Pigs in Heaven - Barbara Kingsolver [48]
“Those quills ought to pass on through without much trouble,” he tells Rose. “My girls used to swallow pennies and all kinds of things, you’d be surprised. They always turned up. You could tell Willie to give them back when he’s done.”
“Maybe I’ll do that,” Rose says. “Hand them over to Mr. Crittenden in a little paper sack.” Cash can tell she is smiling; he knows Rose’s voice, its plump amusement and thinned-out resentments, because so often he is looking at something else while she speaks to him.
He met her, or rather saw her first, in the window of the Trading Post. He made a habit of pecking on the glass and winking at her each day on his way to work, which apparently won her heart, since she says she feels like a plastic dummy up there on display. Mr. Crittenden makes her sit at a little antique schoolroom desk in the bay-window storefront, where tourists can behold a genuine Indian hunched over her beadwork, squinting in the bad glare. Presumably they will be impressed or moved by pity to come inside.
Rose’s beadwork is unimpressive, close up. She’s nothing close to a full-blooded Indian, that’s her excuse, but she could learn the more complicated patterns Cash does, if she cared to. It’s a skill you acquire, like tuning an engine. The things you have to be an Indian to know, in Cash’s experience—how to stretch two chickens and a ham over sixty relatives, for example—are items of no interest in the tourist trade.
He gets up to take his bread out of the oven and start dinner. Cash has discovered cooking in his old age, since moving away from his sisters and aunts, and according to Rose he acts like he invented the concept. She doesn’t seem to mind eating what he cooks, though—she’s here more nights than she’s not. While she smokes at the kitchen table, Cash unpacks the things he brought home from the Health Corral, lining them up: six crimson bell peppers, five white potatoes, six orange carrots. He imagines putting all these colors on a needle, and wishes his life were really as bright as this instant.
“Looky here, girl,” he says, waving a bell pepper at Rose.
“Cash, you watch out,” she says. The pepper is deformed with something like testicles. Cash gets to bring home produce that is too organic even for the health-food crowd. In his tiny apartment behind this tourist town’s back, Cash feeds on stews of bell peppers with genitals and carrots with arms and legs.
He spreads newspapers on the table and sits to peel his potatoes. He feels comforted by the slip-slip-slip of his peeler and the potatoes piling up like clean dry stones. “Somebody come in the store today and told me how to get rich,” he says.
“Well, from what I hear you’ve gotten rich fifty times over, except for the money part,” Rose says.
“No, now listen. In the store we sell these shampoos they make with ho-hoba. It’s this natural business the girls want now. A fellow come in today and says he’s all set up down in Arizona to grow ho-hoba beans on his farm. They’ll just grow in the dirt desert, they don’t need nothing but a poor patch of ground and some sunshine. I’ll bet you can buy you a piece of that land for nothing.”
“Why would somebody sell it for nothing if they could get rich growing shampoo beans on it?”
“It takes five years before the plants start to bear, that’s the hitch. Young people don’t have that much patience.”
“And old people don’t have that much time.”
“I’ve got my whole retirement ahead of me. And I know how to make things grow. It could work out good.”
“Like the silver foxes did,” Rose says, slicing him carelessly. In January, before the tourist jobs opened up, Cash skinned foxes. With frozen fingers he tore the delicate membranes that held pelt to flesh, earning his own pair to breed. It seems like a dream to him now, that he believed he could