Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [32]
Jewel’s and Hannie-Mavis’s five-year-olds were running underfoot, literally: one of the two had just climbed underneath Lusa’s legs and the strange black stockings someone had given her to put on. The persistent, spiraling path of these boys through their uncle’s wake made her ponder moth navigation: were the children sampling the air for grief in different parts of the room? If so, what would they find in the air around Lusa? She found it impossible to feel anything. Somehow her numbness seemed connected with the great din of noise. As the evening wore on and on, the noise seemed to rise like a tide. So many conversations at once added up to a kind of quacking racket that she could not begin to sort through. She found herself considering, instead, the sounds of nonsensical phrases that bounced into her ears. Mountain speech, even without its words, was a whole different language from city speech: the vowels were a little harsher, but the whole cadence was somehow softer. ’At’en up ’air, she heard again and again: “That one up there.”
Hit’s not for sale. Them cows come over on Lawrence again. Wet’s it is, won’t be no more tobacco setting this week, Law, no. Hit’s a line fence. Why sure, I wouldn’t care to. Widener boy, old Widener place, Law, yes, I been up ’air.
Why yeah, fishing, when I’s a kid. ’Air’s a pond up ’at holler. Bitter Holler.
No, no bid’ness of hers. That’s Widener land and everybody knows it, you-all’s family place, what does she have to do with it?
No, she won’t stay on it. Don’t hardly see how she could.
This last, she realized with a start, was Mary Edna. Over near the door, speaking of her, Lusa. How could this have been decided already? But it was only natural, even a kindness, Lusa supposed, for them to release her so easily. What else could they expect but for Lusa to pack up her butterfly nets and her foreign name and go back to Lexington now? “Where she belongs,” was the end of the sentence she didn’t hear spoken aloud.
She felt a strange lightness: Yes! She could walk away from Zebulon County. She’d been granted more than just the freedom to read in bed all she wanted, which would still mean hiding from sisters-in-law who disapproved of reading and probably the whole idea of being in bed. No, it was that she could leave this place, be anybody she wanted, anywhere at all. She put her hands to her face and felt a joyful urge to tell Cole: they could leave now! Oh, God, Cole. She ground her knuckles into her eye sockets and vaguely grasped how far gone she must be. Shock, two nights without sleep, and two days of people eating ham sandwiches in her kitchen had caused her to lose her mind. Her body, as if it belonged to someone else, began to shake with a dry, sharp rack she was helpless to stop, a strange weeping from her throat that sounded almost like laughter. Hannie-Mavis put an arm around Lusa’s convulsing shoulders and whispered, “Honey, I don’t know what we’ll do without him. We’re all just as lost as you are.”
Lusa looked at Hannie-Mavis. Behind the fiercely curled and blue-mascaraed lashes, her eyes did seem helpless, truly as lost as she claimed. What was she trying to say? That Lusa had no prerogative to the greatest grief? First as mistress of their house, and now as Cole’s widow, Lusa was