Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [0]
{ A Novel }
Prodigal Summer
—for Steven, Camille, and Lily,
and for wildness, where it lives
Prothalamium
Come, all you who are not satisfied as ruler in a lone, wallpapered room full of mute birds, and flowers that falsely bloom, and closets choked with dreams that long ago died!
Come, let us sweep the old streets—like a bride: sweep out dead leaves with a relentless broom; prepare for Spring, as though he were our groom for whose light footstep eagerly we bide.
We’ll sweep out shadows, where the rats long fed; sweep out our shame—and in its place we’ll make a bower for love, a splendid marriage-bed fragrant with flowers aquiver for the Spring. And when he comes, our murdered dreams shall wake; and when he comes, all the mute birds shall sing.
—Aaron Kramer
Contents
Epigraph
1
Predators
2
Moth Love
3
Old Chestnuts
4
Predators
5
Moth Love
6
Old Chestnuts
7
Predators
8
Moth Love
9
Old Chestnuts
10
Moth Love
11
Predators
12
Old Chestnuts
13
Predators
14
Old Chestnuts
15
Moth Love
16
Predators
17
Old Chestnuts
18
Moth Love
19
Predators
20
Old Chestnuts
21
Moth Love
22
Predators
23
Old Chestnuts
24
Moth Love
25
Predators
26
Old Chestnuts
27
Moth Love
28
Old Chestnuts
29
Predators
30
Moth Love
31
She paused at the top of the field, inhaling the…
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Other Books by Barbara Kingsolver
Copyright
About the Publisher
{1}
Predators
Her body moved with the frankness that comes from solitary habits. But solitude is only a human presumption. Every quiet step is thunder to beetle life underfoot; every choice is a world made new for the chosen. All secrets are witnessed.
If someone in this forest had been watching her—a man with a gun, for instance, hiding inside a copse of leafy beech trees—he would have noticed how quickly she moved up the path and how direly she scowled at the ground ahead of her feet. He would have judged her an angry woman on the trail of something hateful.
He would have been wrong. She was frustrated, it’s true, to be following tracks in the mud she couldn’t identify. She was used to being sure. But if she’d troubled to inspect her own mind on this humid, sunlit morning, she would have declared herself happy. She loved the air after a hard rain, and the way a forest of dripping leaves fills itself with a sibilant percussion that empties your head of words. Her body was free to follow its own rules: a long-legged gait too fast for companionship, unself-conscious squats in the path where she needed to touch broken foliage, a braid of hair nearly as thick as her forearm falling over her shoulder to sweep the ground whenever she bent down. Her limbs rejoiced to be outdoors again, out of her tiny cabin whose log walls had grown furry and overbearing during the long spring rains. The frown was pure concentration, nothing more. Two years alone had given her a blind person’s indifference to the look on her own face.
All morning the animal trail had led her uphill, ascending the mountain, skirting a rhododendron slick, and now climbing into an old-growth forest whose steepness had spared it from ever being logged. But even here, where a good oak-hickory canopy sheltered the ridge top, last night’s rain had pounded through hard enough to obscure the tracks. She knew the animal’s size from the path it had left through the glossy undergrowth of mayapples, and that was enough to speed up her heart. It could be what she’d been looking for these two years and more. This lifetime. But to know for sure she needed details, especially the faint claw mark beyond the toe pad that distinguishes canid from feline. That would be the first thing to vanish in a hard rain, so it wasn’t going to appear to her now, however hard she looked. Now it would take more than tracks, and on this sweet, damp morning at the beginning of the world, that was fine with her. She could be a patient tracker. Eventually the animal would give itself away with a mound of scat (which might have