Pigs in Heaven - Barbara Kingsolver [78]
18
Natural Systems
ALONG THE HIGHWAY THE CORNFIELDS lie newly flayed, mile after mile, their green skin pulled back to reveal Oklahoma’s flesh of orange velvet dirt. The uncultivated hills nearby show off a new summer wardrobe of wildflowers. The massed reds flecked with gold are Indian blanket; Cash recalls this name with pleasure, like a precious possession lost and retrieved. He fixes the radio on the sweet, torn voice of George Jones and breathes deeply of the air near home.
A woman in the Oklahoma Welcome Station told him that schoolkids take up collections of pennies to buy the wildflower seeds. Cash had thought wildflowers just grew. He considers this now as he drives, and decides maybe they just tell the kids they use their money for wildflowers. So the little ones can look out the car window and think they did all that with their pennies.
Cash hums along with George, who is gloating about putting a gold ring on the right left hand this time. He thinks briefly of Rose, back in Jackson Hole, admiring the rear ends of boys in McDonald’s; he wonders how quickly she’ll forget about his tired, flat hind end altogether. He doesn’t much care. He is headed back to the home he never should have left, and right now he feels the possibility of fresh love for his own life. When he stopped for the restroom at the welcome station, he gazed at the educational display of the seven different types of barbed-wire and felt he could leap over all seven in one bound.
As he nears the Arkansas River and Cherokee country, the fields give way to trees and there are more varieties of living things, it seems: scissortail birds snipping over the meadows catching bugs, and big-headed kingfishers sitting on high lines overlooking the river. He drives into the outskirts of Tahlequah, through the motel strip along the Muskogee Highway and then into the older, pretty part of town. The old brick courthouse and the seminary building and all the old oaks haven’t changed. The main road leads him out again, into the woods.
At a bend in the road outside Locust Grove, Cash is moved by the sight of a little field with a heartbreaking hedgerow of wild pink roses and one small, sweet hickory in the center, left standing because the Cherokee man or woman who plowed that field wouldn’t cut down a hickory. He keeps an eye out, afraid to miss one single sight as he makes his way. Crowds of black-eyed susans stand up to be counted, and five beagles sit side by side in someone’s yard, reverent as a choir, blessing his overdue return.
Annawake is first aware of a rectangle of brightness framing the window shade, then the pile of quilts arguing on her bed: wild geese, double wedding ring, trip around the world, stitched by three different aunts who quarreled, when they were alive, about which pattern was best. And there is something under the quilts, a lump, stealing along like a mole beneath the garden. Annawake reaches behind her head, pulls herself to a half situp, and conks the lump with a pillow. It flattens and giggles. She pulls out a naked Annie.
“I found a rat in my bed. What am I going to do with this rat?” She covers Annie’s face with kisses. When she exhausts her affectionate assault, Annie lies on her back next to Annawake and sucks her thumb with a contented, arrogant air.
“You got kicked out of Millie’s bed, didn’t you.”
Annie nods.
“That’s because there’s another baby now. You’ve moved up in the world. Now you get to be a big sister. Doesn’t that sound fun?”
Annie shakes her head.
“I don’t blame you. Who needs it?” Annawake lies on her back too. They both look for a while at the ceiling, which is decorated with a few unwelcome suggestions of mildew. Before Annawake finished law school and moved back to Tahlequah, Millie doubled up the kids into the front room, mounted a convulsing stepladder and scrubbed this room to within an inch of its life. But there has been rain since then, and the roof is older than anyone living under it.
Dellon pokes his head in the door. “There