Pigs in Heaven - Barbara Kingsolver [134]
“You’re right,” Taylor says. “A jet plane.”
“Why is it doing that?”
Taylor wonders which level of answer Turtle wants. Why does a jet churn up white dust in the sky? (She doesn’t know.) Or, what is this particular jet’s motivation? (This, maybe nobody knows.)
“Remember in Dorothy, when the witch wrote in the sky?”
“Yeah, I do,” Taylor says. “In the Wizard of Oz. She wrote, ‘Surrender Dorothy.’ ”
“Did that mean they were supposed to give Dorothy to the witch?”
“That’s what she was asking for. Yeah.”
“Are you going to give me to the Indians?”
“No. I’ll never do that. But I think we have to go back and talk to them. Are you scared?”
“Yeah.”
“Me too.”
29
The Secret of Creation
CASH MOVES THROUGH HIS KITCHEN the way a lanky squirrel might, if a squirrel could cook: stepping quickly from sink to stove, pausing, sensing the air. By comparison, Alice feels like the lazy squirrel wife, sitting at the table separating hickory nuts from their crushed shells. “Slow down, Cash,” she tells him, smiling. “You’re making my eyes hurt.”
“I always do that to women,” he says. “I’m just ugly, is all.”
“Pish posh, you are not.” Alice picks a nearly whole nut from the curled chambers of its shell and drops it into the bowl. For reasons she couldn’t explain, the naked, curled little nuts remind her of babies waiting to get born.
Cash told her this log cabin was the original dwelling on his family’s homestead. It has stood empty for years, and seemed the right size for him when he came back from Wyoming. It’s all one room, with a kitchen at one end and a pair of parlor chairs flanking the lace curtain on the other end. For the summer he’s moved his bed out to the porch, for air. His rifle, his toothbrush, and a lucky horseshoe hang over the stone fireplace. The cabin seems sturdy enough to stand through a tornado, or small enough to be overlooked by one in favor of the larger house that was built later on, where Letty now lives. The cabin has been occupied by most of Letty’s children at one time or another; they were the ones who installed plumbing and strung out the electrical wire, which now supplies Cash’s few light bulbs and—Alice was distressed to note—the little TV set that squats on the kitchen counter amongst the bowls and flour canisters. He did shut it off right away when she came in. She’ll hand him that much.
“You don’t have to get all them shells out. Just the big pieces,” he tells her. “Are you watching this, now? You got to know how to make kunutche, if you’re going to sign up to be Cherokee here in a while.”
“Is that right? Will they give me a test?”
“Oh, I think so, probably. But if you decide not to enroll, then don’t bother learning. No yonega would fool around with a thing that’s this much trouble.”
“Maybe I oughtn’t to, then, and just go on letting you do all the work.” Alice is startled to hear what she’s just said, words that contain a presumption about the future. If Cash is in any way riled, he doesn’t show it. He dumps the nuts with a clatter into a dented metal bucket and pounds them deftly with a wooden club, making a steady gritch-gritch like a cow chewing. The pounding club resembles a sawed-off baseball bat. Alice saw one in Sugar’s kitchen and had no earthly notion what kind of cooking implement it might be. It looked so forceful.
“You pound it till it’s powder, that’s the way you start out,” Cash instructs. “Then you roll it into balls about yay big.” He holds up his right fist, wrist forward, to show her, looking to see that she has understood. “There’s enough oil in it so it holds together good.” He turns back to pounding, and goes on talking with a slightly breathless rhythm over the nutty gritching