Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [22]
It was very early, a damp dawn that had committed itself to nothing yet, still perfectly windless and scentless. May nineteenth, still a nothing of a day, though the date would never again pass unnoticed, after this. She was standing at the same upstairs window watching fog drift up the edges of the fields, uphill along the hedgerows, like the ghost of some ancient river whose tributaries no longer heeded gravity. There was a strange quality to these mornings when Cole was away and she woke up here alone; she was free. As free and disembodied as a ghost. She focused her eyes out in the middle distance of the yard, where she could see the frenzied movement of nocturnal insects in the shadows, noctuid moths looping crazily through the last minutes of this night’s search for a mate.
When she saw Tim Boyer’s sedan with its seal on the side, she understood. If he were just hurt, in a hospital, that was something Tim could have stopped down below to tell. He could have given the news to Lois or Mary Edna first. This was a different mission—requiring notice to the wife. She knew why. Did not know the details—would never know some of them, in fact. The damage to the body was of the kind that sisters and brothers-in-law discuss at length but wives are never told about. But she knew enough.
Now, she thought, her body going cold, as the long white car moved so slowly up the driveway that she could hear the individual pops as the gravel shifted beneath the tires. Right now, from here on everything changes.
But that would not be true. Her decision and all the rest of her days would turn not on the moment when she understood that Cole was dead, but on an earlier time at that same window when she’d received his wordless message by scent across a field.
{3}
Old Chestnuts
Eight years a widower, Garnett still sometimes awoke disoriented and lost to the day. It was because of the large empty bed, he felt; a woman was an anchor. Lacking a wife, he had turned to his God for solace, but sometimes a man also needed the view out his window.
Garnett sat up slowly and bent toward the light, seeing as much with his memory as with his eyes. There was the gray fog of dawn in this wet hollow, lifted with imperious slowness like the skirt of an old woman stepping over a puddle. There were the barn and slat-sided grain house, built by his father and grandfather in another time. The grass-covered root cellar still bulged from the hillside, the two windows in its fieldstone face staring out of the hill like eyes in the head of a man. Every morning of his life, Garnett had saluted that old man in the hillside with the ivy beard crawling out of his chin and the forelock of fescue hanging over his brow. As a boy, Garnett had never dreamed of being an old man himself, still looking at these sights and needing them as badly as a boy needs the smooth lucky chestnut in his pocket, the talisman he rubs all day just to make sure it’s still there.
The birds were starting up their morning chorus. They were in full form now, this far into the spring. What was it now, the nineteenth of May? Full form and feather. He listened. The prothalamion, he had named this in his mind years ago: a song raised up to connubial union. There were meadowlarks and chats, field sparrows, indigo buntings, all with their heads raised to the dawn and their hearts pressed into clear liquid song for their mates. Garnett held his face in his hands for just a moment. As a boy he had never dreamed of an age when there was no song left, but still some heart.
{4}
Predators
She sat cross-legged on the floor of the porch, brushing out her hair and listening to the opening chorus of this day. A black-and-white warbler had started it long before dawn, breaking into her sleep with his high-pitched “Sweet sweet!” Deanna could picture him out there, circling the trunk of a poplar, tilting his tiny little zebra-striped head toward the first hints of light, tearing yesterday off the calendar and opening the summer of love with his