Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [128]
“What does?”
“The caterpillars eat the poisonous leaves, and their bodies turn toxic. So if a bird eats them, it vomits! It’s kind of a trick the butterfly plays on the birds to keep her caterpillars from getting eaten.”
Crystal seemed unimpressed. “But if a bird eats it and vomits, the caterpillar’s already done keelt.”
It took a second for Lusa to interpret this. “It’s already been killed? Well, yeah, that one has. But the birds learn their lesson, so most of them don’t get eaten. It’s a scientific fact. Birds avoid eating the caterpillars of monarch butterflies.”
“So what,” Crystal said after a minute.
“So that’s one weird way that mothers can take care of their children,” Lusa said. “Making them eat poison.”
“Yeah, but so what for the one that’s dead.”
“Good point,” Lusa said. “So what for him.” She would not go into the current theories on kin selection. She reached under the seat and pulled the lever that lifted the blade. “Let’s head into the barn. We’ve done enough mowing for today; let’s go hunt bugs.” She helped guide the mower in through the door of the barn cellar and parked it inside.
When she cut the engine, her ears were left singing the high, ringing complaint of assaulted eardrums. She and Crys climbed off the machine and stood dazed for a minute while their eyes and ears adjusted to the dim, dusty silence. Crys was peering up at the steps that rose to a trapdoor in the floor of the barn above them. It was more of a permanent stepladder than a staircase, and so twisted by a hundred years of this structure’s settling that none of its angles squared with gravity anymore. It always made Lusa think of an Escher drawing of a spiral staircase whose every flight seemed to define “up” in a different direction. This thing looked so crazily hazardous that she had never used it, even though it was a long walk around to the ground-level entrance on the hillside.
“Can we go up there?”
“Sure.” Lusa swallowed a taste of panic. “Good idea. We need to go up to the storage room anyway, to get nets and collecting jars.”
The girl grasped the rickety, splintered wood and started to climb in the many different directions this staircase called “up.” On a wing and a prayer, Lusa followed. The trapdoor gave easily when they shoved it. They stuck out their elbows like chickens spreading their wings in the dust, pulled their bodies up through the hole, and emerged into the main room of the barn. Lusa inhaled its perfume, a faint petroleum pungency but mostly the mellow sweetness of old tobacco. A fine brown dust of crumbled leaves inhabited every crevice of this place where Wideners had stripped, hung, and baled tobacco for over a hundred years.
The storeroom was a former corncrib, framed out in a corner of the barn and carefully rodent-proofed by means of wire mesh nailed over every square inch of its floor, walls, and ceiling. Lusa unlatched the door and felt depressed by the sight of this dusty, quiet room full of equipment. Everything here had been touched by Cole’s hands at one time or another. He’d moved it, stored it, kept it in repair. A lot of it she didn’t even know how to use: sprayer arms and tractor attachments, a long row of chemicals stored on the shelf. Vehicle parts. Stranger things, too: an antediluvian oil furnace and an assortment of horse and mule tack left from the days before tractors. An empty piano, just the wooden case, with nothing inside. Lusa stored her own things in this room but had never really looked around at everything else. Before this moment, it had never all belonged to her. She pinched her nose against a sneeze that was bringing tears to her eyes and tried to stave off whatever sadness was coming on; this child would brook no self-pity. And given the set of woes she’d been handed at ten years of age, why should she? Lusa wedged herself through an aisle between the piano case and some large bundles of baling twine and stooped to blow some dust off the huge iron hulk of an ancient machine.
“Holy cow. Look at this, Crys.”
“What is