The Bean Trees - Barbara Kingsolver [38]
“Whoa!” I said. While I wasn’t paying attention she’d thrown the heavy can at me. I caught it, though it came near to bowling me over.
“Knocked the wind out of you, but it didn’t kill you, right?”
“Right,” I said.
“That’s twenty-eight pounds of water. Twenty-eight pounds of air is about what you put in a tire. When it hits you, that’s what it feels like.”
“If you say so,” I said. “But I saw a guy get blown up in the air once by a tire. All the way over the Standard Oil sign. It was a tractor tire.”
“Well that’s another whole can of beans,” Mattie said. “If we get a tractor tire in here, I’ll handle it.”
I had never thought of tire explosions in relative terms, though it stood to reason that some would be worse than others. By no means did this put my fears to rest, but still I felt better somehow. What the hell. Live free or bust.
“Okay,” I said. “We’ll handle it together, how’s that?”
“That’s a deal, hon.”
“Can I put this down now?”
“Sure, put it down.” She said it in a serious way, as if the can of water were some important damaged auto part we’d been discussing. I blessed Mattie’s soul for never laughing at any point in this conversation. “Better yet,” she said, “pour it out on those sweet peas.”
There was a whole set of things I didn’t understand about plants, such as why hadn’t the sweet peas been killed by the frost? The same boy sped by again on his bike, or possibly a different boy. This time he had a bunch of roses in a white paper funnel tucked under his arm. While the water glugged out over the sweet peas I noticed Mattie looking at me with her arms crossed. Just watching. I missed Mama so much my chest hurt.
Turtle had managed to get through her whole life without a book, I suppose, and then had two of them bought for her in one day. I got her one called Old MacDonald Had an Apartment House, which showed pictures of Old MacDonald growing celery in windowboxes and broccoli in the bathtub and carrots under the living-room rug. Old MacDonald’s downstairs neighbors could see the carrots popping down through the ceiling. I bought it because it reminded me of Mattie, and because it had stiff pages that I hoped might stand up to Turtle’s blood-out-of-turnips grip.
While I was downtown I also looked for a late Valentine’s card to send Mama. I still felt kind of awful about leaving her, and changing my name just seemed like the final act of betrayal, but Mama didn’t see it that way. She said I was smarter than anything to think of Taylor, that it fit me like a pair of washed jeans. She told me she’d always had second thoughts about Marietta.
I found just the right card to send her. On the cover there were hearts, and it said, “Here’s hoping you’ll soon have something big and strong around the house to open those tight jar lids.” Inside was a picture of a pipe wrench.
Lou Ann, meanwhile, had bought one of those name-your-baby books in the grocery checkout line. When I came home she had it propped open on the stove and was calling out names from the girl section while she made dinner. Both Turtle and Dwayne Ray were propped up at the table in chairs too big for them. Dwayne Ray’s head was all flopped over, he was too little to hold it up by himself, and he was wiggling toward the floor like Snake Man escaping from his basket. Turtle just sat and stared at nothing. Or rather, at something on the table that was as real to her as Snowboots’s invisible poop was to him.
Lou Ann was banging pot lids to wake the dead and boiling bottles. She had stopped nursing and put Dwayne Ray on formula, saying she was petrified she wouldn’t have enough milk for him.
“Leandra, Leonie, Leonore, Leslie, Letitia,” she called out, watching Turtle over her shoulder as though she expected her to spew out quarters like a slot machine when she hit the right combination of letters.
“Lord have mercy,” I said. “Have you been doing this all the way from the Agathas