Pigs in Heaven - Barbara Kingsolver [99]
“Probably is. You might find marijuana, too.” Sugar giggles.
The forest opens before them onto a grassy park with a long bank sloping down to the creek. Where the water is deep it stands a cool, turquoise blue. A steep limestone cliff pocked with caves rises behind the creek, and above the cliff, a wooded hill. Alice and Sugar stand a long time looking.
“I’ll bet there’s crawdads right in there.” Sugar points to the shallows.
Alice feels herself relax, looking at the water. Bright orange dragonflies zip low and dive and stab their tails at their own reflections, then light in the rushes, transforming all that energy into perfect stillness. The sunlight reflected upward from the water lights the undersides of Sugar’s and Alice’s faces and the broad hickory leaves above them, as if they’re all on a stage. “I can see why you’d call it Heaven,” she says.
“Oh, this isn’t the good one yet. This one they call the mushrat hole. I guess they used to trap a lot of mushrat and mink down here. Heaven’s on down the trail a little bit,” Sugar says, and she strikes out again downstream.
When Alice arrives in Heaven at last, a little breathless, she instantly begins to worry about boys cracking their skulls. Sugar is right, this blue hole is clearer, much larger and deeper, and the limestone cliff is alive with children leaping like frogs into the water. Sugar stands without a trace of worry on her face, watching small boys, most of whom are presumably her descendants, dive off twenty- and thirty-foot rocks. Some of the kids are barely past toddler age; they have more trouble climbing up the bank than jumping off. Alice is astonished. “Don’t you worry about them?” she asks.
“Nobody’s ever got drowned here,” Sugar says. “They do sometimes up in the river, but not here.”
The kids have noticed the two women; they wave their arms in wide arcs, shouting, “Hi, Grandma!” Sugar waves back, not very energetically, Alice thinks, as if it is no big deal to her to be acknowledged publicly by grandsons. Several older children stand knee-deep in water farther down the bank, fishing, and they, too, wave at Sugar. One boy crosses the creek and makes his way toward them carrying a heavy string of fish. He lays the fish on the grass in front of Sugar, just exactly the way Alice’s old cat used to bring birds to lay at her doorstep. Alice can’t get over what she is seeing: adolescent boys being polite. Even more than polite, they are demonstrating love.
Sugar makes over the fish. “Where’d you get all these? You must have been down here since Friday.”
“No,” he says, embarrassed. He is a stocky, long-haired teenager with broad shoulders and a gold razor blade on a chain hanging on his bare chest.
“What kind of fish are they?” Alice asks.
“The purple ones are perch,” he tells her politely. “These are goggle-eyes. They go under rocks. The ones with the pink fins are chub.” He turns back to Sugar, animated. “We caught a snapping turtle in the mud. Leon poked a stick at it and it bit it and wouldn’t turn loose. We just pulled it right out of the water. Those things are stout.”
“They’ll give you a stout bite, too, if you don’t leave them be.”
“I’ll clean these and bring them up later, Grandma.”
“Okay, Stand. Bring me some watercress, too. I see some growing down there by them red rocks.”
“Okay.” Stand walks away with his catch.
Sugar hobbles over to a pair of decrepit aluminum folding chairs that are leaning against a tree and shakes them open, setting them in the shade. “That Stand likes to get drunk, but he’s a good boy. He loves to hunt. He brings me something every week. ‘Grandma, I brung you this,’ he’ll say. He don’t stay home. Junior is always taking him somewhere and dumping him off and then about three o’clock he’ll go after him, he’ll have something. Squirrel, or anything green, you know.”
“He’s your older son’s boy?”
“No, not exactly, he’s Quatie’s, but she already had six or seven when he was born, so Junior adopted him. You know how people do. Share the kids around.”
Alice doesn’t exactly know, but she can gather.
“I wish he wouldn