Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [33]
“You’ll be all right,” Lusa told her without feeling. As soon as I’m gone.
The evening had the sensation of a dream she would not remember in the morning. Trapped in the endless repetition, she shook the callused palms of men who still milked cows by hand, and accepted the scented, too-soft cheeks of their wives against her own.
“He was a good man. Only the Lord knows why his time came so soon.”
“Called home. He’s with the Savior now.”
“He looks real natural.”
She hadn’t looked at the body and couldn’t contemplate it. She could not really think it was in there, not his body, the great perfect table of his stomach on which she could lay down her head like a sleepy schoolchild; that energy of his that she had learned to crave and move to like an old tune inside her that she’d never known how to sing before Cole. His hands on her bare back, his mouth that drew her in like a nectar guide on a flower—these things of Cole’s she would never have again in her life. She opened her eyes for fear she would fall into the darkness. A tiny old woman was there, kneeling in front of her, startling Lusa by putting both hands very firmly on her knees.
“You don’t know me,” she whispered, almost fiercely. “I have an orchard a mile up the road from your farm. I’ve known Cole Widener since he was a little boy. He used to come play with my daughter. I’d let him steal apples.”
“Oh,” Lusa said. “Thank you.”
The woman looked upward and blinked as if she were listening for a moment. Her eyes were very deep brown, surrounded by pale lashes, and she wore her gray hair in a crown of braids wrapped around her head, like someone from another country or another time. “I lost a child,” she said, meeting Lusa’s eyes directly. “I thought I wouldn’t live through it. But you do. You learn to love the place somebody leaves behind for you.”
She released Lusa’s knees and grasped her hands instead, holding them tightly for a few seconds before ducking away. Her grip had felt so cool and strong on Lusa’s listless fingers, and so fleeting. As the woman went out the door Lusa caught sight of her calico skirt swinging to the side, like a curtain closing.
Sometime after nine o’clock, Mary Edna began to insist that Lusa go home. Herb could take her, she suggested, and then come back to wait out the evening with the rest of the family. Or someone else could do it—there was a volunteer, a Widener cousin, who would stay with her so she wouldn’t have to be alone in the house until the others got there.
“But why should I go home if you’re all still staying?” Lusa asked, as muddled as a child. And then, like a muddled child who senses she’s being wronged, she pushed her faltering will into a dogged single-mindedness. She told Mary Edna she would stay here till the end, until the last person had said good-bye to Cole and left this room. She would see the back of Herb Goins’s bald head and the hind ends of Mary Edna, Lois, Jewel, Emaline, and Hannie-Mavis pass through that door, and then she would kiss her husband good-bye. She didn’t think about Cole’s body or anything else as she declared her intention to stay. She just repeated it, more angrily each time, until she made it come true.
Two days and two nights after the wake, Lusa still hadn’t slept. She couldn’t understand how her mind could fail to collapse over her body’s exhaustion. But it was the opposite: the more tired she felt, the more adamantly her mind seemed to want to keep vigil. Over what? Nobody’s going to steal the silver, she mused, not that she would give a hoot if somebody did—and well somebody might, the house was so jammed with visitors. On Friday afternoon, right after the funeral, she had dozed off for just a minute on the parlor couch in a room full of people dressed in their Sunday clothes. She could swear it was the quiet that woke her, the fact that their talk of crops and rain and beef prices and rheumatism suddenly ceased when they realized she was sleeping. Lusa had opened her eyes onto their sorrowful, silent stares, as if she herself were the