Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [57]
Jewel passed the sponge from one hand to the other while she studied Lusa. “Nobody’s saying you didn’t love him.”
“Nobody thinks they’re saying that.” She could feel Jewel’s scrutiny but couldn’t look up. She turned back to the sink and leaned in to the sticky preserve pot and scrubbed it hard to keep herself from crying or yelling. Her whole body pumped with the effort.
“My Lord, honey. What’s this about?”
“That thing about changing my name back, for instance. My husband’s hardly cold in the grave, and already I’ve run to the courthouse to erase his family name from the deed to your family farm? That’s for shit. What kind of meanspirited lie is that, and who made it up?”
Jewel hesitated. “Lois saw your signature on something at the funeral home.”
Loud Lois, she thought uncharitably, picturing that long face permanently puckered with worry that someone else was getting her share. “I always had the same name, before, during, and after Cole. Lusa Maluf Landowski. My mom’s Palestinian and my dad’s a Polish Jew, and never, before I came here, did I think that was anything to be ashamed of. I’ve had it since I was born. Not that I’ve ever heard anybody in your family say it. You talk about making somebody disappear? You think they put the vanishing act on Shel? Try living in a family that won’t learn your damn name!”
She and Jewel blinked at each other, shocked equally.
“Nobody meant any harm, honey. It’s just normal to take your husband’s name around here. We’re just regular country people, with country ways.”
“It never struck me as a regular thing to do, so we just didn’t. God, Jewel, did you all really believe I’d take his name and then throw it back, a week after he died? Some carpetbagger, erasing your family name and stealing your homeplace, is that how you see me?”
Jewel had her hand on her mouth, and tears were welling up in her eyes; they were back where they’d started. Lusa had raised her voice at this timid woman who was probably the nearest thing she had to a friend in the family or this county. Jewel shook her head and held out her arms to Lusa, who stepped awkwardly into her hug. Jewel’s body felt as bony and light as a bird’s underneath her apron, all feathers and heartbeat.
They clung to each other for a minute, rocking back and forth. “Don’t pay any attention to me,” Lusa said. “I’m losing my mind. There are ghosts here. There’s one in this kitchen that stirs up fights.”
Over Jewel’s shoulder she could look straight down the hall through the wavy antique glass in the front door to the outside, the yard and front pasture. This rain would never end, she thought. She could see the fresh beginnings of yet another storm coming: the leaves of the tulip poplar down by the barn trembling and rotating on a hundred different axes, like a tree full of pinwheels. Beneath it Lowell and Crystal orbited the barnyard in their dark, soaked clothes, laughing and galloping on a pair of invisible horses, traveling in circles through the infinite downpour as if time for them had stopped, or not yet started.
{9}
Old Chestnuts
Garnett stood admiring the side of his barn. Over the course of a century the unpainted chestnut planks had weathered to a rich, mottled gray, interrupted only by the orange and lime-colored streaks of lichen that brightened the wood in long, vertical stripes where moisture drained from the galvanized tin roof.
He was haunted by the ghosts of these old chestnuts, by the great emptiness their extinction had left in the world, and so this was something Garnett did from time to time, like going to the cemetery to be with dead relatives: he admired chestnut wood. He took a moment to honor and praise its color, its grain, and its miraculous capacity to stand up to decades of weather without pressure treatment or insecticides. Why and how, exactly, no one quite knew.