Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [73]
“Here, put this out for me,” she said, handing him the stub of her cigarette. “Before I burn down my barn.”
He tamped it out on the bottom of his shoe, then ran a hand through his hair and straightened up. She saw his eyes glance twice at the open doorway. It was no longer evening now but night, full dark.
“You need to get home,” she said.
“Yeah, I do.”
“Tell your dad it’s OK about the tobacco. He’s right, it really is what I wanted, not to set tobacco this year. Thank him for helping me stick to my principles.”
“OK.”
“Now get.” She smacked his thigh with the back of her hand. “Your mother will think I’m holding you hostage.”
“She won’t, either. They’re more shy of you than anything, the whole family.”
“I know. I’m an outsider occupying their family home. They want their farm back, and I really don’t blame them. Most mornings I get out of bed thinking I should pack my car and drive away without even saying good-bye.”
He raised his eyebrows. “That’d hurt some feelings.”
“Maybe that’d be my point.”
“Even if you left, we couldn’t be sure of keeping this place. My folks or Uncle Herb and Aunt Mary Edna, they could lose it next year to the bank.”
“That’s what I was thinking, too. Families lose their land for a million reasons. My dad’s parents had this wonderful farm in Poland, which they lost for being Jewish. And my mother’s people got run off their land for not being Jewish. Go figure.”
“Is that true? What type of farming?”
She glanced up at him, surprised by his interest. “The Malufs had olive groves along the Jordan River, or so I’m told. I don’t know the details; it was pretty far back. Mom was born in New York. But my dad was actually born on his folks’ farm, in the middle part of Poland, which people say looks like a storybook. I think they grew sugar beets.”
“That’s something, that you come from farming people.” He appraised her as though she’d suddenly grown taller or older. “I never knew that.”
She saw now that his interest was not in social history but in crops. She’d begun to comprehend this frank pragmatism and to suspect that if she could acquire it—if she could want to—she could belong here. She shrugged. “So what, I come from farming people. Doesn’t make any difference.”
He continued to look at her. “You talk about leaving, everybody says you’re going to, but you stay. There’s some reason.”
She sighed, crossing her arms across her chest and rubbing her elbows. “If there’s any reason or rhyme to what I’m doing, I wish I knew it. I’m like a moth, Rickie, flying in spirals. You see how they do?” She nodded up at the lightbulb, where hordes of small, frantic wings glinted through the arc of brightness in circular paths through the air. They were everywhere once you bothered to notice them: like visible molecules, Lusa thought, entirely filling up space with their looping trajectories. Rickie seemed surprised to realize this, that moths were everywhere. He stared upward with his mouth slightly open.
“A calf will run around that way when it’s lost its mama and scared to death,” he observed at last.
“They’re not lost, though. Moths don’t use their eyes the way we do; they use smell. They’re tasting the air, taking samples from different places and comparing them, really fast. That’s how they navigate. It gets them where they need to be, but it takes them forever to get there.”
“‘Go sniff the wind.’ However you said that.”
“Ru-uh shum hawa. Exactly. That’s me. I can’t seem to go in a straight line.”
“Who says you have to?”
“I don’t know, it’s embarrassing. People are watching me. I’m figuring out how to farm by doing all the wrong things. And I’m having this retrospective marriage, starting at the end and moving backward, getting acquainted with Cole through all the different ages he was before I met him.”
She doubted Rickie was following this, but he was respectful, at least. They stood together watching the dizzying dance of silver wings through the cool air: tussock moths, tortricids, foresters, each one ignoring the others as it wheeled on its own path, urgent and true.