Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [15]
Silently then, after snapping at him, she’d watched Cole eat his breakfast for a while before slapping down the offending newspaper and getting up to face her work, stepping out the kitchen door to retrieve yesterday’s milk from the cool back porch. She was still in her slippers and seersucker nightshirt at that point; they hadn’t been out of bed for an hour yet, and the fog was still lifting above the creek. An Io moth rested on the screen, her second-favorite moth, whose surprising underwings were the same pinkish gold as her hair. (Her favorite would always be Actias luna, ethereal green ghost of the upper forests.) “Worn out from your big night of love,” she scolded, “that’s what you get”—but of course he’d had no choice. All the giant silkworm family, the Ios and lunas she admired, did their eating as caterpillars and as adult moths had no mouths. What mute, romantic extravagance, Lusa thought: a starving creature racing with death to scour the night for his mate.
She picked up the milk and handled it carefully, noting that it was nicely set, ready to separate. There wasn’t but a gallon. They kept only one milk cow for the homemade butter and cream Cole liked, and milked her only in the evenings now. Lusa had shocked everyone with her proposal of eliminating the inconvenient four A.M. milking by putting up the cow with her calf in the barn overnight. She could even pasture mother and calf together and skip milking altogether if she needed to drive to Lexington for a weekend (did it take a scientist to think of this?). On days when Lusa wanted to milk, they simply pushed the calf into a pasture separate from his mother so her udder would be full by evening. Cole’s sisters disapproved of this easy arrangement, but Lusa felt smug. If they’d spent their girlhoods as slaves to the twice-daily milkings, that was not Lusa’s problem. She had her own ways of doing a thing. She’d neatly mastered the domestic side of farming in less than a year, and Cole loved her cooking more than he’d loved his mother’s. Now, as she stood at the sink dipping the skimmer and watching the cream flow smoothly over the rim in a stream so thin it was nearly green, she had an inspiration: fat bouquets of savoy spinach stood ready for picking in her backdoor garden. Sautéed in butter with sliced mushrooms, a bay leaf, and this cream, they’d make for a fragrant, sensuous soup Cole would love. She could have it ready by noon when he came in for his dinner. She would concentrate on soup, then, and try to let this argument go by.
But Cole wouldn’t do it. “Why don’t you write the garden column for the newspaper, Lusa?” he’d goaded her from the breakfast table. “Think of all you could teach us sorry-ass bumpkins.”
“Cole, I have to concentrate on what I’m doing here. Do we have to fight?”
“No, dear. I’m just sorry,” he said, not sorry at all, “that I’m not from someplace fancy where people keep their dogs in the house and their gardens in window boxes.”
“Will you ever let it go? Lexington’s not fancy. People there just have more to read and write about than killing the honeysuckle in their hedgerows.”
“They needn’t to bother. They don’t have hedgerows. Every city yard I ever saw ended in the flat killing