Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [76]
“Don’t do it like that.” Deanna lifted aside the heavy pile of blankets and put her feet on the cold floor. The wood stove radiated a tangible field of heat that her body passed through as she walked to the window. “Best if you don’t touch it. The scales will come off its wings.”
“And that would be terrible?”
“To the moth it would. I think it dies or something, without them.”
He stepped back, deferring to this dire claim. “Is that a scientific fact?”
She smiled. “My dad told me, so it must be true.” She tried with her cupped hands to steer the moth away from the window. “Darn it, little wing, I’d open this window for you, but you’ve picked the only one that doesn’t open.”
“Who’s your dad, a moth scientist or something?”
“Don’t laugh, there are moth scientists. I knew of one, in graduate school.” She tried to urge the moth toward the window over the bed, but nothing doing. It continued to throw itself eastward like a supplicant toward Mecca.
“Maybe if we close the curtain she’ll go to a different window,” he suggested.
“Maybe.” Carefully she drew the white cotton curtain between the moth and the glass, but she could see that wasn’t going to help much.
“She can still see the light,” he said.
He’d believed her when she declared the moth a female. Deanna was touched. “You know what, I can’t really sex a moth at twenty paces, I was bluffing. And no, my dad wasn’t a scientist. He could have been. He was a farmer, but he was…” The moth settled onto the curtain and sat still. It was an astonishing creature, with black and white wings patterned in geometric shapes, scarlet underwings, and a fat white body with black spots running down it like a snowman’s coal buttons. No human eye had looked at this moth before; no one would see its friends. So much detail goes unnoticed in the world.
“I can’t really even describe how my dad was,” she finished. “If you spent a hundred years in Zebulon County just watching every plant and animal that lived in the woods and the fields, you still wouldn’t know as much as he did when he died.”
“Your hero. I’m jealous.”
“He was. He had theories about everything. He’d say, ‘Look at that indigo bunting, he’s so blue, looks like he dropped down here from some other world where all the colors are brighter. And look at his wife: she’s brown as mud. Why do you reckon that is?’ And I’d say something dumb, like, maybe in indigo buntings it’s the men instead of the ladies that like to get dressed up. And Dad would say, ‘I think it’s because she’s the one that sits on the eggs, and bright colors would draw attention to the nest.’”
“And what did your mama say about it?”
“Yeek!” Deanna howled, startled by the darting shadow of a mouse that burst from behind the woodpile and ran practically across their bare feet before disappearing into a hole in the corner between the log wall and the floor. “Damn.” She laughed. “I hate how they make me squeal like a girl, every time.” Eddie Bondo had jumped, too, she’d noticed.
“Your mama said ‘Yeek’?”
“My mama said not a whole heck of a lot. On account of she was dead.” Deanna narrowed her eyes, studying the hole into which the mouse had disappeared. She’d been stuffing holes with scraps of aluminum foil for two years. But anything with mice was a war you couldn’t win, she’d learned that much.
She realized Eddie was looking at her, waiting for the rest of the story. “Oh, it’s not a tragedy or anything, about my mother. I mean, to Dad it was, I’m sure, but I don’t even remember her, I was that little.” Deanna spread her hands, unable really to name the hole this had put in her life. “Nobody ever taught me to be a proper lady, that’s the tragedy. Oh, now look, she is a she.” Deanna pointed to the moth, which was pressing the tip of its abdomen against the fabric of the curtain, apparently attempting to lay eggs.
“My mama died, too, quite a while back,” he said, as they watched the moth closely. “Happens, I guess. Daddy remarried after about, oh, fifteen minutes.”
Deanna couldn’t imagine such family carelessness. “Did you get along with her, at least?