Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [99]
“One hundred and eighty-one dollars,” she boomed in a voice deepened by decades of cigarettes. Mary Edna stood three feet away, ignoring her and scowling at the food table. When Lois spied Lusa coming out of the house, she perked up at the potential of a new audience. “A hundred and eighty-one dollars!” she called out to Lusa. “That’s what these little boys spent on their little show for tonight, did you ever hear the like?”
Lusa had already heard it all from upstairs, but she pretended to be dismayed. “Good grief. Did they drive all the way to China, or what?” she said, walking over toward Lois. She was relieved to see that Lois was in the Jezebel camp, too, dressed in jeans and a western-style shirt unsnapped a tad too far.
“Naw,” Lois said, “they went over to Crazy Harry’s down there off the interstate.”
As far as Lusa could tell, the entire border of the state of Tennessee was ringed with shacks advertising cheap fireworks. It had to do with their being legal on one side of the line and not the other, but she wasn’t sure which was which.
“I should have gone with them,” Lois droned on in her deep, cracked voice. “Or sent Little Rickie and the girls along to keep an eye on them. I didn’t think two grown men would act like kids in a candy store.” She examined the ends of her hair, which she wore long and dyed coal black—not flatteringly, in Lusa’s opinion, since Lois was fair and blue-eyed like Cole, and a little long in the tooth for the straight, dyed look. But maybe having Indian-black hair like her husband and children made her feel like she belonged to them. Who knew?
Mary Edna was fussing tediously with a piece of aluminum foil over a sheet cake. She was a vision in her orange polyester, which seemed itself a heat source in this muggy night; the outfit gave Lusa an odd, uncomfortable sensation that Mary Edna’s physical presence would spoil the food.
Mary Edna turned around suddenly, as if reading Lusa’s thoughts, but it was Lois she snapped at: “Oh, hush your bellyaching, Lois, they do it ever year. If you’re not used to it by now, you never will be.”
Lusa winced, but Lois was utterly unfazed. She craned her head sideways toward Mary Edna, flicking ash in the grass. “Why sure, go ahead and talk. Your husband wouldn’t go spend a week’s grocery money on cherry bombs and Martian Candles and stuff.”
“I’d ruther him do that than what he’s up to right now, down there poking his nose in the bottles. What kind of hooch have they got down there?”
“Lord, honey, Frank’s done made that elderberry wine. You’d think he’d get over that little chemistry project, or Emaline would dump it down the drain, one.”
“Oh, it’s that business.”
“He claims it’s a pure wonderful product and maybe he’ll sell it one of these days.” Lois rolled her eyes.
Mary Edna touched her bluish, tightly coiffed hair and stared at the men with narrow eyes. “I wouldn’t know. You ask me, I’d have to agree with the good Lord. All of it bites as the serpent.”
Lois snorted, breathing smoke out her nose like a dragon. “After the second bottle of that stuff, turpentine’d taste pure wonderful, I expect.”
Lusa watched the sisters volley, surprised that they could be as mean about their own husbands and each other’s as they’d ever been toward her. Cole had always insisted that she took his family too personally. She’d never had brothers or sisters of her own, only parents who said “please” and “thank you” to each other and to the child they’d produced late in life and never quite known how to handle. Maybe Cole had been right. She’d never experienced rough-and-tumble, the sharper edges of family love.
She walked down toward the chicken house, deciding to investigate whatever it was that was biting these men as the serpent. They were engaged in the kind of cheerful, energetic argument that tends to happen when all present are agreed and the enemy is absent. Farm policy and government stupidity, most likely.