Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [47]
“To tell me it’s supposed to stop raining, you came up here?” Lusa asked, looking from one sun-toughened face to the other for some clue. It was always like this, anytime she got wedged into a conversation with her brothers-in-law. This sense of having wandered into a country where they spoke English but all the words meant something different.
“Yep,” said Herb. Rickie nodded to corroborate. They looked like a comedy team: stout, bald Herb was the front man, while tall, gangling Rickie stood mostly silent with his cap in hand and his wild black hair molded to the shape of the cap. He had an Adam’s apple like a round oak gall on the stalk of his long neck. People called him Big Rickie even though his son Little Rickie had, at seventeen, surpassed him in many ways. Lusa felt some sympathy with Little Rickie’s fate. Life in Zebulon: the minute you’re born you’re trapped like a bug, somebody’s son or wife, a place too small to fit into.
“So,” Herb interjected into the silence. “We’ll be needing to set Cole’s tobacco.”
“Oh,” Lusa said, surprised. “It’s time for that, isn’t it.”
“I’ll tell you the truth, it’s past time. All this rain’s been keeping everybody’s fields mucked up, and now here it is June, perty near too late.”
“Well, it’s only, what, the fifth or something? June fifth?”
“’At’s right. Blue mold will be setting in here come July, if the plants aren’t up big enough by then.”
“You can spray for blue mold if you have to,” Lusa said. Tobacco pathology was not exactly her department, but she’d heard Cole speak of it. She felt desperate to know something in front of these men.
“Can,” they agreed, with limited enthusiasm.
“Have you both got your own tobacco plants in? You should go ahead and do your own first.”
Herb nodded. “I leased out my allotment this year, since them durn cows are keeping me too busy to mess with it. Me and him got Big Rickie’s in on Monday morning, when we had that break in the weather. That puts Cole next.”
And what about Jewel? Lusa wondered. Are they also running her life, since her husband ran off with a waitress from Cracker Barrel? “So what you’re saying is,” she interpreted cautiously, her heart pounding in her ears, “on Saturday you and your boys will be coming up here to set the tobacco.”
“’At’s right. If it dries out for a day first.”
“And what about me? Do I get a say?”
Both men glanced at her with the exact same eye: surprised, fearful, put out. But wasn’t it her farm? She looked away from them, inhaling the rich scents of mud and honeysuckle and listening to her childish project, her bucket on the step: Tat-tat-a-tat-tat-a-tat-tat-tat! She heard a song against the beat, distinctly, the trilling clarinet rising like laughter and the mandolin as insistent as clapping hands. Klezmer music.
“It’s my farm now,” she said aloud. Her voice quavered, and her fingers felt hot.
“Yep,” Herb agreed. “But we don’t mind helping Cole out like any other year. Tobacco’s a lot of work, takes a whole family. ’At’s how people around here do it, anyways.”
“I was here last year,” she said tersely. “I brought hot coffee out to you and Cole and Little Rickie and that other boy, that cousin from Tazewell. If you recall.”
Big Rickie smiled. “I recall you trying your hand at riding behind the tractor and setting a row of plants. Some of them ended up with their roots a-dangling up in the air and their leaves planted in the ground.”
“Cole drove too fast on purpose! We were just newlyweds. He was teasing me in front of you guys.” Lusa flushed pink up to the hairline, remembering her ride on the little platform attached to the rear of the tractor, grabbing the floppy young tobacco plants from the box beside her. Their disintegrating texture was like that of tissue paper; trying to plunge them into the chunky clay of the furrow as it passed beneath her seemed impossible. They had been married only two days. “It was my first time behind a tractor,” she contended.
“It was,” Big Rickie conceded. “And most of them plants was roots-down.”
Herb steered