Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [129]
“A grain mill. An old-fashioned one—look, it has all these cloth belts and things.” She studied the way it was put together. “I guess they hooked it up to some kind of a turning axle to power it. Maybe a mule in a yoke, walking in a circle.”
“What for?”
“No electricity. This thing’s a hundred years old. It was your great-great-grandfather’s, probably.”
Crys sounded scornful, as if Lusa were very slow to keep up: “I mean, what’d they use it for?”
“It’s a mill. They used it to grind their flour.”
Crys squatted underneath the machine and looked up inside of it. “To grind up flowers?”
She pronounced it “flars,” puzzling Lusa for a second.
“Oh, no, flour. You know. To make bread. Everybody around here used to grow their own wheat and corn for bread, plus what they needed for their animals. Now they buy feed at Southern States and go to Kroger’s for a loaf of god-awful bread that was baked in another state.”
“Why?”
“Because they can’t afford to grow grain anymore. It’s cheaper to buy bad stuff from a big farm than to grow good stuff on a little farm.”
“Why?”
Lusa leaned against a fifty-five-gallon drum that had solidified creosote in the bottom. “Boy, that’s hard to answer. Because people want too much stuff, I guess, and won’t pay for quality. And also, farmers have to follow rules that automatically favor whoever already has the most. You know how when you play marbles, as soon as somebody starts getting most of the marbles then they’re going to win everything?”
“No.”
“No?”
“I don’t play with marbles.”
“What do you play with?”
“Game Boy.” Crys had drifted away and was putting her hands on things, drawing circles in the dust, looking under tables. “What’s’is?”
“A bee smoker.”
The child laughed. “For smoking bees? Do you get high off ’em?”
Lusa wondered what this child knew about getting high but decided again not to react. “No. Smoke comes out of there, and it drugs the bees, as a matter of fact. It makes them dopey and lazy so they won’t sting you when you take the top off their hive and steal their honey.”
“Oh.” Crys leaned back and bounced herself against a bedspring that was standing on its end, propped against the wall. “That’s where honey comes from? People steal it?”
Lusa was surprised at the extent of the girl’s ignorance—her generation’s ignorance, probably. “People raise bees, for honey. Everybody around here used to, I’m sure. You see old broken-down bee boxes everywhere.”
“Now it just comes in a jar.”
“Yep,” Lusa agreed. “From Argentina or someplace. That’s what I mean about big farms far away taking the place of little farms right here. It’s sad. It’s not fair, and it stinks.” She sat down on a side-arm of the ancient grain mill, which startled her by giving way an inch or two before it held. “Nobody cares, though. I used to live in a city, and I’ll tell you, city people do not think this is their problem. They think food comes from the supermarket, period, and always will.”
Crys continued to bounce herself sideways against the bedspring. “My mama works at Kroger’s. She hates it.”
“I know.” Lusa looked around at the dim boneyard of obsolete equipment and felt despair, not only—or not specifically—for the loss of her husband, but for all the things people used to grow and make for themselves before they were widowed from their own food chain.
“She hates it because it makes her tired. They won’t give her no days off.”
“I know. Not enough, anyway.”
“Mama’s sick.”
“I know.”
“I can’t stay at Aunt Lois’s no more. Lowell can, but I can’t. You know why?”
“Why?”
Crys stopped throwing herself against the bedspring. She stepped carefully into a broken baling box and out the other side.
“Why, Crys?” Lusa repeated.
“She made me try on stupid dresses. Hand-me-downs from Jennifer and Louise.”
“Yeah? I never heard that part of the story.”
“She said I had to wear them. They’s ugly.”
“Probably out of style, too. Jennifer and Louise are a lot older than you.”
Crys shrugged her shoulders, a quick, unhappy jerk. She sat down on a tractor tire and put her feet into the center of it, with her