Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [160]
That was the question. When a body wanted one thing wholly and a mind wanted the opposite, which of the two was she, Deanna?
She leaned far forward from the bridge so she could see her face in the water. Her braid swung over her shoulder and hung down, nearly touching the water, swaying like a bell rope. Pull me in, she said silently to the girl in the water. Make up my mind for me. Take from me this agitation, the likes of which I have never known in all my life.
This morning she had wept for no reason she could possibly name. The forest hadn’t seemed large enough for her grief. She’d startled up a white-spotted, flag-tailed fawn and sent it crashing downmountain from the bed of leaves where its mother had carefully hidden it. Deanna curled herself into the spot it’d fled, and sensed the small body’s warmth still there in the brown leaves. There was no loss here, she told herself; the fawn would bleat for its mother and be found. But she’d suddenly felt so despairing and tired, such an utterly lost cause, that she’d lain on the ground and put leaves in her mouth.
Bang! A thunder boom hit now like a hammer on the back of her spine, jerking her up onto her feet on the raw wooden planks of the bridge. She was grateful for that, at least—one decision made for her. By the time the second boom hit, rolling up the hollow like a wave and crashing over her head, her feet were already headed up the mountain. They would get her to the cabin before the lightning arrived. What do I want, what do I want? her feet on the trail demanded, the rhythm of her breathing demanded. If she couldn’t say what she wanted, she could say nothing—wouldn’t look at him, would have to go on feeling trapped with him in that place, like predator and prey closed tight in a box, waiting for word on which was to be which.
She was breathing hard by the time the cabin came into sight. Why had she been getting out of breath at the drop of a hat lately, was that age, too? Was she running faster than she used to? Through the trees she could just see the south face of her house, where the logs had been completely overgrown this summer by a single Virginia creeper vine. She’d pondered whether to rip the hairy little tendrils off the logs or just leave them there to protect the old wood from wind and rain, like a lively green skin.
She angled up the hill, coming up on the cabin from the back. Her mind was running ahead of her and off to the side, but it snapped back when she saw something odd at the place where the roof gable butted against the uppermost log in the cabin’s wall. The small hole there she’d noticed before, but now something was moving out of it, a dark loop. She approached slowly, catching her breath and keeping her eyes on the spot.
She could see now exactly what it was: the cabin’s summerlong resident guardian angel who kept down the mice, the devil who took the phoebes, the author of that slow sandpaper sound in the roof—her blacksnake. He was leaving. Deanna planted her feet and watched the entire, unbelievable length of him pour out the small hole in the side of the roof gable. He oozed down the log wall in an undulating, liquid flow like a line of molasses spilling over the edge of a pitcher. When most of his length had emerged, he suddenly dropped into the tall grass, which trembled and then went still. Then he was gone, for good. Just like that, today of all days, for reasons she would never be able to know. Whether she had loved or hated this snake was of absolutely no consequence to his departure. She considered this fact as she watched him go, and she felt something shift inside her body—relief, it felt like, enormous and settled, like a pile of stones on a steep slope suddenly shifting and tumbling slightly into the angle of repose.
The pounding of What do I want went still in her breast. It didn’t matter what she chose. The world was what it was, a place with its own rules of hunger and satisfaction. Creatures lived and mated and died, they came and went, as surely as summer did. They would go their own ways, of their own accord.