Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [165]
Jewel shook her head. “It’s your work, too, though. I swear, this is pretty. It looks like a woman’s garden, some way. It doesn’t look like other people’s gardens.”
Lusa thought, but did not say, that this was because she was an outsider. She planted different things: five-color Swiss chard instead of collard greens, and several rows of fava beans to dry for falafel meal. She’d grown four different kinds of eggplants from seed, including the pink-and-white-streaked “Rosa Bianca” for her beloved imam bayildi and baba ganouj.
Jewel was examining the tomato plants, rubbing their healthy leaves between her fingers. “What do you kill the hornworms with, Sevin dust?”
“No, not that. It kills too many of my friends.”
Jewel looked over at her with a horrified face, and Lusa laughed. “Bugs, I mean. I know you all laugh at me, but I’m so fond of bugs, I can’t stand to use a general pesticide like Sevin. I use different things. I use Bt on the tomatoes.”
“B-T?”
“It’s a germ, Bacillus thuringiensis. A bacterium that gives hornworms indigestion when they eat my tomatoes but doesn’t hurt bees or ladybugs.”
“Are you pulling my leg?”
“Nope. Well, bad indigestion—the hornworms die. It works on cabbage loopers, too. Here, there’s a peck basket by the fence there, why don’t you pick some tomatoes for you and the kids to take home?”
“I won’t eat them; my stomach’s shot for anything acid, I guess from the chemo. I still can’t even drink orange juice. But I’ll pick you the ripe ones, instead of just standing here useless. Something else for you to put up.”
“I have quit on canning tomatoes. Now I just slice them up with basil and olive oil and eat them for breakfast.”
“Oh, shoot, I stepped right on your marigolds.”
“That’s okay, I don’t care what they look like. I just put them in to keep nematodes away from the roots of the tomato plants.”
“Now, that is something. That is really something. Cole was starting to get real interested in all that the last couple years. How to poison things without using poison. He went up to U.K. to take a class on that.”
“That’s how we met,” Lusa said, looking down. “I was his teacher.”
“Oh!” cried Jewel, as if she’d been stung by a bee. Was she jealous? Lusa wondered. She didn’t usually seem to be, not so much as the other sisters, even though she and Cole had been so close. Jewel alone had always seemed willing to share him. Lusa bent close to her beans to keep the sun out of her eyes as she neared the end of her row. She moved along on her knees, dragging a nearly full paper grocery bag along beside her.
“Believe it or not,” she said to Jewel, “I had both your kids up here for half the morning handpicking the bean beetles and squashing them. I told them I’d pay them a penny apiece if they kept track, and would you believe, they did a body count. They’re going to go home rich today. You got any overdue bills you need paid, talk to Crys and Lowell.” She glanced up. “Jewel? Jewel?”
Lusa scanned above the whole row of tall tomato plants for Jewel’s head, but it wasn’t there. She stood up and walked along the end in a panic, looking down between the rows. There Jewel was on the ground, gripping her knees and rocking with her face tight with pain and a basket of tomatoes spilled out on the ground beside her. Lusa flew to her side and put both arms around her to steady her.
“Oh, God,” Lusa said, several times. “What should I do? I’m sorry, I’m not one of those people who’re good in emergencies.”
Jewel opened her eyes. “It’s no emergency. I just need to get to the house. I guess I overdid it. I’ve got pain pills in my purse.”
Leaving beans and tomatoes strewed on the ground and the rabbit fence wide open, the two small women struggled down the slope and across the yard to the house. Lusa practically carried Jewel up the steps. Upper-body strength had come to her unbidden in the last months: nearly every day she did something she used to have to ask Cole to do, and it startled her, always, to glance at her body in the mirror and see planes where soft curves used to be. Carrying