. Her former and present lives were so different that she couldn't even hold one in her mind as she lived the other. It embarrassed her to try. Instead she soothed herself with an ancient litany: Actias luna, Hyalophora cecropia, Automeris io, luna, cecropia, Io, the giant saturniid moths, silken creatures that bore the names of gods into Zebulon's deep hollows and mountain slopes. Most people never knew what wings beat at their darkened windows while they slept.

  It was just one more thing she couldn't talk about--her education, which far outstripped her husband's. Cole's standard joke: "I loved education so much, I repeated every grade I could." And Lusa had never, ever believed his self-deprecation. From the day they'd first met at the University of Kentucky she'd recognized him as a scholar of his own kind. Cole was there for a workshop on integrated pest management. A group of farmers in this county had raised the tuition and sent him to Lexington knowing Cole would ignore the claptrap and bring back to them anything worth knowing. Their confidence was justified. He'd not been automatically impressed with Lusa's status as a postdoctoral assistant, but had pressed her with questions when he saw how well she knew the gelechid moths, denizens of a grain crop in storage. His eyes, the blue of a rainless summer sky, had begun to follow her in a way that either alarmed or flattered her, she couldn't say which. She'd showed him her lab and her father's larger one in the same building, where he studied the pheromones of codling moths, notorious pests of apple trees. The laboratory moths lived scrutinized lives in glass boxes where scientists learned to fool the males into mating with scent-baited traps so their virgin brides might vainly cover the world's apples with empty, harmless eggs.

  Later on (but not much), Lusa and Cole had slept together in her apartment on Euclid Street. Cole made love like a farmer, which is not to say he was coarse. On the contrary, he had a fine intelligence for the physical that drove him toward her earthy scents, seeking out with his furred mouth her soft, damp places, turning her like fresh earth toward the glory of new growth. Her body, which she'd always considered too short and hourglass-curved to be taken seriously, became something new in the embrace of a man who judged breeding animals with his hands. He gave her to know what she'd never before understood: she was voluptuous.

  She told him about the scent cues animals use to find and identify their mates. Pheromones. That delighted him. "So it's all about sex. All you people in that laboratory, all the livelong day. And getting paid for it."

  "Guilty," she confessed. "I study moth love."

  He was interested in moth love. More interested still when she explained to him that even humans seem to rely on certain pheromonal cues, though most have little inclination to know the details. Cole would, she thought. Cole, the man who buried his face in every fold of her skin to inhale her scent. He could only love sex more if he had antennae the shape of feathers, like a moth, for combing the air around her, and elaborately branched coremata he could evert from his abdomen for the purpose of calling back to her with his own scent.

  He'd asked, "When you fall in love with somebody for no apparent reason you can think of, then, is that what's going on? The pheromones?"

  "Maybe," she'd answered. "Probably."

  He'd rolled onto his back then and locked his fingers behind his head, providing her with an opportunity to study him from close range. He was astonishingly large. His shoulders, his hands, the plane of his broad, flat stomach and chest--all of him made her feel tiny and delicate. Here was a happy giant, naked in her bed.

  "Tell me this, then," he said. "How come a woman will do everything humanly possible to cover up what she really smells like?"

  "I have no idea." Lusa had wondered this before, of course. Even shaving armpits defeats the purpose. The whole point of pubic hair is to increase the surface area for scent molecules, and she told him so.

  "Damn if this isn't another thing entirely, sleeping with a lady scientist," he'd declared, smiling at her with a face she'd already begun to think about missing. Damn if he wasn't another thing entirely. And soon he would be gone, the happy, earnest enormity of him, his closely trimmed beard that marked lines on his jaw and up the center of his chin to his wonderful mouth. His beard made her think of the nectar guides on the throats of flowers that show bees the path to the sweet place where nectar resides.

  Her Euclid apartment had seemed to suit him so well that he delayed his departure for two days after the seminar's end. They hardly left her bed, in fact, and she had to call her lab to claim sudden illness. She was on the verge of asking him--not out of guile, but just for curiosity--whether he habitually slept with
women he'd just met, when he proposed marriage. Lusa was speechless. For the next year he courted her with an intensity that caused her to ovulate during his visits. She began taking real care, lest a pregnancy too close to their wedding provide his relatives with the goods on Lusa they seemed to want. Her mother's language had an expression for people like Cole's sisters: "Born with ten fingers so they can count to nine."

  Cole had finished his breakfast now and glanced up at Lusa as he lit a cigarette. He seemed startled to find her staring at him. "What?" he asked.

  "I was just remembering how much we used to like each other."

  "Oh, I forgot to tell you. Herb will be up later this morning to borrow the pressure sprayer. Don't be surprised to see him digging in the storeroom."

  She glared. This was typical Cole, to answer an appeal to his emotional core by appearing not to have one. "I don't want Herb in our storeroom," she replied flatly. "So. I guess I'll have to go down to the barn and dig it out myself."

  "What for? Herb knows what a pressure sprayer looks like. Hell, he's the one talked me into buying it, and now he uses it more than I do."

  "And on his way to finding it he'll be handling my collecting funnels and insect nets, storing up tales for Mary Edna to whisper to Hannie-Mavis by way of Lois and Emaline. No thank you."

  Cole leaned back in his chair, smiling. "The three most efficient means of communication: telegraph, telephone, tell a Widener woman."

  "I used to think that was funny. Before their favorite subject was me."

  "They don't mean any harm."

  "Do you really believe that?" She shook her head, turning her back on him. They did mean her harm. They had from the beginning. Since she'd become mistress of their family home last June, they'd had little to say to her and everything to say about her. Before Lusa herself ever set foot in the Kroger's or the hardware store, she was already known as a Lexington girl who got down on all fours to name the insects in the parlor rather than squashing them.