Pigs in Heaven - Barbara Kingsolver [9]
The rescuers look like miners, blacked with grit. The rope that connects them waist to waist went down at dawn in yellow coils, but now is coming up black. Only the clinking buckles of their climbing gear catch the sun.
The stretcher comes out of the hole as a long, stiff oval, like a loaf shoved from the oven. Lucky Buster is wrapped in rubber rescue blankets and strapped down tightly from forehead to ankles with black canvas straps, so he bulges in sections. He can’t stop blinking his eyes. That crowd on the fence is the brightest thing he has ever seen.
3
The True Stories
TEN O’CLOCK IN KENTUCKY: the sun has barely started thinking about Arizona. She can’t call yet. Alice has been cleaning out her kitchen cabinets since dawn. She saw something on the early-morning news that disturbed her and she needs to talk to Taylor. Time zones are a mean trick, she feels, surely invented by someone whose family all lived under one roof.
Cardboard boxes crowd the linoleum floor like little barges bristling with their cargo: pots and pans, Mason jars, oven mitts, steak knives, more stuff than Alice can imagine she ever needed. The mood she’s in, she’s ready to turn out the cookstove. She doubts Harland would notice if she stopped cooking altogether. When she met him he was heating up unopened cans of Campbell’s soup in a big pot of water every night. It amazed her to see the cans rolling around like logs in the boiling water. “Don’t they bust?” she asked him, and he shyly put his hand on hers and allowed as how sometimes they did. His idea of a home-cooked meal is when you open the can first and pour it in a saucepan. Alice has been wasting her talents.
With aggressive strokes of her cleaning rag she reaches back into a high cabinet, feeling her Bermuda shorts slide up her thighs where the veins have turned a helpless blue. She’s exposing herself to no one at the moment, but still feels embarrassed that her circulatory system has to start showing this way. Getting old is just a matter of getting easier to see through, until all your failing insides are in plain view and everyone’s business. Even the ads aimed at old people are embarrassing: bathroom talk. You’re expected to pull yourself inside-out like a sleeve and go public with your hemorrhoids.
It’s hard for Alice to picture the portion of her life that still lies ahead. Her friend Lee Shanks saw a religious call-in show about turning your life around through Creative Imaging, and Lee has been trying ever since to image a new Honda Accord. But when Alice closes her eyes she sees, at the moment, Mason jars. She knows that no woman with varicose veins and a brain in her head would walk away from a decent husband, but she’s going to anyway. Aloneness is her inheritance, like the deep heartline that breaks into match sticks across her palm. The Stamper women might sometimes think they’re getting somewhere, nailing themselves down to kin, but some mystery always cuts them loose from people in the long run. Her mother used to tromp around the farm with her eyes on the sky as if some sign up there said: FREEDOM AND HAPPINESS THIS WAY, AT THE END OF THE LONELY ROAD.
Alice never wanted to be like her. She married young and misguided but with every intention of staying with her first husband, Foster Greer. She met him in a juke joint at the edge of the woods by the Old Miss slaughter pen, and on that very first night he danced her out to the parking lot and told her he was going to take her away from that smell. Between the hog farm and the slaughter pen Alice had lived her whole life within a perimeter of stench, and didn’t know what he meant. It amazed her to discover that air, on its own, was empty of odor. She breathed through her nose again and again like an addict high on a new drug, and in the narrow parting of a highway cut through cypress swamps they drove all the way to New Orleans before breakfast. Even now