Prodigal Summer: A Novel

  "My sisters have more to do than to sit around hating you," Cole insisted.

  "Your sisters haven't learned my name yet."

  "Lusa, come on."

  "You ask them. I'll give you ten dollars if one of them gets it right--the whole thing, Lusa Maluf Landowski. They make a show of not being able to remember it. You think I'm kidding? Lois evidently told Oda Black my maiden name was Zucchini."

  "Now, that can't be."

  "Oda was clucking that she could see why I'd rushed you to the altar to be rid of that." She watched his face, trying to see if he even understood this humiliation. Lusa had kept her own name when they married, but it hadn't mattered: everyone called her Mrs. Widener, as if there were no Lusa at all.

  "Well, in spite of despising you with all her heart," he said patiently, "Lois invited us down for a big supper Memorial Day. She wants us all to go out to the cemetery in the afternoon to decorate Mommy's and Dad's graves."

  Lusa cocked her head, curious. "When did she call?"

  "Last night."

  "The whole family's invited? How can Lois do that? Her kitchen's the size of a phone booth."

  "It was much bigger before the ruffles and plastic ducks prevailed."

  Lusa had to smile.

  He gestured. "Here's the kitchen. Why don't you ever invite everybody up here?"

  Lusa stared at him, slack-jawed.

  "Well, what?"

  She shook her head. "How can you possibly be so dumb? How can you sit there in the middle of this hurricane of hateful women and act like it's a nice, sunny day out?"

  "What?"

  She marched to the corner cabinet in the dining room and returned with a particular china plate, which she held up like a flash card. "This means nothing to you?"

  "It's your wedding china."

  Her wedding china, true--it had been her family's, a pattern from England with delicately tinted botanical paintings of flowers and their pollinators. But did they have to scorn everything she loved? "You don't recall what happened at the dinner I had here last July, a month after we married? The birthday party for you that I spent about two weeks cooking, without help, in my first failed attempt to impress your family?"

  "No."

  "Let me help you out. Picture your eldest sister. Picture her sitting in that chair, blue hair and all, forgive me, wearing a face that would curdle milk. Picture me serving her dinner on this plate, right here."

  He laughed. "I recall Mary Edna took a bite of potatoes and saw a black widow or something underneath and screamed."

  "It was the wing of a sphinx moth. A painting of a sphinx moth. I would not have china with black widows on it. And she didn't scream, she laid down her fork and crossed her hands like a corpse and has refused my invitations ever since. Even Thanksgiving, Cole, for God's sake. In your family home, where you and your sisters have eaten every Thanksgiving dinner of your lives, prior to the mortal offense committed by your wife against Her Majesty Mary Edna."

  "Let the rest of them come without Mary Edna, then. She's always made too much of herself for being the oldest."

  "They won't come without Mary Edna."

  He shrugged. "Well, then, maybe they're just country folks that don't understand plates with bugs and fancy Latin words printed on them. Maybe they're scared they'll use the wrong fork."

  "Damn you, Cole. Damn your whole family, if all you can do is ridicule me." She grew hot in the face and felt like smashing the plate for effect, but the gesture would be all wrong. The plate seemed more valuable than the marriage.

  "Oh, Lord," he clucked. "They warned me about marrying a redhead."

  "Shuchach!" she muttered, sinking her teeth into the harsh Arabic consonants as she stomped into the dining room to put the plate away. Lusa was embarrassed by her tears, shamed that the spurned invitations still stung. Too many times in this past year she had hung up the phone and walked around in circles on the braided rug in the parlor, a grown, married woman with a degree in entomology, sobbing like a child. How could she care so much what they thought of her? Any girl who pursued the study of insects had learned to ignore public opinion. But what she couldn't bear, then or now, was the implied belief that she was a curiosity, a nonsense of a woman. Lusa feared in retrospect that she'd judged her own father the same way, pitied him for being such a bitter, unworldly man, for devoting himself to agriculture in disinfected laboratories smelling of ether. Both her parents had come from farming lineages, but they had no more acquaintance with actual farm work than could be gleaned on a Sunday drive through the racehorse pastures east of Fayette County.

  Lusa had wanted to be different. She'd craved to shock people with her love of crawling things and her sweat. She could still feel the childhood desire in her body, a girl bending close to breathe on the mirror when hard play on summer days dampened her strawberry hair into dark-brown tendrils against her face. As a woman, she'd jumped at an unexpected chance: to be a farmer's partner.

  She'd never expected the strange, effete legacy that followed her here to Zebulon, where her new relatives considered her old ones to be a family of fools who kept insect pests alive in glass boxes, on purpose.

  She returned to the kitchen without looking at him. If he could act like this wasn't tearing him apart, she could do the same. "Check," she said. "Do not serve anything to a Widener on bug plates. I'll remember that. And check, open the door to Herb the great and glorious varmint killer when he comes to rifle through my storeroom for the pressure sprayer." Herb and Mary Edna were a perfect marriage, in Lusa's opinion: the one was exactly as superior and tactless as the other.

  "What in the world does that mean?" Cole asked.

  "Do you know what Hannie-Mavis told me yesterday? She said one time Herb found a den of coyotes up in the woods above his fence line, a mother and a litter of nursing babies. She said he put a bullet in every one of their heads, right in their den."

  Cole gave her a blank look.

  "Is that true?" she demanded. "Did you know about it?"

  "Why bring up the subject?"

  "When was it? Recently?"

  "No-oh. It was way last spring, I think. Around the time your mother got sick. Before the wedding, anyway. That's why you didn't know about it."

  "Oh, back that long ago. So it doesn't matter now."

  He sighed. "Lusa, they were meat-eating animals setting up camp on a dairy farm. What do you think Herb's going to do, give his profits away to the wolves?"

  "Not wolves, coyotes."

  "Same thing."

  "Not the same thing. Did it occur to anybody to be interested in the idea of coyotes being here, two thousand miles or something from the Grand Canyon?"

  "I expect he was interested in what they eat. Such as a newborn calf."

  "If that's even what they were--coyotes--which I doubt, knowing Herb's eyesight. I also doubt if he shot them, to tell you the truth. I bet he missed. I hope he missed."

  "Herb proposition, I will not argue with that. But if you care to know my end of it, Lusa, I hope he got them."

  "You and everybody else in the county. I know. If Herb didn't get them, somebody else will." She wished she were dressed. She felt vulnerable and unconvincing in her nightshirt. She went back out to the porch, letting the screen door slam behind her. She set the milk back into the cooler to reseparate and noticed that the Io moth was still hanging on the porch screen. She reached up and gently slapped the screen where it clung. "Better fly on out of here," she said. "No insect is safe around here." She watched the moth flare open, showing its watermelon-colored underwings with their startling pair of black pupils. An owl's eyes, she thought, a perfect likeness. Pity the little bird that opens its mouth for a bite of moth and gets stared in the face by that. Jolly old life, full of surprises.

  She returned to the kitchen with a jar of last summer's tomatoes in each hand; instead of the soup she would make imam bayildi, her mother's stuffed-vegetable recipe, which Lusa herself much preferred to anything milky. Cole wasn't crazy a
bout imam bayildi. He was even skeptical of spaghetti, which he called an "Eye-talian" dish. But it was his fault she'd lost the cream, so fine, then, let him eat foreign food. I've stooped to this, she thought. The former National Science Foundation scholar with the most coveted postgraduate fellowship in her department now wields her influence on the world through acts of vengeful cooking.

  His whole big exasperating person was still there at the table, smoking cigarettes. Arcs of pale ash stretched like starry nebulae across the dark tabletop between his left hand and the ugly tin ashtray balanced halfway off the table. The whole scene looked like something she'd like to wad up and throw away. It wasn't like Cole to be this slow getting out to his cattle and his tractor. It was a full hour past dawn now; the sun was well up. Was he that determined to vex her?

  "What does Herb want with our pressure sprayer, anyway?" she asked.

  "I don't know. No, I do know. He said they're exterminating at the church. They've got some kind of bees moved into the walls, Mary Edna said."

  "Oh, that's perfect. Exterminating God's creatures down at the church. It's a good thing God didn't leave Herb and Mary Edna in charge of Noah's ark. They'd fumigate it first, and then they'd sink it."

  He refused to laugh. "Lusa, honey, where you come from maybe they think it'd be nice to have a church full of bees. People get sentimental in a place where nature's already been dead for fifty years, so they can all get to mourning it like some relative they never knew. But out here he's alive and kicking and still on his bender."

  "My husband, the poet. Nature is an uncle with a drinking problem."

  He shook his head. "That's how it is. You have to persuade it two steps back every day or it will move in and take you over." Cole could fend off her condescension with astonishing ease. He had his own I-can-put-up-with-this tone of voice that made Lusa want to scream her red head off.

  "Take over what?" she said, trembling to hold back a rage. "You're nature, I'm nature. We shit, we piss, we have babies, we make messes. The world will not end if you let the honeysuckle have the side of your barn."

  We have babies? I didn't notice, his look seemed to say. But he asked her instead, "Why tolerate a weed when you can nip it in the bud?"

  Every word they said to each other was wrong, every truth underneath it unsayable, unfindable. Their kindnesses had grown stale, and their jokes were all old chestnuts, too worn out for use. Lusa threw down the dish towel, feeling suffocated in cliches. "You have a nice day out there in the big woolly jungle. I'm going to go do your laundry. Your damn cigarettes are stinking up the kitchen."

  "While you're cursing tobacco, you might consider it was last year's crop that bought your new washer and dryer."

  "Yil'an deenuk!" she shouted from the hallway.

  "If my Ay-rab mama had taught me to swear, I wouldn't be proud of it," he called back.

  Ay-rab mama, Polack daddy--he held this against her too, apparently, along with the rest of his family. But hadn't she ridiculed his accent, his background? And yet neither of them, truly, was that kind of person. Layers of contempt crouched camouflaged beneath one another until it was too much to sort out--if she and Cole were married a hundred years they'd still be fighting without knowing why. She felt sick and defeated, stomping from room to room to collect cast-off shirts or socks they'd shed in the downstairs rooms (some were hers). There was nothing to say, but still they said it, the honeysuckle and the tobacco. In less than a year of marriage they'd already learned to move from one argument to the next, just like the creek that ran down the mountain into this hollow, flowing out of its banks into the ruts of their driveway, then back again into its creek bed at the bottom of the valley. Arguments could fill a marriage like water, running through everything, always, with no taste or color but lots of noise.

  Bitter Creek, that stream was named, and the hollow running up the back of their farm into the National Forest, people called Bitter Hollow. Perfect. I am too young to feel this way, she thought, trudging upstairs to collect the rest of the laundry while he headed out to till the bottom field. How would it be in ten years? Had she really wanted so badly all her life to live on a farm? A bird in the hand loses its mystery in no time flat. Now she felt like a frontier mail-order bride, hardly past her wedding and already wondering how she could have left her city and beloved career for the narrow place a rural county holds open for a farmer's wife.

  It was only four hours later, in the eleventh hour of the ninth of May, as the dryer clicked and droned downstairs and she sat beside her bedroom window reading, that Lusa's life turned over on this one simple thing: a potent rise of scent as her young husband reached out his muscled arm for a branch of flowers. Here was what she'd forgotten about, the full, straight truth of their attachment. Her heart emptied of words, for once, and filled with a new species of feeling. Even if he never reached the house, if his trip across the field was disastrously interrupted by the kind of tractor accident that felled farmers in this steep county, she would still have had a burst of fragrance reaching across a distance to explain Cole's position in the simplest terms conceivable.

  Lusa sat still and marveled: This is how moths speak to each other. They tell their love across the fields by scent. There is no mouth, the wrong words are impossible, either a mate is there or he's not, and if so the pair will find each other in the dark.

  For several more minutes her hands lay motionless on her book while she considered a language that could carry nothing but love and simple truth.

  Ten days later the marriage would reach its end. When it came, Lusa would look back to that moment at the window and feel the chill of its prescience.

  No one would have called it a premonition, exactly; Cole's tractor did not overturn. And it wasn't tobacco that killed him, or at least not smoking. She could have allowed him the pleasure of two packs a day, it would have made no difference in the long run, since there was to be no long run. Tobacco's failure was partly to blame, though--the drop in price supports that had pressed him to take part-time work driving grain deliveries for Southern States. Lusa knew this outside job shamed him as a farmer, even though there was hardly a family in the whole valley that got by solely on farm profits. For Cole the failure was not simply one of money, but of attachment. He hated being away from the farm for even one night when he had to make a run over the Blue Ridge and down into North Carolina. She had told him they could find the money elsewhere--maybe by borrowing against next year's cattle, though he mistrusted debt, and the new tractor had already put them in deep. Or she could teach at the community college in Franklin. (Would that also shame him? She wasn't sure.) She was thinking of that, picturing herself with a class of nursing students in a biology lab, just before the sheriff drove up to inform the next of kin.

  It was very early, a damp dawn that had committed itself to nothing yet, still perfectly windless and scentless. May nineteenth, still a nothing of a day, though the date would never again pass unnoticed, after this. She was standing at the same upstairs window watching fog drift up the edges of the fields, uphill along the hedgerows, like the ghost of some ancient river whose tributaries no longer heeded gravity. There was a strange quality to these mornings when Cole was away and she woke up here alone; she was free. As free and disembodied as a ghost. She focused her eyes out in the middle distance of the yard, where she could see the frenzied movement of nocturnal insects in the shadows, noctuid moths looping crazily through the last minutes of this night's search for a mate.

  When she saw Tim Boyer's sedan with its seal on the side, she understood. If he were just hurt, in a hospital, that was something Tim could have stopped down below to tell. He could have given the news to Lois or Mary Edna first. This was a different mission--requiring notice to the wife. She knew why. Did not know the details--would never know some of them, in fact. The damage to the body was of the kind that sisters and brothers-in-law discuss at length but wives are never told about. But she knew enough.

  Now, she thought, her body goi
ng cold, as the long white car moved so slowly up the driveway that she could hear the individual pops as the gravel shifted beneath the tires. Right now, from here on everything changes.

  But that would not be true. Her decision and all the rest of her days would turn not on the moment when she understood that Cole was dead, but on an earlier time at that same window when she'd received his wordless message by scent across a field.

  {3}

  Old Chestnuts

  Eight years a widower, Garnett still sometimes awoke disoriented and lost to the day. It was because of the large empty bed, he felt; a woman was an anchor. Lacking a wife, he had turned to his God for solace, but sometimes a man also needed the view out his window.

  Garnett sat up slowly and bent toward the light, seeing as much with his memory as with his eyes. There was the gray fog of dawn in this wet hollow, lifted with imperious slowness like the skirt of an old woman stepping over a puddle. There were the barn and slat-sided grain house, built by his father and grandfather in another time. The grass-covered root cellar still bulged from the hillside, the two windows in its fieldstone face staring out of the hill like eyes in the head of a man. Every morning of his life, Garnett had saluted that old man in the hillside with the ivy beard crawling out of his chin and the forelock of fescue hanging over his brow. As a boy, Garnett had never dreamed of being an old man himself, still looking at these sights and needing them as badly as a boy needs the smooth lucky chestnut in his pocket, the talisman he rubs all day just to make sure it's still there.

  The birds were starting up their morning chorus. They were in full form now, this far into the spring. What was it now, the nineteenth of May? Full form and feather. He listened. The prothalamion, he had named this in his mind years ago: a song raised up to connubial union. There were meadowlarks and chats, field sparrows, indigo buntings, all with their heads raised to the dawn and their hearts pressed into clear liquid song for their mates. Garnett held his face in his hands for just a moment. As a boy he had never dreamed of an age when there was no song left, but still some heart.