Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [157]
Crys looked at her. “Are you that?”
“Am I what?”
“Veg-arian.”
“No, I’m one of the other Christianities. As your cousin Rickie put it.”
Crys had taken up a stalk of long grass and was very lightly touching Lusa’s skin in the spot where her T-shirt rode up and exposed her belly. It was the closest thing to intimacy she’d ever seen this child share with anyone. Lusa held her breath and lay very still, stunned by luck, as if a butterfly had lit on her shoulder. Finally she breathed out, feeling a little dizzy from watching the high, thin clouds race across the blue gap in the trees overhead. “Listen to me moan and groan. I guess I must be a real farmer now, huh?”
Crys shrugged. “I guess.”
“If my goats don’t work out, I’m what you call screwed. I hate to think about it. I’d feel like a murderer logging this hill, but I’m not sure how else I can keep this farm.”
Crys turned suddenly from Lusa and tossed the grass stem away. “Why do you have to keep it?”
“That’s a good question. I’m asking myself that question. You know what I come up with?”
“What?”
“Ghosts.”
Crys leaned over and peered down into Lusa’s face. She looked puzzled, briefly, before her expression went neutral. “That’s stupid.”
“Not really. You’d be surprised.”
Crys pulled a handful of grass out of the ground. “Ghosts of who?”
“People who have lost things, I think. Some are your family, and some are from mine.”
“Real people? Dead people?”
“Yes.”
“Like who?”
“My zayda, my grandpa on my dad’s side. Once upon a time he had this beautiful, beautiful farm, right? And people took it away from him. It was a long time ago, before I was born. My mother’s grandparents had a farm, too, in a whole different country, and the same thing happened: gone. Now they’ve all wound up here.”
“Are you scared of them?” Crys asked quietly.
“Not at all.”
“Do you really believe in ghosts?”
Lusa wondered why on earth she was talking about this with a child. But she needed to speak of it, as badly as Crys needed to curse. They both had their reasons. She sat up and looked at her until at last she caught her eye. “I’m not scaring you, am I?”
The girl shook her head rapidly.
“Maybe I shouldn’t even call them ghosts. It’s just stuff you can’t see. That I believe in, probably more than most people. Certain kinds of love you can’t see. That’s what I’m calling ghosts.”
Crys wrinkled her nose. “What do you do, then, smell ’em?”
“I do. And hear them. I hear my grandfather playing music when it rains. That’s how I know he’s here. And your uncle Cole’s here, too. I smell him all the time. I’m not kidding: three or four times a week. I’ll open a drawer or walk into the corncrib in the grain house, and there he is.”
Crys looked truly unhappy. “He’s not there for real, though. If you can’t see him, he’s not.”
Lusa reached out and rubbed her shoulder, a hard little point of bone beneath a tense little blanket of muscle. “I know, it’s hard to think about,” she said. “Humans are a very visual species.”
“What’s that mean?”
A monarch butterfly drifted into the shaft of light in front of them and batted lazily into the cleared path through the trees toward the fields below. Lusa said, “What that means is, we mainly love things with our eyes.”
“You mean like Rickie does with those girl magazines under his bed?”
Lusa laughed hard. “That is exactly what I mean.”
They both watched the monarch, a bouncing orange dot receding downhill until it was nothing, just a bright spot melting into the light of day.
“A lot of animals trust their other senses more than we do. Moths use smell, for instance. They don’t have to see their husbands or wives at all to know they’re there.”
“So? You’re not a moth.”
“So. I guess you’re right. Pretty stupid, huh?”
Crys shrugged her shoulders. “When you die will you be a ghost hanging around here, too?”
“Oh, yeah. A good one.”
“And who’ll be here then, after you?”
“That’s the sixty-four-dollar question. The