The Bean Trees - Barbara Kingsolver [72]
“Listen at this: ‘Liberty, Kansas. The parents and doctor of severely deformed Siamese twins joined at the frontal lobe of the brain have been accused of attempting to murder the infants by withholding medical care.’ Lord, you can’t really blame them, can you? I mean, what would you do? Is it better to be totally retarded and deformed and miserable, or just plain old dead?”
“I honestly couldn’t say,” I said. “Not having been either one.” Although, when I thought about it, being dead seemed a lot like not being born yet, and I hadn’t especially minded that. But I didn’t give it a lot of thought. I was interested in the weather forecast. We hadn’t had a drop of rain since that double-rainbow hailstorm back in January, and the whole world was looking parched. When you walked by a tree or a bush it just looked like it ached, somehow. I had to drag the water hose around to the back every day for Mattie’s squash and beans. The noise of the cicadas was enough to drive you to homicide. Mattie said it was their love call, that they mated during the hottest, driest weeks of the year, but it was beyond belief that any creature—even another cicada—would be attracted by that sound. It was a high, screaming buzz, a sound that hurt your eyes and made your skin shrink, a sound in the same class with scratched-up phonograph records and squeaking chalk.
Lou Ann, who had lived here long enough to make the association, said the sound of the cicadas made her hot. For me it went way beyond that. I used the air hose to blast the accursed insects out of the low branches of the Palo Verde trees around Mattie’s, sending them diving and screaming off through the air like bottle rockets. Every time I walked past the mural of Jesus Is Lord I begged Him for rain.
But every day the paper said: No precipitation expected.
“Remember that time at the zoo?” Lou Ann asked, still occupied with the Liberty, Kansas, horror. “About those Siamese twins born pregnant, or whatever it was?”
“I remember the giant turtles,” I said.
Lou Ann laughed. “Now how’s a turtle manage to be pregnant, I’d like to know. Do they get maternity shells? I almost feel like going back to see how she’s doing.”
“Do you know what Estevan told me?” I asked Lou Ann. “In Spanish, the way to say you have a baby is to say that you give it to the light. Isn’t that nice?”
“You give the baby to the light?”
“Mmm-hmm.” I was reading a piece about earthquakes under the ocean. They cause giant waves, but in a ship you can’t feel it at all, it just rolls under you.
I twisted my hair into a knot to try and get it off my sweaty neck. I looked enviously at Lou Ann’s blond head, cropped like a golf course.
“I was so sure Dwayne Ray was going to be a Siamese twin or something,” she said. “Because I was so big. When he was born I had to ask the doctor about fifteen times if he was normal, before it sunk in. I just couldn’t believe he was okay.”
“And now you just can’t believe he’s going to get through a day without strangling or drowning in an ice chest,” I said, but in a nice way. I put down the paper and gave Lou Ann my attention. “Why do you think you’re such a worry wart, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“Taylor, can I tell you something? Promise you won’t tell anybody. Promise me you won’t laugh.”
“Cross my heart.”
“I had this dream, one week after he was born. This angel came down, I guess from the sky—I didn’t see that part. He was dressed kind of modern, in a suit, you know? With a brown tie? But he was an angel, I’m positive—he had wings. And he said: ‘I was sent to you from the future of this planet.’ Then he told me my son would not live to see the year two thousand.”
“Lou Ann, please.”
“But no, that’s not even the scariest part. The next morning my horoscope said, ‘Listen to the advice of a stranger.’ Now don’t you think that’s got to mean something? That part’s real, it’s not a dream. I cut it out and saved it. And Dwayne Ray’s