Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [115]
“It’s not that cold out. It’s July.”
“For a featherless little quarter ounce of bird it’s cold out. They’ll die overnight if she’s not on them.”
Eddie seemed to have trouble believing in the summertime cold up here, what people called blackberry winter. But he knew the truth of her warning, that a bird chased off its nest at dusk wouldn’t come back. She might sit fifty feet away from it, crying out to her babies all night, stranded. Deanna had never known exactly why, but Eddie had told her what a hunter knows about animal perceptions: most birds can’t see in the dark. From one minute to the next, at dusk, they go blind and can’t see at all.
He smiled at her from the doorway. “I don’t need four dead babies on my conscience, on top of all my other sins.”
“It’s important,” she persisted.
“I know it is.”
“It is. She’s already lost one brood, thanks to us tromping around out there.”
“I’ll be careful,” he said. “I’ll tiptoe.”
He did, apparently. She didn’t hear another sound until he came back in and stoked up the fire. She felt the mattress shift when he sat down on it, heard the hiss of the match, and smelled its sulfur when he leaned over to light the kerosene lamp on the table beside the bed. “Roll over, I’ll rub your back where it hurts.”
“What’d you do, eat some Mr. Nice Guy mushrooms?” She opened her eyes. “How do you know my back hurts?”
“I’m always a nice guy, you just fail to see through my irritating demeanor.” He kissed her forehead. “You’re coming down with something. The flu or something. You felt hot as a furnace a while ago. Roll over.”
“The epizooty,” she said. “Nannie used to say that. It’s a catchall disease category.” She rolled over and lay with her face buried in the pillow, smiling, suffocating with comfort as he massaged her shoulders. “Nannie was my dad’s girlfriend,” she said into the pillow, which muffled her words completely.
“What?”
She turned over onto her back. “Nannie was my dad’s girlfriend.”
“Oh. I thought you said, ‘Eddie is a mad birdbrain.’”
“Well, yeah. That, too.”
“The apple-orchard lady, I know. You got free apples, and old Dad got lucky.” His hands moved expertly down her sides, working gently from rib to rib but pausing just under her breasts and finally resting there, distracting her senseless. When she could no longer stand the suspense, he unzipped his jeans and got under the quilts. For a long time he stroked her without speaking.
“So,” she said. “You remember this junk I tell you about my life?”
“She had a baby with a hole in her heart. But she wouldn’t marry your dad.”
“You do remember. I’m never sure if you’re listening.”
“No future doesn’t mean I’m not here now.”
She wanted to believe it but couldn’t, quite. “I don’t know why you’d invest the effort,” she said. “If you’re just going to have to forget it all later.”
“You think I’m going to forget you when we’re finished here?”
“Yes.”
“No.” He kissed her for a long time. She kept her eyes open, watching. Kissing her with his eyes closed, he looked so vulnerable and yielding that it was nearly painful to see it.
“I’ll forget you,” she lied softly into his mouth. “The minute you’re gone.”
He pulled away from her a little, looking at her eyes to see what she meant. She couldn’t focus as close as he could. That was age, again.
“I’ll make sure you don’t,” he promised, and she shivered, feeling the prescience of some deep change or damage. He would make sure. The coyotes came unbidden to her mind: children in the woods, huddled in their den away from the storm.
But Eddie Bondo’s mind seemed to be here, focused on her, making amends for whatever hurt he felt he’d delivered earlier—the Alberta crack, she supposed. This was their strange dance. More than once now she’d flown into a rage at him and then spent days afterward offering food, cutting his hair, washing his socks, her unguents of apology. It made her think of the bobtail cat she’d had in childhood that would sometimes get mean when they played and scratch her, drawing blood; afterward he would always hunt