Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [193]
And awoke resurrected. She walked out into the yard, astonished by the downed catalpa branches everywhere and the twinkling constellations of broken glass. Those windows had been the antique, wavy glass original to this house. It was amazing. After all the years this place had known, something new could still happen.
In the first confident act of her new life, she called up Little Rickie and hired him to be her part-time assistant farm manager. Over the phone they agreed on ten dollars an hour (the rule of neighbors and family notwithstanding) and a starting date as soon as he could get the parts from Dink Little to fix the baler. He would mow her hay and help her get it in the barn, then take on the task of clearing the multiflora roses out of any field edges her goats couldn’t reach. She would not let him spray any weed killer. They’d argued about it briefly, but she’d won, because this wasn’t a marital feud as it had been with Cole. It was a condition of employment. Rickie could clear with the bush hog and a hand scythe or not at all, and he was not to touch the woods, not to hunt squirrel or deer or coyote or ginseng. It would be Rickie’s job, too, to find tactful ways of keeping the other men in the family from hunting up in the hollow. This was still the Widener farm, but the woods were no longer the Widener woods, Lusa explained. They were nobody’s.
The yard she could take care of herself. He’d offered, but she’d said she wanted to do it. She’d awakened today with a deep desire to put the place in order. Not just to drag the downed branches out of the yard, but to cut back the brambles she’d allowed to creep in over the course of the summer. She couldn’t explain why, but she felt closed in and needed to strike out, to take up her Weed Eater and pruners like weapons against the encroachment. She’d been working at it fiercely all day, taking a break only briefly in the afternoon, when the call came from her cousin in New York. Then she’d gone right back to it and continued working long into the evening, with the mountain’s breath on the back of her neck and moth wings looping circles in the porch light.
She knew, from Rickie and Crystal, that the family had begun to talk about how hard she worked with her hands. They seemed to respect her use of tools. Earlier in the day she’d showed Rickie how to use a sharpened spade instead of Roundup to cut out the field-apple saplings planted by accident in the lawn. After he left, she’d taken a pruning saw to the creeper vines that were trailing up the sides of the house and over into the boxwoods, getting into everything, the way creeper vines did. Then she ripped out every climbing vine from the row of old lilacs so they could bloom again.
Now, in the gathering darkness, she turned finally to tearing out the honeysuckle that had overgrown the garage. There was enough moon reflected off the white clapboards that she could see what she needed to see. It was only honeysuckle, an invasive exotic, nothing sacred. She saw it now for what it was, an introduced garden vine coiling itself tightly around all the green places where humans and wilder creatures conceded to share their lives.
She ripped the vine down from the walls in long strands, letting them fall in coils like rope on the ground at the foot of her ladder. Wherever she ripped the long tendrils from the flank of the building, dark tracks of root hairs remained in place, trailing upward like faint lines of animal tracks traveling silently uphill. Or like long, curving spines left standing after their bodies were stripped suddenly away. She worked steadily in the cool night, tearing herself free, knowing this honeysuckle would persist beyond anything she could ever devise or imagine. It would be back here again, as soon as next summer.
{31}
She paused at the top of the field, inhaling the faint scent of honeysuckle. It seemed odd for someone to be out down there, this late at night. She kept up