Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [90]
Now, beneath the laughter of ghosts, she began to hear the intermittent vocalizations of the coyotes. She moved toward the sound, another slow hundred steps down the trail, stopping finally in a place where she could peek through rhododendrons and get a clear view of the den. The place had altered since spring; now the woods were thick with leaves. Air and light moved differently, and the den had changed, too. The bank below the cave was an apron of bare dirt, ridged with so many tiny claw marks it looked like light-brown corduroy. She thought she saw some movement inside the dark grin of the den’s mouth, but then nothing, only stillness. She counted her own heartbeats to pass a minute, then more minutes, and convinced herself she’d actually seen no movement. There had been pups here, that was sure from all the claw marks on the bank, but it was too late, she began to believe. She’d missed them by one day; they’d grown up and gone.
Then she saw a rustling movement in the huckleberry thicket a little distance from the opening. A long, low whine pulled at her heart, an irresistible appeal. An adult was in that thicket, the mother or one of the beta females calling the children out. Instantly they appeared all together in the opening, a row of bright eyes beneath a forest of tiny, pointed ears. Deanna tried to count, but there were too many, and they moved in a rambunctious swarm of ears and tails: more than six, she decided, and fewer than twenty. They tumbled over one another out the doorway as the female approached with something in her teeth, a dark, small thing she tossed into their midst. A wake of tiny growls and yips erupted, and the little golden furballs hopped like popcorn in a kettle. Puppies, she thought; they were nothing but puppies. But kittenlike, too, in the way they were pouncing and playing with the half-living vole that had just been delivered to their schoolyard. Deanna sank down on her knees, into the childhood summers when neighbors had brought litters of pups in boxes and the barn cats had delivered their kittens practically into her hands. Without self-consciousness her body became a child’s, her teeth holding her braid in her mouth for silence and her hands on her chest to keep her heart from bursting.
She wished so hard for her father, it felt like a prayer: If I could only show him this, oh, please. Let him look down from Heaven, whatever that means, let him look up through my eyes from the cells of genesis he planted in me, let him see this, because he would understand it perfectly. Love was one thing he always knew when it looked him in the face.
She wondered if there was anyone alive she could tell about these little dogs, this tightly knotted pack of survival and nurture. Not to dissect their history and nature; she had done that already. What she craved to explain was how much they felt like family.
{14}
Old Chestnuts
Garnett turned up the hot water and let it scald the muscles shielding his shoulder blades. What an ache he had back there, as if some schoolyard bully had landed a haymaker squarely on his backbone.
He sighed. This life was getting to be too much for one old man. It wasn’t so much the work; he loved messing with his chestnut trees. People presumed it was awfully tedious to bag all the flowers in the spring, do the careful cross-pollinating, collect the seeds, and plant the new seedlings, but every inch of that was exciting to Garnett because any of those seeds might grow up to be his blight-resistant chestnut tree. Every white bag slipped over a branch tip, every shake of pollen, each step carried the hope of something wondrous in the making. A piece of the old, lost world returning, right before his eyes.
No, what got him lately was the running into one problem after another, this farm and all its history dragging him down. The farm was a darn junkyard hiding its menace under a thin skin of grass. Every farm around here was, to tell the truth.