Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [46]
She’d set out the buckets to collect a drink for the potted ferns on the porch, which were out of the rain’s reach and turning brown, even in this soggy weather, as brittle and desolate as her internal grief. She’d meant to return to her work, but the rhythms arrested her. It was a relief to stand still for a minute, listening, without anyone giving her pitying looks and ordering her to go lie down. Hannie-Mavis and Jewel had gone home finally, though they still came up several times a day to “check” on her, which mostly meant telling her to eat, even what to eat, as if she were a child. But then they’d go away afterward. Lusa could stand on her own porch in a pair of jeans and Cole’s work shirt and watch the rain and let her mind go numb if she felt like it. If she hadn’t had a gallon of cherries to pit and pack into canning jars she could have amused herself all morning out here, setting a bucket under each downspout and making up a song to go with it. Her grandfather Landowski’s game: he used to tap out unexpected rhythms with his fingertips on her bony knees, inventing mysterious Balkan melodies that he’d hum against the beat.
“Your zayda, the last landowner in our line,” her father used to declare sarcastically, because his father had had a sugar-beet farm on the Ner River north of Lodz, and he’d lost it in the war, fleeing Poland in possession of nothing but his life, a young son and wife, and a clarinet. “Your great zayda who made a name for himself in New York as a klezmer musician, before leaving his wife and child for an American girl he met in a nightclub.” Lusa knew, though it wasn’t discussed, that with his young mistress the old man had even sired a second family, all of whom perished in a tenement fire—her zayda included. It was hard to say which part of the story Lusa’s father held against him—most of it, she supposed. When they flew to New York to witness the burial of the charred remains, Lusa was still too young to understand her father’s feelings and all the ironies of the loss. Zayda Landowski hadn’t visited her mind for many years. And now here he was, in a syncopated string of water drops on a farmhouse porch in Zebulon County. He’d started out as a farmer before bending the rest of his life around loss. What would he have made of a rainy day in this hollow, with its rich smells of decomposition and sweet new growth?
Lusa smoothed her shirttail and composed herself to look busy and well nourished, for here came Herb and Mary Edna’s green truck bouncing up the drive. But it was not the Menacing Eldest behind the wheel this time. It was her husband, Herb, Lusa saw as he pulled up in front of the house, and Lois’s husband, Big Rickie, who got out on the passenger’s side. Both men tucked their heads down and held the bills of their caps with their right hands as they jogged toward her through the rain. They ducked through the beaded curtain of drips, carefully avoiding her buckets on the steps, and stomped their boots several times on the porch floorboards before taking off their caps. The scents rising from their work overalls put Cole right there with them: dust, motor oil, barn hay. She breathed in, drawing from strange men’s clothes these molecules of her husband.
“He needs a gutter put on this porch,” Rickie told Herb, as if they also agreed to the fact of Cole’s presence here—and Lusa’s absence. What mission required this delegation of husbands? Were they going to order her to leave now, or what? Would she put up a fight or go peacefully?
“Rickie, Herb,” she said, squaring her shoulders. “Nice to see you.”
Both men nodded at her, then glanced back out at the rain, the absent gutter, and the waterlogged fields where they seemed eager to return to work. She eyed the green cockleburs planted like tiny land mines on the cuffs of their khaki trousers.
“Another good hard rain,” Herb observed. “Too bad we need it like a hole in the head. One more week of this, the frogs’ll drown.”
“Supposed to clear up by Saturday, though,” said Rickie.
“’At’s right,” Herb agreed. “Otherwise we wouldn’t