Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [77]
He laughed oddly. “She could have got along without me. She had her own kids, that was some of the trouble, who the ranch would go to. The whole ugly-stepsister story, you know.”
Deanna didn’t know. “My dad never did remarry.”
“No? So it was always just you and him?”
Did she want to tell him this? “Mainly me and him, yeah,” she said. “He had a friend, but that was years later. They never moved in together, they both had their farms to run, but she was good to me. She’s an amazing lady. I didn’t even realize until just lately how she’d been through hell and back with us. My dad was a mess on her hands at the end. And she had a little girl, too, with Down’s syndrome and a hole in her heart that couldn’t be fixed. My half-sister.”
Eddie Bondo put his hands on Deanna’s shoulders and kissed her. “This is you, isn’t it?”
She ran a hand through his hair, newly shorn to a smoother shape—less crow, more mink. On Tuesday, her day of mortification after assaulting him in the chestnut log, she had let him talk her into many things, including cutting his hair with her little scissors. It was surprisingly thick, like the pelt of some northern animal that needed the insulation. The exquisite tactile pleasure of that slow hour spent out on the porch with her hands on his scalp had created between them a new kind of intimacy. Afterward they’d stood quietly watching a pair of chickadees gather up the fallen hairs for their nest.
“Me, no,” she said, unsure what he meant, “my half-sister. Rachel was her name.”
“It’s who you are, I mean. You’re telling me a piece of your life.”
She looked at his eyes, watched him glance back and forth between her own two pupils. He was that close.
“Our bed’s getting cold,” he whispered.
“I don’t think that’s possible.”
The fire cracked loudly then, like a shot, startling them like the mouse had, making them laugh out loud. Eddie Bondo ran for the bed and leapt under the blankets, hooting that the posse had found him out. She tugged at the edge of the bed, fighting him to let her in. “I reported you to the Forest Service,” she warned. “Keeping a wildlife manager from her work, which is a hanging crime in these mountains.”
“I get my last meal, then.” He threw aside the covers to reveal himself, solemn and flat on his back. She pounced and tried to pin him, but he was strong and seemed to know real wrestling moves. In spite of her size and longer limbs, he could have her tidily turned with an elbow pinned behind her back every time. In less than a minute she was helpless, laughing as he straddled her.
“What is that, Bondo? Some kind of sheep-herding maneuver?”
“Exactly.” He gathered a thick skein of her hair in one hand. “Next I shear you.”
Instead he kissed her forehead and then each one of her ribs before nuzzling his head against her waist. But she tugged him back up to the pillow beside her. She needed to look at him. “OK,” she said, “you’re saved. I’m giving you a stay of execution.”
“Governor. I’m your slave.”
She wanted to play, but her mood was wrong for it. Speaking aloud of Nannie and Rachel had brought those two into this cabin. And her father, too—especially him. What would he have made of Eddie Bondo? “I told you something about me,” she said. “Now you have to tell me one thing about you.”
He looked wary. “I choose which thing? Or you get to ask?”
“I get to ask.”
“A serious thing?”
“To me it is.”
He rolled onto his back and they both stared up at the ceiling, its crooked log beams riddled with the small tunnels of beetles. Deanna thought about the trees they had been once, a long time ago. Suffering more in life than in death, surely. There was a scratching sound coming from the space above the roof boards.
“What’s up there?” he asked.
“On top of those boards, cedar shingles—rotten, probably. See all the nails? Then galvanized tin on top of the whole mess.”
“I mean that noise,” he persisted.
“Mouse, probably.”
“The same one that just made you squeal like a girl?”
She narrowed her eyes. “Different one. One of his innumerable friends and relations.”
They both stared for