Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [56]
“No. He never told me that.”
“I’m telling you. Right out here in Daddy’s bottom field. Every year, whatever it was, it failed, and he had to eat a little more of his pride. He grew up in those three years, from dreamer to farmer. Gave up his pipe dreams and started smoking.”
Lusa shook her head. “I can’t picture that. I know Cole was energetic, but I can’t picture that he was ever so—what? starry-eyed.” She laughed. “Plus, I figured he was born smoking. Like a fish, he was hooked.”
“No, I remember being shocked to see him smoking with the men at Mommy’s wake. So it was right around then, when Mommy died. The very next year, Daddy cleaned out the barn and signed the farm over to Cole, and then he died, too. Seemed like he could trust Cole to be a man finally. He’d be able to handle anything that came along, after the red bell peppers, the cucumbers, and the potatoes.”
Anything but a steering column through his rib cage, Lusa thought morbidly, recognizing how self-pity could push its nose into any conversation like a tiresome dog. It took so much energy to keep Cole outside her thoughts for a single minute. And yet people still said, “I didn’t want to remind you….”
“What could go wrong with potatoes?” Lusa forced herself to ask. “It seems like such a sure thing. Good yielder, easy to transport, and you could spread out the harvest.”
“It was the funniest thing. They said he could make a profit if he could get them down to the potato-chip factory in Knoxville. But then when he did, it didn’t work out. They liked the Idaho potatoes better. The ones that grow around here have too much sugar in them. It makes them slice ragged and burn around the edges.”
“Too much sugar?”
“That’s what they said. This bottomland’s too rich. I mean, they’re good potatoes, just not good for the market.”
“Jewel, my life sounds like a country song: ‘My roof’s a-caving in, my land’s too steep to plow, and my bottom’s got too much sugar.’”
“Your bottom!” Jewel startled Lusa by smacking her with a dish towel. “Let’s get your bottom to cleaning up this mess. You are not going to starve, Loretta Lynn.”
Jewel piled things up to carry to the sink while Lusa plunged her hands into soapy water so hot it prickled her skin. The hurt felt like a punishment that would clean the ache out of her chest. The rain was picking up again, starting to hammer a quiet roar on the tin roof, playing Zayda Landowski’s music. Yesterday was the anniversary of her wedding, which nobody had mentioned all day, but Zayda had regaled her all through the rainy night playing klezmer tunes on his clarinet—the Jewish wedding she never had. She and Cole had made a small ceremony of it in the Hunt Morgan garden in Lexington, outdoors, to sidestep the issue of religion. That had been fine with Cole. He wasn’t churchy like his sisters.
“Jewel, I want to tell you something. Just let me say this. I loved my husband.”
“Well, sure you did.”
In her mind’s eye Lusa pictured the lower field, back when he’d first set out to make it his own: a moving sea of leaves turning lightly in the breeze, the bobbing red bells of ripening peppers, a young man wading through them the way he would walk into a lake. Cole at nineteen. A man she never met.
“We never got a chance to hit our stride, maybe. You all still think I don’t really know who he was, but I did, I do. We talked a lot; he told me things. Just a few days before he died, he told me something amazing.”
Jewel looked up. “What? Can I ask?”
Lusa crossed her arms over her stomach, holding her breath, transported by the scent-memory of honeysuckle across a field. Like a moth, here I am, we’re here. She glanced over at Jewel. “I’m sorry, it won’t make any sense to you. It’s nothing I can say in words.”
“Well,” Jewel said, turning away. She was disappointed, Lusa could see. Now she thought Lusa was withholding something important, some piece of her brother that would help bring him back.
“Never mind. I’m sorry,