Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [192]
And this was what she had started: in the absence of Cole, in the house where he’d grown up, she was learning to cohabit with the whole of his life. It was Cole who’d broken out the top rail of the banister as a rambunctious child, Cole who’d built the dry sink in the pantry for his mother the first year he took shop in school. He’d planted every one of the lilacs in the yard, though that seemed impossible because they were thirty feet tall now. His father had made him plant them for his mother the summer he was nine, as reparation for cursing in front of her. Lusa was making progress toward understanding. Cole was not to be a husband for whom one cooked, with whom one sat down to meals. He would be a second childhood to carry alongside her own, the child becoming the man for all the years that had led up to their meeting. She could coax stories about Cole even from people outside the family: women in town, strangers, Mr. Walker. Country people seemed to have many unwritten codes about death, more of them than city people, and one was that after a given amount of time you could speak freely of the dead man again. You could tell tales on him, even laugh at his mild expense, as if he had rejoined your ranks. It seemed to Lusa that all these scattered accounts were really parts of one long story, the history of a family that had stayed on its land. And that story was hers now as well.
In the afternoon she’d learned she was going to get a dollar eighty a pound for her goats, if everything went according to plan. It was a price unheard of in the county, apparently, for any animal. She considered this now, happily taking a minute to let her success sink in while she rested on her ladder in the darkness and rubbed the tired muscles in the back of her neck. This was like winning the blue ribbon. By her wits she had made something succeed here, where there seemed to be no hope. It didn’t even matter that no one would ever properly admire her canny ingenuity. Nobody would realize that the major holidays of three of the world’s major religions coincided in the week she sold her goats, like stars aligning for a spectacular horoscope. Only a religious mongrel like Lusa could have seen it coming and hitched her fortunes to it. Probably the real facts of her coup would be transformed into the sort of wild rumor that ran barefoot through Oda Black’s and the hardware store, and that nobody believed: Lusa had a cousin with connections to rich Italian gangsters. Lusa had illegally gotten her goats sold to the king of Egypt. In a place like this, some secrets kept themselves, out of a failure to stand up to the competing rumors.
She knew her goat success wasn’t any kind of permanent answer; there was no cure-all for the predicament known as farming. She’d have to be resourceful for the rest of her life. At Southern States she’d noticed the native bluestem grasses the government was now paying people to plant in place of fescue, and had been shocked to see what the seed went for. Twenty-eight dollars a pound. That seed had to be grown somewhere; a grass farm, imagine the gossip that would generate. Next year she might raise no goats at all, depending on the calendar, though many other people surely would, after they heard what she got for hers. And they would discover they couldn’t give their goat meat away. Lusa was beginning to see how she would live out her life in Zebulon County. She was going to be a woman men talked about.
This morning after her terrible night Lusa had awakened feeling shucked out and changed altogether, shaken but sound. As if she’d passed through some door into a place where she could walk surely on the ground of her life. The storm had washed the world clean and snuffed out the electricity in the whole county. Here, it shattered the windows on the north side of the house and rattled every ghost out of the rafters, from both sides of the family. She’d spent the night saying prayers in the languages she knew, feeling sure some kind of end was near, before finally falling