Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [127]
“Oh,” Lusa said. “Then I guess you don’t need to unpack. Just pitch it up there on the porch, then, and come help me finish the mowing.”
Crys tossed the hard little cube toward the porch, underhand, like a softball pitch. It hit the step and flew open, letting fly a square of mirror that broke to pieces on the stone steps. A banty hen scratching in the flower bed next to the porch let out a squawk and scrambled for safety. Lusa felt shaken by this child’s untempered hostility, but she knew enough not to show it. “Oh, well,” she said carelessly. “There’s seven years of bad luck.”
“I already done had ten years of it,” said Crys.
“No way. How old are you?”
“Ten.”
Lord help me get through the next thirty hours, Lusa pleaded to any God who would listen.
“You know what, Crys? I’ve just got a few minutes left to go on this yard. You want to sit here on the seat with me and help me mow? Then we’ll be done with this chore and we can find something more fun to do.”
“Like what?”
She racked her brain wildly; suggest the wrong thing here and she might lose an eye. “Hunt bugs, maybe? I love bugs, they’re my favorite thing—did you know I’m actually a bugologist?”
The child crossed her arms and looked elsewhere, waiting for Lusa to say something interesting for a change.
“Oh,” Lusa said, “but I guess you hate bugs. All the other women in this family fear and despise bugs. I’m sorry, I forgot.”
Crys shrugged. “I ain’t asceared of bugs.”
“No? Good, that makes two of us, then. Thank God I’ve finally got somebody to go bug hunting with.” She pressed the clutch, turned the key, and started the engine roaring again, then sat and waited. After a second of hesitation Crys crossed the yard and climbed onto the seat of the mower in front of Lusa.
“Uncle Rickie says you can’t do this ’cause hit’s dangerous,” she declared loudly as they backed up a little and headed into a circular path around the lower yard.
“Yeah, it’s probably dangerous for little kids,” Lusa yelled over the engine noise. “But holy smokes, you’re ten, you’re not going to fall off and get run over or anything. Here, put your hands on the steering wheel, like this.” They bounced down a small embankment. “OK, you’re driving now. Don’t run over the chickens, or we’ll have chicken salad. And watch out for the rocks. Go around, OK?”
She helped Crystal steer around a limestone outcrop on the bank between the barn and the henhouse. Lusa had learned to give it a wide margin, to spare the mower blade and also because she loved the flowering weeds that had sprung up in this little island.
“What’s them orange flowers?” Crystal asked loudly. She seemed unperturbed to be having a conversation at this decibel level.
“Butterfly weed.” Lusa tried not to be shocked by her grammar, which was noticeably worse even than that of the other kids in the family. She wondered if everyone had given up on Crystal, and if so, how long ago.
“What’s butterflies do, smoke it?”
Lusa ignored this. “They drink nectar out of the flowers. And there’s one kind, the monarch, that lays its eggs on the leaves so the caterpillars can eat butterfly weed when they hatch out. And you know what? The leaves make them poisonous! The whole plant’s full of poison.”
“Like ’at stuff the doctor’s putting in Mama,” Crystal said.
It was unnerving to have this sad, bony little body so close to her on the seat; it was all Lusa could do to keep from wrapping her arms around it. “Yeah,” she said. “Kind of like that.”
“It makes Mama poison. Whenever she comes home from Roanoke we can’t go in her room or touch nothing in the bathroom after she goes pee. Or we’d die.”
“I don’t think you’d die. You’d get sick and throw up, maybe.” Lusa allowed her chin to brush against the crown of the blond, cropped head that bobbed just in front of her chin. It was brief, a gesture that could pass for an accident. They stopped talking for a minute while Lusa helped steer the mower around the shrinking swath of remaining grass. “You know what?” Lusa said, “That