Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [158]
Crys studied her. “Which side you figure to pick?”
Lusa stared and shrugged back at her, the same quick, introverted jerk of the shoulders that Crys kept ready at hand to answer all questions. A stolen gesture.
“Come on,” she said then, jumping up and pulling Crys up by the hand. “We’d better go see if Lowell’s awake.”
“He’ll still be asleep. He’d sleep forever if you let him.”
“Maybe he’s just a little sad about your mom. Sometimes people need to sleep more when they’re sad.” She reached over to give Crys a hand down the bank into the road cut, but the girl took the plunge by herself in one huge leap.
“Not me,” she said, landing on her feet.
“No? What do you do?” Lusa climbed more slowly through the daylilies down onto the road, feeling like the turtle trailing the hare.
“Nothing. I don’t think about it.”
“Really. Not ever?”
Crys shrugged, then caught herself at it. They didn’t speak for several minutes as they walked side by side downhill, through puddles of light in the road spilled by gaps in the forest canopy. Every fifty feet or so they scattered up another cloud of swallowtails—the choirboys turned out of church. Lusa liked the idea of butterfly church. Frankly, it was no more far-fetched than the notion of a communal sucking-up of sodium for sperm valentines. She wondered what would happen if she submitted a paper to Behavioral Ecology on the spiritual effects of swallowtail puddling. Lusa was still amusing herself with the idea when they rounded the corner above the house and she was stopped dead in her tracks.
“Oh, no, look,” she cried.
“Shit, Aunt Lusa. The damn booger honeysuckles et your garage.”
Lusa could not think of a better way to put it. The mound of dark-green leaves was so rounded and immense, there was hardly any sign that a building lay underneath. An ancient burial mound, Lusa might have guessed. A Mayan temple crumbled to ruin. Could this really have happened in just one wildly rainy, out-of-control summer? She hadn’t been up the cemetery road for as long as she could remember, and certainly hadn’t looked at the garage from the back side since before Cole’s death. Now she could only stare, recalling the exact content of their argument about honeysuckle before he was killed: the absurd newspaper column about spraying it with Roundup; her ire on the plant’s behalf. How could she have gotten so sanctimonious about honeysuckle? It wasn’t even native here, it occurred to Lusa now. It was an escapee from people’s gardens, like the daylilies—like most weedy things that overgrew, in fact. No local insects could eat it because it was an introduction from someplace else—Japan, probably. Lonicera japonica, that would be right, like Japanese beetles and chestnut blight and the horribly invasive Japanese knotweed and the dreaded kudzu. One more artifact of the human covenant that threatened to strangle out the natives.
You have to persuade it two steps back every day, he’d said, or it will move in and take you over. His instincts about this plant had been right; his eye had known things he’d never been trained to speak of. And yet she’d replied carelessly, Take over what? The world will not end if you let the honeysuckle have the side of your barn. She crossed her arms against a shiver of anguish and asked him now to forgive a city person’s audacity.
Her head filled with the scent of a thousand translucent white flowers that had yellowed and fallen from this mountain of vine many months before. Maybe years before.
Crys was looking up at her so anxiously that Lusa touched her own face to make sure it was still intact.
“Don’t worry, it’s nothing,” she said. “I saw a ghost.”
{22}
Predators
Dog days. Deanna sat on her freshly completed bridge in the hemlock grove, nervously picking off splinters from the end of a pine plank and tossing them into the water, listening to the clan of red-tails screaming at one