Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [140]
Eddie was picking through the pile, pulling out medium-sized hickory logs, but he stopped to stare at her with raised eyebrows.
“What?” she asked. “It’s a prey species. It has fallen prey to us. I can deal with that. Predation’s a sacrament, Eddie; it culls out the sick and the old, keeps populations from going through their own roofs. Predation is honorable.”
“That’s not how Little Red Riding Hood tells it,” he said.
“Oh, man, don’t get me started on the subject of childhood brainwash. I hate that. Every fairy story, every Disney movie, every plot with animals in it, the bad guy is always the top carnivore. Wolf, grizzly, anaconda, Tyrannosaurus rex.”
“Don’t forget Jaws,” he said.
“Oh, yeah: shark.” She watched him return to the fire with his carefully stacked armload of wood. He squatted and began feeding the flames again with such tender care, examining each stick on both sides before extending it toward the tongues of the fire, that he might have been feeding a cranky toddler. “I will never understand it,” she said. “We’re the top of our food chain, so you’d think we’d relate to those guys the best. Seems like we’d be trying to talk them into trade agreements.”
Eddie laughed at that. “So you’re telling me that as a kid, you were rooting for the wolf to eat the Riding Hood babe?”
“My last name was Wolfe. I took it all kind of personally.” She finished drying the carcass inside and out with a rag and inspected the cavity. “I sure as heck wanted Wile E. Coyote to get that stupid roadrunner.”
“But then the show would be over,” he protested.
“Amen to that.” She stood up and dried her hands on her jeans. “I’m going to get some salt.”
Inside the cabin she poured some olive oil from the square metal container into a jar and dug out her moisture-proof can of salt. She peered into the vegetable bin: plenty of onions, and some potatoes left, too, burgeoning with pink sprouts. Four carrots. She would throw all these into the pot with the turkey once it was halfway cooked. And then drop in a few smoldering hickory twigs and put the lid on to give it a nice smoky flavor. She glanced at the clock on the bookshelf and tried to guess how long this would all take. Hours, of course. And she was ravenous. They would get to smell the heavenly, mounting fragrance and anticipate their feast for hours. Nothing was more wonderful than waiting for a happiness you could be sure of. The pleasure of food was something she’d nearly forgotten. Her sympathy for Jaws and T. rex notwithstanding, Deanna was a little surprised at herself—to be engaged in this act of carnivory and just thrilled about it.
When she came outside she saw that Eddie had managed to dump the hot water out of the pot without dousing the fire, which was now roaring. He was piling on logs the size of arms and legs. Luckily her woodpile was in no danger of depletion: there were oak and hickory and poplar logs neatly split and stacked head-high against the cabin’s west wall, in spite of its being only July. Splitting firewood seemed to be Eddie’s favorite exertion—or second-favorite, anyway. She paused to admire his body as he stood back from the heat and brushed bark off his hands. It was so easy to let go of their animosity in these moments of animal grace. She felt moved by what he’d done for her, his act of provision.
He turned and caught her watching. “What are you thinking about?” he asked.
“Hankerings,” she said. “Eating that bird. You may be right about me, I may be a little anemic. Why, what are you thinking about?”
“The gospel according to Deanna. It’s a sin to kill a spider but not a turkey.”
She walked over to the boulder and settled down beside her next meal. “Oh, sin, who knows what that is? Something invented by mothers, I guess. And me never having one.” She glanced up. “What?”
He shook his head. “Just you. I was trying to be serious. For once.”
“What, about spiders and turkeys? You know about that as well as I do, it’s not complicated. Removing a predator has bigger consequences