Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [195]
She stopped to listen, briefly, for the sound of anything here that might be unexpected. Nothing. It was a still, good night full of customary things. Flying squirrels in every oak within hearing distance; a skunk halfway down the mountainside; a group of turkeys roosting closer by, in the tangled branches of a huge oak that had fallen in the storm; and up ahead somewhere, one of the little owls that barked when the moon was half dark. She trotted quickly on up the ridge, leaving behind the delicate, sinuous trail of her footprints and her own particular scent.
If someone in this forest had been watching her—a man with a gun, for instance, hiding inside a copse of leafy beech trees—he would have noticed how quickly she moved up the path, attending the ground ahead of her feet, so preoccupied with her solitary search that she appeared unaware of his presence. He might have watched her for a long time, until he believed himself and this other restless life in his sight to be the only two creatures left here in this forest of dripping leaves, breathing in some separate atmosphere that was somehow more rarefied and important than the world of air silently exhaled by the leaves all around them.
But he would have been wrong. Solitude is a human presumption. Every quiet step is thunder to beetle life underfoot, a tug of impalpable thread on the web pulling mate to mate and predator to prey, a beginning or an end. Every choice is a world made new for the chosen.
Acknowledgments
This novel grew from soil richly blessed by my Virginia friends and neighbors. I’m especially grateful to Neta Findley for a friendship that has brought me home, and to her late husband, Bill, and their son Joe, whose stories and humor have enriched my life and this book. A tithe of my future apple crop goes to Fred Hebard of the American Chestnut Foundation for all kinds of help and an education in trees; the foundation’s chestnut breeding program—a far more systematic project than the one invented for this tale—will someday return the American chestnut to American woodlands. Thanks also to Dayle, Paige, and Kyla, our family’s family. I’m grateful to Jim and Pam Watson for carriage rides, good humor, and good will; Miss Amy for peace of mind; Randy Lowe for good advice; and the Cooperative Extension Service for answering perhaps the strangest questions they’ve ever been asked. Bill Kittrell of the Nature Conservancy provided valuable insights, as did Braven Beaty, Kristy Clark, Steve Lindeman, and Claiborne Woodall. Finally, I’m forever indebted to Felicia Mitchell for laundrymat friendship and the poetry of yard sales, and for taking me to the farm that first evening when I almost didn’t go.
In the wider world I’m beholden to a network of friends and colleagues larger than I can ever thank by name, though some rise to the top: blessed thanks to Emma Hardesty for years of our lives; to Terry Karten for believing in literature in spite of everything; to Jane Beirn for graciously connecting the private me with the public world; to Walter Thabit for Arabic curses; to Frances Goldin for recipes, Yiddish syntax, infallible instincts, unconditional love, and, basically, everything—for more than you, who could ask. I’m grateful to the family of Aaron Kramer for their generosity in allowing me to use his exquisite poem “Prothalamium,” from The Thunder of the Grass (International Publishers, New York); in discovering the beauty and breadth of his life’s work as a writer of passion and social conscience, I feel I am finding a kindred spirit. I thank Chris Cokinos for his wonderful book Hope Is the Thing with Feathers; Carrie Newcomer for invisible threads; W. D. Hamilton (in memoriam) for boldness and brilliance; Edward O. Wilson for those things and also devotion. Dan Papaj brought to