Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [24]
Now that it was the third week of May, buds were emerging and leaf-eating insects of every kind would soon be hanging thick on the trees, and these little Napoleons could find plenty to eat elsewhere, but they’d probably gotten addicted to her handouts. She was addicted to their presence, too. Lately she’d been thinking about dusting off her Smokey the Bear hat (she’d been issued both Park Service and Forest Service uniforms, as a glitch of this hybrid job) and putting it out there on the boulder every morning with seed on the brim so the birds would get used to landing on it. Eventually she’d be able to put it on and walk around with a gaggle of chickadees on her head, for no purpose other than her own foolish amusement.
She’d finished brushing out her hair. It cascaded down her back and shoulders and folded onto the porch floor where she sat, rippling all around her like a dark, tea-colored waterfall glittering with silver reflections. More silver each year, and less tea. She’d told her husband (ex- already by then), when he asked her why, that she was moving up onto the mountain so she wouldn’t have to cut her hair. Apparently it was a rule for women in their forties: the short, perky haircut. He probably hadn’t understood the joke, thinking it was some embryonic vanity on Deanna’s part, but it wasn’t. She rarely noticed her hair except to let it out of its braid for a run once a week or so, like a neglected hound. She just hadn’t liked the rule, hadn’t wanted to look her age, or any age. And who could be bothered with haircuts, weekly or monthly or whatever they had to be? Deanna actually didn’t know. She’d managed to live her life apart from this and most other mysteries owned by women. Eyeliner, for instance: what was the instrument of its application, did it hurt, and what on earth was the point? She’d never quite had a real haircut. Her dad had known better than to take a girl child to his barber, and if he’d meant to think of some other option, he didn’t get around to it before her wild mane grew down to the backs of her knees. The most she’d done in the way of coiffure was to untangle it from tree branches and trim the ends with the scissors on her Swiss Army knife. That was the only kind of woman she had ever known how to be, in Zebulon County and later on as a schoolteacher and attempted wife in Knoxville. Up here in the woods, finally, she could be the only kind of woman there was.
The kind without a man. Eddie Bondo was gone, and that had to be for the best.
He’d said he’d be back, but she did not believe it. He’d taken everything with him when he went—“everything” being his pack, which admittedly wasn’t much. If what he said was true, that he intended only to hike over to Clinch Peak for a day or two and then come back to see her again, he would need his pack. So she couldn’t judge his leaving by what he’d taken or left. It wasn’t that.
He’d called her hair a miracle. He’d said it was like rolling himself up in a silkworm’s cocoon.
She turned her face to the sky and listened to the blessed woods—that was what he’d left behind. A chance to listen to the dawn chorus and brush her hair without being watched. Eddie Bondo had left her this hard, fine gem of her very own, this diamond solitaire of a life.
She stretched her legs straight in front of her while she re-braided her hair into its familiar rope, an exercise her hands could do without mirror or attention. When she’d snapped the rubber band back onto it from her wrist, she bent her forehead to