Prodigal Summer

Garnett is showering after a hard morning spent clearing a row of ground for new trees when he’s startled by a phone call from an unfamiliar young woman with a “townish sound to her” (206). The woman turns out to be Lusa, who’s been told Garnett is “the regional goat maven” (206) and needs advice on how to procure and raise goats. Garnett tells her if she runs an ad in the newspaper, she’ll end up with “more goats than [she] know[s] what to do with” (208), prompting Lusa to ask about “a goat plague” (208) in Zebulon a while ago. Garnett interprets this as Lusa “attempting to uncover his most embarrassing secret” (209), and he defends his choice to have his 4-H students raise goats; after his wife’s death, he had “a spell of poor judgment” prompted by his neighbor’s “grudge” against goats (209). He tells Lusa how to make sure the goats breed right away, and as he’s talking he hears an “insistent” (208) knocking at the door.

After the phone call, he discovers his visitor has left behind a letter, a berry pie, and a note identifying the visitor as Nannie Rawley. The letter is a response to his earlier missive to her; Nannie argues that since “everything alive is connected to every other” (216), the extinction of one species can have wide-ranging consequences. Garnett, of all people, should understand this, as his family’s fortune was destroyed by the extinction of the chestnut. Nanny also says that Garnett misinterpreted Genesis—she believes the Biblical Genesis story says that “even weeds and pond algae are sacred” (217), and all living things should be treated with respect. Finally, she says she was discussing her Snapper lawn mower, not the turtle, in Little Brothers’.

In response to this letter, Garnett’s “blood pressure start[s] to rise” (218), and he hurriedly composes a rebuttal in which he accuses her of favoring “Evolutionary Theory” over “Creation Science” (219), concluding that he believes his thoughts will be “enough for you and your bra-burning Unitarian friends to ponder” (220). As he mails the letter, Garnett sees himself as a “Soldier of God […] marching as to war” (220).

Lusa has invited Cole’s entire family for the Fourth of July, and although Lusa suspects “maybe it was just pity” (221), they’ve all come. Lusa listens as her sisters-in-law complain about their husbands wasting money on fireworks, and is “surprised that they could be as mean about their own husbands and each other’s as they’d ever been toward her” (225). Lusa decides to see what the men are up to for herself, and she’s again surprised—this time that she receives a warm welcome, aided by the homemade elderberry wine the men are drinking. Big Rickie jokes with Lusa about the goats she’s now raising, and Lusa realizes he’s flirting with her, as are some of the others. She feels a tightness in her belly and it occurs to her that since she stopped taking birth control after Cole’s death, her cycle is returning. She’s “trailing pheromones” (230), and that’s why the men are “fluttering around her like moths” (230).

Later in the evening, Lusa asks Jewel if she’s ever seen ghosts in the farmhouse—“when it rains,” Lusa says, she hears “children running on the stairs” (232). Lusa notices new “steep lines” (233) on Jewel’s face, but Jewel doesn’t want to talk about whatever’s wrong, and Lusa walks down to the pond by herself to look at the moon. She runs into Little Rickie “being a bad boy, smoking behind the barn” (235) and promptly joins him, bumming her own cigarette. She asks if he saw her fifty-eight goats—she’s already talked to her cousin, the butcher, who thinks they’ll make “a killing” (237) at holiday time. Suddenly they spy, across her moonlit pasture, the billy goat “working his herd, methodically mounting one doe after another” (238).

Lusa tells Cole about the ghosts she sees—she believes they’re Cole and Jewel as children—and Rickie reveals that Jewel has cancer. Lusa cries and lays her head on Rickie’s chest, and he tells her he’ll fix her barn roof—a huge job—and kisses her on the mouth. Lusa admonishes him—“I’m your aunt,” she says (242)—but he apologizes and she quickly forgives him. Returning to the party, she sees the fireworks exploding and thinks “we’re only what we are: a woman cycling with the moon, and a tribe of men trying to have sex with the sky” (244). 

Deanna is out working when she’s startled by the “triangular head” (245) of a poisonous snake, a copperhead. When it starts to rain, she heads for home and runs into Jerry Lind, the young man who brings her supplies once a month, in his Forest Service jeep. She’s forgotten he’s coming and is upset because he’s already been by her cabin, and has likely seen Eddie, whom she left on the porch this morning. Jerry insists on driving Deanna back, and confirms that he’s “met your boyfriend” and seen the “twenty-five-pack of rubbers” by the bed (252), which only increases Deanna’s agitation.

As soon as Jerry leaves, Deanna confronts Eddie, asking why he didn’t just “disappear” (254) when Jerry arrived and reminding Eddie he’s “not a part of [her] life” (255). Eddie doesn’t understand why she’s so upset, and she expresses her concerns about their “playing house” (256) together: Deanna is nineteen years older than Eddie, half a foot taller than him, and “spent six years researching an animal [Eddie would] like to see purged from the planet” (256). In addition, Deanna’s uneasy about continuing their relationship without plans for the future.

Deanna falls asleep, and when she wakes up, Eddie tells her she’s getting sick. When he goes out for firewood, she cautions him to be careful of the phoebe nest on the porch—one brood has already died, and Deanna doesn’t need “four dead babies on my conscience” (260).

Eddie gets back into bed, and they talk about Deanna’s past a bit more. Eddie asks why Deanna’s father never married Nannie Rawley, and Deanna says Nannie didn’t want to. Deanna remembers her half-sister, Rachel, an “angel” who’d “come to be my little sister for a while” before going back to Heaven (263). Deanna goes on to describe marrying one of her college professors, becoming a seventh-grade teacher at her husband’s suggestion, and going “out of my gourd” (263) before finally attending graduate school and studying wildlife biology. As she speaks, Eddie makes love to her, prompting Deanna to think that “intercourse with Eddie Bondo was a miracle of nature” (265).

Deanna and Eddie hear a sliding noise in the roof boards, and when Deanna tells him it’s a snake, she’s amused to find Eddie is afraid of the creature. Deanna reminds him how valuable predators like snakes are—“I’ll take one snake over fifty mice in my house any day,” she says (266)—as they go to sleep for the night.

An oak tree has fallen on the line between Garnett’s and Nannie’s property, and Garnett wants Nannie to pay for half the cleanup, which means he has to again confront the woman he considers “a test of his faith, his cross to bear” (270). He finds Nannie in her orchard, where she berates him for spraying Sevin pesticide and says that “if I get lung cancer, it will be on your conscience” (272). She quickly apologizes, however, as Garnett’s wife, Ellen, died of lung cancer despite never smoking, and he feels a “deeper dread” that pesticide might have caused her illness (272).

Nannie goes on to argue that the Sevin spraying actually causes “a caterpillar boom” (273) by killing the insects’ predators, which can’t reproduce as fast as the herbivore pests. While Garnett first considers her ideas “nonsense” (273), Nannie’s deeper explanation forces him to admit he “didn’t find the fault in [her] thinking” (275). Nannie wishes Garnett wouldn’t get so angry about everything, and could instead see the beauty in “a field of plants and bugs working out a balance in their own way” (277).

Next, Garnett brings up his letter to Nannie, with Nannie saying his “logic is weak” (278) and telling him evolution works the same way he breeds his chestnuts, choosing the “best survivors” to procreate (279). When Garnett still disagrees, believing there must be a “good and just” God controlling the natural world (281), Nannie thinks about how unjust her daughter’s death was and begins to cry. She adds that Garnett “cut off his own son like a limb off a tree” (281), and Garnett says his son, an alcoholic, has to “decide for [himself] to get better” (282). Nannie and Garnett agree that despite all their differences, they’ve “both had [their] griefs to bear” (283). Nannie agrees to pay for half the cost of removing the tree, but concludes that Garnett is “a sanctimonious old fart” (284) as she stomps off.

Lusa is mowing her farm when her sisters-in-law drop off Jewel’s 10-year-old daughter, Crystal. Jewel is headed to another chemotherapy treatment, and Crys has become so difficult that Jewel’s sisters refuse to watch her. Crys—who is such a tomboy that Lusa believed she was a boy for a while—arrives with “untampered hostility” (287) but agrees to accompany Lusa as she finishes mowing.

Atop the roaring mower, Crys asks about a nearby flower, which Lusa identifies as a poisonous butterfly weed, prompting a conversation about the chemotherapy treatment that “makes Mama poison” (289). Crys tells Lusa her aunt, Lois, made her try on dresses, and then cut up her favorite corduroys and plaid shirt while she was doing so. In response, Crys broke Lois’s statue, which Lusa admits was “a fair trade” (295), especially when Crys reveals she “told Jesus if I wore them clothes every day he’d make Mama get better” (295). Lusa offers to care for Crys’s younger brother, Lowell, next time, so he won’t have to stay with Lois either, and Crys agrees. Crys and Lusa go bug-hunting together, and Lusa shares her knowledge and love of insects with Crys. Lusa is relieved to hear Crys laugh, and finally sound “clear and transparent, like a child” (298).

Around midnight, Hannie-Mavis, another of Lusa’s sisters-in-law, stops by after dropping Jewel at home; it’s taken her that long because Jewel was so sick after her treatment. Hannie-Mavis reveals that the doctor told her Jewel is actually “worse” after chemo (301), so the doctors are going to stop treatment. Jewel thinks this is good news, and Hannie-Mavis didn’t have the heart to tell her sister the truth: the doctors have given up. Hannie-Mavis and Lusa have tea and bond a bit, with Hannie-Mavis insisting that “we don’t resent you” (305) for inheriting the farm. Hannie-Mavis explains that the family is only worried that Lusa will remarry and the farm will no longer be “the Widener place” (307). Lusa realizes she herself was never “the problem”; instead, the issue is “progeny. The family line” (307).

The next morning, Lusa again sees the ghost of a brother and sister sitting on her stairs, with the girl’s arm around her brother’s shoulder, in order “to protect him from the world” (309). Lusa now realizes the pair is not Jewel and Cole, but Crys and Lowell.