Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [138]
“I’m mad as hell,” she declared, trying to sound like it. “It’s high summer. That turkey could be brooding a whole clutch of young. If that’s so, you’ve killed a family.”
“Nope. This was Daddy.”
“It’s a tom? Did you know that before you shot it?”
He gave her a wounded look.
“Well, I’m sorry. You’ve got a good eye, and you know better than to shoot a hen turkey in July. But still, look at you, poaching. Smack under the nose of a game warden.”
He walked straight toward her, turkey and all, and kissed her mouth with such enthusiasm that she had to take several steps backward. “This is the warden’s dinner,” he said.
“You don’t need to be shooting me any dinner. And it’s too late for dinner anyway, it’s suppertime.”
“It’s your supper, then”—he kissed her again—“and I did need to do it. I’ve been bumming off you all summer. You don’t even know what a good provider I am. I considered bringing you a deer.”
She laughed. “Oh, boy. That’d be hard to hide if one of my colleagues happened to show up.”
He handed her the bird and checked the chamber of his rifle before he set it carefully against the wall. “You need protein,” he said. “You’ve been living too long on bird food, and you’re peaked. You’re walking around here with iron-poor tired blood.”
She laughed. “You’re too young to even know what that means. Now what are you doing?” He’d picked up the shovel and was over at the edge of the clearing by the boulder, eyeing the ground around it. “You thinking to give it a Christian burial?”
“We need a fire pit. I’ve been hankering to do this all summer.”
She smiled at his hankering. “Where’d you learn to talk like ’at, young fella?”
“Some beautiful long-haired hillbilly girl.”
He poked the point of the shovel into the soft dirt. Deanna studied the bird in her hand, holding it out at arm’s length. It weighed more than a gallon jug of water—ten or twelve pounds, maybe. “So what are your exact plans for tom here?”
“Pluck him.”
“Right. But you have to scald him in hot water first to get the feathers loose, and I don’t think I have any pot big enough to dunk this old boy in.”
“Yes, you do—one of those big metal cans you keep the beans and rice in,” he said without looking up. He was excavating a good-sized pit. “We’ll boil the water to scald it in there first, and then we can empty it out and cook the bird inside there, with the coals piled all around it.”
She looked at Eddie, surprised. “You have been thinking about this all summer.”
“Yep.”
“Carnivorous fantasies,” she said.
“Yep.”
She went inside, smiling in spite of herself as she checked the bottoms of the storage canisters and emptied out the one that looked more watertight. She felt excited. She’d passed so many days now on forest time, timeless time, noting the changes in leaf and song and weather but imposing no human agenda. Even her own birthday she’d let pass without mentioning it to Eddie. But something in her body had been longing for a celebration, or so it seemed right now. He’d guessed right. She wanted this feast. An extravagant event to mark this extravagant summer.
When she carried the empty canister outside, Eddie had already lined the pit with rocks and was starting the fire. While he built up kindling and the rising flame licked around the tall metal can, she carried water one kettleful at a time from the pump spigot inside the cabin. The cold water hissed and sheared into columns of steam as she poured it down the inside of the hot cylinder. On her trips back and forth she paused just once to examine the turkey. She let herself touch the bumpy red skin on his head and wattles and his translucent eyelids, then stroked the iridescent sheen on his dark feathers. Not a human’s idea of beauty, maybe, but she felt something for all the days he’d passed in the filtered sunlight of this forest, meditating on fat berries and the far-off sound of a mate. Eddie was right, they’d done no damage to anyone’s childhood here—turkey paternity was the hit-and-run kind. But she wondered what mark this grand male had