Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [154]
Crys let out a tiny laugh, just air escaping between her teeth.
“Look here, on the mossy side of this tree. See these little white moths?” They both bent close as Lusa prodded gently at a translucent wing. The moth roused and crawled a few inches up the rough bark. Crys was backlit by the sun, so Lusa could see the pale down on her curved cheek, like the fuzz on a peach. There was a softness to her features in these moments of concentration that made Lusa wonder how so many adults—herself included—could ever take this child for a boy.
She looked up. “What are they?”
“These are called cankerworms. The worm stage got noticed first with these guys, so mama moth is stuck with not such a nice name. She’s kind of pretty, though, isn’t she?” Lusa let it crawl onto her finger, then held it up and blew on it lightly, sending it fluttering in a crooked arc toward another tree. Crys stood for a minute longer watching its sleepy colleagues on the tree before she was willing to move on. “How come you know so much about bugs?” she asked.
“Before I married your uncle Cole and moved here, I used to be a bug scientist. In Lexington. I did experiments and learned stuff about them that nobody knew before.”
“They got a lot of bugs in Lexington?”
Lusa laughed. “As many as anywhere, I guess.”
“Huh. Aunt Lois said you’s a miner.”
“A miner?”
“Gold miner.”
Lusa puzzled over this. “Oh. A gold digger.” She sighed. This time she was sure Crys hadn’t meant to hurt her.
“Is it true?” Crys asked.
“Nope. No gold mines for me, past or future. Aunt Lois has got her head up her butt on that particular subject.”
Crys closed her mouth in a tight, conspiratorial grin and rolled her eyes at Lusa. They were finding their ways of living with the judgment of the righteous.
“This is a good spot, let’s look up here,” Lusa said, pointing up a steep embankment to a grassy clearing above the road, bathed in dappled light. They’d come as far up this road as she wanted to go. They shouldn’t stray too far from the house since Lowell was napping alone. Also, Lusa really didn’t want to face the family cemetery that waited around the next bend. Cole wasn’t in it, but too many other Wideners were.
Crys was already scrambling ahead of her through the plumes of the daylilies that had escaped from someone’s garden long ago and were now as common as weeds. They were pretty, though. Their straplike leaves spilled like waterfalls over the banks, crowned with circles of bright orange-eyed flowers and long, graceful buds. They grew in bobbing rows along nearly every unmowed roadside in the county, punctuated with the intermittent purple-pink of sweet peas. Before they started to bloom a few weeks ago, Lusa had never noticed either one of these plants. The whole county was one big escaped flower garden.
Crys yanked the head off one of the lilies as she mounted the bank. “Watch this.” She rubbed its center against her chin before tossing the bedraggled flower on the ground.
“Very nice. Now you’ve got an orange beard,” Lusa observed.
Crys attempted an evil grin, touchingly childish. “Like the devil.”
“You know what that is, that orange stuff? Pollen. You know what pollen is?”
She shook her head.
“Spe-erm.” Lusa exaggerated the word thrillingly.
“Eew, yuck.” She wiped her chin fiercely.
“Don’t worry. It won’t make you get pregnant and have flowers.” She walked past her to the edge of the clearing where a stand of hickories had caught her eye. She began to search the trees’ north sides systematically, moving deeper into the woods.
Crys trailed along behind her at a little distance. “D’you think it’s, like, going to hail?” she seemed to be asking.
Lusa glanced up at the bits of sky she could see between trees. “No way. There aren’t any rain clouds in the sky.”
“I’m talking about hail,” the child insisted.
Lusa moved deeper into the woods, scanning limbs and the undersides of leaves with a practiced eye. “It takes a big storm to bring hail. Why do you care, anyway? You don’t have a crop in the ground.”
“Hail, I said!”
There was enough frustration