Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [82]
“Fairly warned,” she agreed.
She got out of bed, trembling internally from the effort of acting so tough. She slipped her long flannel gown over her head and shook it down over her body like a cocoon. She took a widemouthed plastic cup from the kitchen cupboard and an envelope from the stack of papers on her desk. She turned it over: an old letter from Nannie Rawley, the only person who still wrote her here. She went to the window and pulled back the curtain gently, sending the disturbed moth back into its frenetic charge at the glass. On the curtain it had left a double row of tiny eggs, as neat as a double-stitched seam. It made Deanna sad to see such a last, desperate stab at survival. She’d read that some female moths could mate with many different males, save up all their sperm packets, and then, by some incomprehensible mechanism, choose among them after the boys were long gone—actually deciding whose sperm would fertilize the eggs as she laid them. Deanna studied this little moth’s earnest work on the curtain. Maybe she’d been holding out for some perfect guy she believed was still out there. Too late now.
“You poor thing,” she said quietly, “quit bashing your brains out, you’ve earned your freedom.” Carefully she placed the cup over the moth, then slid the letter between the cup’s mouth and the glass. The trapped creature clicked against the hard plastic, but it wasn’t human hands, so the scales shouldn’t rub off. Deanna stepped barefoot into her unlaced boots and clumped outside, negotiating the door with her elbow, feeling Eddie Bondo’s eyes on her as she went. A lynx, was that really how he saw her? She didn’t feel that elegant or self-contained. He made her talk too much.
The day was gorgeous. This was summer, surely. These morning chills would soon be gone for good, dissolved into the heat of breeding season. She inhaled: even the air smelled like sexual ecstasy. Mosses and ferns were releasing their spores into the air. Birds were pressing the unfeathered brood patches on their breasts against fertile eggs; coyote pups, wherever on earth they lived, were emerging for their first lessons in life. Deanna stood at the edge of the porch and raised the paper from the lid of the cup, giving the cup a gentle heave to send the moth on its way. It tumbled and struggled in the bright air, then swerved clumsily upward for several seconds, grasping at sudden freedom.
A phoebe darted out from the eaves and snapped the moth out of the air. In a vivid brown dash she was gone again, off to feed her nestlings.
{12}
Old Chestnuts
Dear Miss Rawley,
I have been greatly troubled by a suspicion that occurred to me last Friday, June 8, in the Little Bros. Hardware. I could not help but overhear (though I did not wish to, but the conversation was quite unavoidably audible) your remarks to the Little bros. concerning a “snapper.” I was wondering whether this conversation referred to your lawn mower, since I am aware this is a brand of mower commonly used in this region and sold by Little Bros. Or is it possible you were discussing a certain event, previously known only to the two of us, involving a snapping turtle?
I write to ask you this, Miss Rawley, not because it is a matter of any great concern to me, but because in keeping with the Lord’s counsel I feel I should advise you it is a sin that does not rest lightly on any soul, to slander the good name of a neighbor who has worked long and hard these many years to serve with wisdom and dignity his county (vo-ag teacher for 21 yrs, 4-H adviser more than 10 yrs) and his Lord.
Sincerely,
Garnett S. Walker III
P.S. On the matter of setting free the “lizards” sold at Grandy’s bait store on the grounds that some of them belong to species that are vanishing from our region, having given it some thought, I propose three questions:
1) Are we humans to think of ourselves merely as one species among many, as you always insist in our discussions of how a person might live in “harmony” with “nature” while still managing to keep the