The Bean Trees - Barbara Kingsolver [105]
“No pledge,” I said. “I just wanted to let you know you’ve gotten me through some rough times. I always thought, ‘If I really get desperate I can call I-800-THE LORD.’ I just wanted to tell you, you have been a Fountain of Faith.”
She didn’t know what to make of this. “So you don’t wish to make a pledge at this time?”
“No,” I said. “Do you wish to make a pledge to me at this time? Would you like to send me a hundred dollars, or a hot meal?”
She sounded irritated. “I can’t do that, ma’am,” she said.
“Okay, no problem,” I said. “I don’t need it, anyway. Especially now. I’ve got a whole trunkful of pickles and baloney.”
“Ma’am, this is a very busy line. If you don’t wish to make a pledge at this time.”
“Look at it this way,” I said. “We’re even.”
After I hung up I felt like singing and dancing through the wide, carpeted halls of the Oklahoma City Main Library. I once saw a movie where kids did cartwheels all over the library tables while Marian the librarian chased them around saying “Shhhh!” I felt just like one of those kids.
But instead Turtle and I snooped politely through the stacks. They didn’t have Old MacDonald Had an Apartment, and as a matter of fact we soon became bored with the juvenile section and moved on to Reference. Some of these had good pictures. Turtle’s favorite was the Horticultural Encyclopedia. It had pictures of vegetables and flowers that were far beyond both her vocabulary and mine. She sat on my lap and together we turned the big, shiny pages. She pointed out pictures of plants she liked, and I read about them. She even found a picture of bean trees.
“Well, you smart thing, I would have missed it altogether,” I said. I would have, too. The picture was in black and white, and didn’t look all that much like the ones back home in Roosevelt Park, but the caption said it was wisteria. I gave Turtle a squeeze. “What you are,” I told her, “is a horticultural genius.” I wouldn’t have put it past her to say “horticulture” one of these days, a word I hadn’t uttered myself until a few months ago.
Turtle was thrilled. She slapped the picture enthusiastically, causing the young man at the reference desk to look over his glasses at us. The book had to have been worth a hundred dollars at least, and it was very clean.
“Here, let’s don’t hit the book,” I said. “I know it’s exciting. Why don’t you hit the table instead?”
She smacked the table while I read to her in a whisper about the life cycle of wisteria. It is a climbing ornamental vine found in temperate latitudes, and came originally from the Orient. It blooms in early spring, is pollinated by bees, and forms beanlike pods. Most of that we knew already. It actually is in the bean family, it turns out. Everything related to beans is called a legume.
But this is the most interesting part: wisteria vines, like other legumes, often thrive in poor soil, the book said. Their secret is something called rhizobia. These are microscopic bugs that live underground in little knots on the roots. They such nitrogen gas right out of the soil and turn it into fertilizer for the plant.
The rhizobia are not actually part of the plant, they are separate creatures, but they always live with legumes: a kind of underground railroad moving secretly up and down the roots.
“It’s like this,” I told Turtle. “There’s a whole invisible system for helping out the plant that you’d never guess was there.” I loved this idea. “It’s just the same as with people. The way Edna has Virgie, and Virgie has Edna, and Sandi has Kid Central Station, and everybody has Mattie. And on and on.”
The wisteria vines on their own would just barely get by, is how I explained it to Turtle, but put them together with rhizobia and they make miracles.
At four o’clock we went to the Oklahoma County Courthouse to pick up the adoption papers. On Mr. Armistead’s directions we found a big bright office where about twenty women sat typing out forms. All together they made quite a racket. The one who came to the