Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [68]
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Tomorrow I’m pasturing this girl out with her calf so all that milk can go to the stomach it was made for. It doesn’t do much for mine.”
“Don’t care for milk, do you?”
“It doesn’t cd this for Cole because he loved fresh cream. I like making yogurt, laban zabadi—I’ll miss that. But I’ve frozen enough butter and cheese to last me all winter, and fresh milk I just don’t need. Unless your family wants it?”
“Nah, we get a gallon a day from Uncle Herb. We drink it, too. Mostly I do.”
“Well, good for you. I wasn’t raised on it like you were.” Lusa was finished. She opened the stanchion to release the cow’s head and carefully backed her out of it. The gentle old Jersey ambled straight to the stall that held her calf, and Lusa let her in, giving her broad flank one good pat for good-bye. She felt ridiculous for the tears in her eyes.
“Yeah, Mom said you were…something.”
“She thinks I’m something, does she? That’s nice.” Lusa brushed off her jeans and shook bits of hay out of the tails of her stained white work shirt, which reached to her knees. It was one of Cole’s, pulled on over a rust-colored velvet T-shirt she used to feel pretty in, once.
“No, I mean, some nationality.”
“I knew what you meant. Rickie, everybody’s some nationality.”
“Not me. I’m just American.”
“Is that why you’ve got a Rebel flag on the bumper of your truck? Because the Confederacy tried to bust up the American government, you know.”
“A southern American, then. What are you?”
“That’s a good question. Polish-Arab-American, I guess.”
“Huh. You don’t look it.”
“No? What do I look like to you?” She stood under the light, holding her arms out straight against the planks of the stanchion. Her hair was curly and wild in this humidity, a strawberry-blond halo around her face in the harsh light. Small white moths batted circles around the lightbulb overhead. Rickie inspected her politely.
“You look like a white person,” he said.
“My mom’s parents were Palestinian, and my dad’s were Jews from Poland. I’m the black sheep of your family, and for all that I still sunburn like nobody’s business. Just goes to show you, Rickie, you can’t tell a book by its cover.”
“I heard Mom and Aunt Mary Edna talking about that, that you were one of those other Christianities.”
“I can just imagine that conversation.” She picked up the flathead shovel to clean up the floor of the milking parlor, but Rickie took it out of her hands, excusing himself for bumping her shoulder. She never knew how to take these country kids—rudeness and politeness in an unfathomable mix. He scraped the manure into a small pile and carried it a shovelful at a time to the mound just outside the door.
“It wasn’t nothing against you, Aunt Lusa,” he said from the darkness, giving her a jolt. It had been so long since she’d heard her name spoken aloud. Twenty-eight days, exactly. Nobody else in the family ever said it. Rickie ducked back into the bright milking parlor. “It was just one time when they were just talking about, what if you and Uncle Cole had kids. This was before…”
“He died. When kids were more of an option for us.”
“Yeah. I think they just wondered, you know, how the church part would work. That it would be hard on his kids.”
She gathered up the bucket and rag she’d used to wash the Jersey’s udder, and set the lid onto the stainless steel milking bucket. The rim felt warm.
“It wasn’t hard on me, being mix-and-match,” she said. “I’ll grant you we weren’t really devout, either way. My dad hated his father and kind of turned his back on his religion. And I’m not a good Muslim, that’s for sure. If I were, you’d see me turning”—she rotated slowly in the barn cellar, finding east—“that way and kneeling down to pray five times a day.”
“You pray towards the chicken house?”
“Toward Mecca.”
“Where’s that at, North Carolina?”
She laughed. “Saudi Arabia. It’s where the prophet Muhammad was born, so you send