Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [145]
She flexed her left foot against a cramp and fought the urge to roll over onto her stomach. Impossible to keep still in this mess of blankets. The only thing to do with such a restlessness was get up and keep it company. She would walk in the woods. There would be enough light with this moon, once it had crested the mountaintop. But first she would check on the phoebes. Taking great care not to disturb Eddie, she got up quietly, found her boots next to the mattress, pulled on her jeans and buttoned them under her night shirt, then went into the cabin to fetch the flashlight. She moved very quietly around to the porch to take a peek. The flashlight wouldn’t disturb the mother if she was on the nest; this late at night it wouldn’t make her fly. Deanna searched the eave for the neat, round mound of woven grass. As she’d dreaded, the mother’s brown-feathered head and little pointed beak weren’t there where they ought to have been. Quickly she checked the porch floor for fallen angels, but none were there. She went inside and brought out the ladderback chair, then climbed up carefully, steadying herself with one hand on the roof joist. Nothing! The inside of the nest was a tidy pocket, perfectly empty. How could that be? Deanna had watched the mother catch bugs all afternoon, a slave to those four huge appetites. They wouldn’t fledge at night. So where were they? She shone the beam on the floor again, searching all around the legs of the chair and farther away, in case they’d traveled as far as the edge of the porch in a feathery little panic. Nothing.
She clicked off the flashlight and thought a minute. Clicked it back on again. With the focused halo of light she scanned every inch of the top of the joist all the way out to the end of the eave, then searched along the other rafters. She passed over and then came back to what looked like a pile of black tubing. Studied it. Found the small, round, wide-set eyes shining back at her, perched smugly on top of the partially coiled body. She swept the light very slowly down the dark body until she found them: four discernible lumps.
She breathed hard against the urge to scream at this monster or tear it down from the rafters and smash its head. Breathed three more times, blowing out hard through her lips each time, feeling a faint coil of nausea inside her anger. This was her familiar, the same blacksnake that had lived in the roof all summer, the snake she had defended as a predator doing its job. Living takes life. But not the babies, she cried in her mind. Not these; they were mine. At the end of the summer the babies are all there will be.
She climbed down from the chair, clicked off the flashlight, and headed out into the woods, tense with fury and sadness. She didn’t understand how far her emotions were running away with her until she felt the coolness of tears running down her face. She wiped them with the heel of her hand and kept walking, fast, away from the cabin and the scent of fire and flesh, up into the dark woods. What was this uncontrollable sorrow that kept surging through her body like hot water? In the last few days she had cried over everything: phoebes, tiredness, the sound of a gunshot, the absence of sleep. Idiotic, sentimental tears, female tears—what was this? Was this what they meant by hot flashes? But they didn’t feel hot. Her body felt full and heavy and slow and human and absent, somehow, just a weight to be carried forward without its enthusiastic cycles of fertility and rest, the crests and valleys she had never realized she counted on so much. Deadweight, was that what she was now? An obsolete female biding its time until death?
Why did she feel so miserable about this? She’d never entirely approved of human beings and all their mess to begin with. Why would she have wanted to make more of them?
Halfway up the hillside she stopped to wipe her eyes and nose on the hem of her nightshirt.