Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [19]
“They won’t come without Mary Edna.”
He shrugged. “Well, then, maybe they’re just country folks that don’t understand plates with bugs and fancy Latin words printed on them. Maybe they’re scared they’ll use the wrong fork.”
“Damn you, Cole. Damn your whole family, if all you can do is ridicule me.” She grew hot in the face and felt like smashing the plate for effect, but the gesture would be all wrong. The plate seemed more valuable than the marriage.
“Oh, Lord,” he clucked. “They warned me about marrying a redhead.”
“Shuchach!” she muttered, sinking her teeth into the harsh Arabic consonants as she stomped into the dining room to put the plate away. Lusa was embarrassed by her tears, shamed that the spurned invitations still stung. Too many times in this past year she had hung up the phone and walked around in circles on the braided rug in the parlor, a grown, married woman with a degree in entomology, sobbing like a child. How could she care so much what they thought of her? Any girl who pursued the study of insects had learned to ignore public opinion. But what she couldn’t bear, then or now, was the implied belief that she was a curiosity, a nonsense of a woman. Lusa feared in retrospect that she’d judged her own father the same way, pitied him for being such a bitter, unworldly man, for devoting himself to agriculture in disinfected laboratories smelling of ether. Both her parents had come from farming lineages, but they had no more acquaintance with actual farm work than could be gleaned on a Sunday drive through the racehorse pastures east of Fayette County.
Lusa had wanted to be different. She’d craved to shock people with her love of crawling things and her sweat. She could still feel the childhood desire in her body, a girl bending close to breathe on the mirror when hard play on summer days dampened her strawberry hair into dark-brown tendrils against her face. As a woman, she’d jumped at an unexpected chance: to be a farmer’s partner.
She’d never expected the strange, effete legacy that followed her here to Zebulon, where her new relatives considered her old ones to be a family of fools who kept insect pests alive in glass boxes, on purpose.
She returned to the kitchen without looking at him. If he could act like this wasn’t tearing him apart, she could do the same. “Check,” she said. “Do not serve anything to a Widener on bug plates. I’ll remember that. And check, open the door to Herb the great and glorious varmint killer when he comes to rifle through my storeroom for the pressure sprayer.” Herb and Mary Edna were a perfect marriage, in Lusa’s opinion: the one was exactly as superior and tactless as the other.
“What in the world does that mean?” Cole asked.
“Do you know what Hannie-Mavis told me yesterday? She said one time Herb found a den of coyotes up in the woods above his fence line, a mother and a litter of nursing babies. She said he put a bullet in every one of their heads, right in their den.”
Cole gave her a blank look.
“Is that true?” she demanded. “Did you know about it?”
“Why bring up the subject?”
“When was it? Recently?”
“No-oh. It was way last spring, I think. Around the time your mother got sick. Before the wedding, anyway. That’s why you didn’t know about it.”
“Oh, back that long ago. So it doesn’t matter now.”
He sighed. “Lusa, they were meat-eating animals setting up camp on a dairy farm. What do you think Herb’s going to do, give his profits away to the wolves?”
“Not wolves, coyotes.”
“Same thing.”
“Not the same thing. Did it occur to anybody to be interested in the idea of coyotes being here, two thousand miles or something from the Grand Canyon?”
“I expect he was interested in what they eat. Such as a newborn calf.”
“If that’s even what they were—coyotes—which I doubt, knowing Herb’s eyesight. I also doubt if he shot them, to tell you the truth. I bet he missed. I hope he missed.”
“Herb proposition, I will not argue with that. But if you care to know my end of it, Lusa, I hope he got them.”
“You and everybody else in the county. I know.