Homeland and Other Stories (3 page)
Read Homeland and Other Stories Online
Authors: Barbara Kingsolver
We drove around the streets of Cherokee and saw that the town was all the same, as single-minded in its offerings as a corn patch or an orchard, so that it made no difference where we stopped. We parked in front of Sitting Bull's Genuine Indian Made Souvenirs, and Mother crossed the street to get groceries for our lunch. I had a sense of something gone badly wrong, like a lie told in my past and then forgotten, and now about to catch up with me.
A man in a feather war bonnet danced across from us in the parking lot. His outfit was bright orange, with white fringe trembling along the seams of the pants and sleeves, and a woman in the same clothes sat cross-legged on the pavement playing a
tom-tom while he danced. People with cameras gathered and side-stepped around one another to snap their shots. The woman told them that she and her husband Chief Many Feathers were genuine Cherokees, and that this was their welcoming dance. Papa sat with his hands frozen on the steering wheel for a very long time. Then suddenly, without saying anything, he got out of the truck and took Jack and Nathan and me into Sitting Bull's. Nathan wanted a tomahawk.
The store was full of items crowded on shelves, so bright-colored it hurt my eyes to look at them all. I lagged behind the boys. There were some Indian dolls with real feathers on them, red and green, and I would like to have stroked the soft feathers but the dolls were wrapped in cellophane. Among all those bright things, I grew fearfully uncertain about what I ought to want. I went back out to the truck and found Great Mam still sitting in the cab.
“Don't you want to get out?” I asked.
The man in the parking lot was dancing again, and she was watching. “I don't know what they think they're doing. Cherokee don't wear feather bonnets like that,” she said.
They looked like Indians to me. I couldn't imagine Indians without feathers. I climbed up onto the seat and closed the door and we sat for a while. I felt a great sadness and embarrassment, as though it were I who had forced her to come here, and I tried to cover it up by pretending to be foolishly cheerful.
“Where's the pole houses, where everybody lives, I wonder,” I said. “Do you think maybe they're out of town a ways?”
She didn't answer. Chief Many Feathers hopped around his circle, forward on one leg and backward on the other. Then the dance was over. The woman beating the tom-tom turned it upside down and passed it around for money.
“I guess things have changed pretty much since you moved away, huh, Great Mam?” I asked.
She said, “I've never been here before.”
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Mother made bologna sandwiches and we ate lunch in a place called Cherokee Park. It was a shaded spot along the river, where the dry banks were worn bald of their grass. Sycamore trees grew at the water's edge, with colorful, waterlogged trash floating in circles in the eddies around their roots. The park's principal attraction was an old buffalo in a pen, identified by a sign as the Last Remaining Buffalo East of the Mississippi. I pitied the beast, thinking it must be lonely without a buffalo wife or buffalo husband, whichever it needed. One of its eyes was put out.
I tried to feed it some dead grass through the cage, while Nathan pelted it with gravel. He said he wanted to see it get mad and charge the fence down, but naturally it did not do that. It simply stood and stared and blinked with its one good eye, and flicked its tail. There were flies all over it, and shiny bald patches on its back, which Papa said were caused by the mange. Mother said we'd better get away from it or we would have the mange too. Great Mam sat at the picnic table with her shoes together, and looked at her sandwich.
We had to go back that same night. It seemed an impossible thing, to come such a distance only to turn right around, but Mother reminded us all that Papa had laid off from work without pay. Where money was concerned we did not argue. The trip home was quiet except for Nathan, who pretended at great length to scalp me with his tomahawk, until the rubber head came loose from its painted stick and fell with a clunk.
III
Before there was a world, there was only the sea, and the high, bright sky arched above it like an overturned bowl.
For as many years as anyone can imagine, the people in the stars looked down at the ocean's glittering face without giving a thought to what it was, or what might lie beneath it. They had their own concerns. But as more time passed, as is natural, they began to grow curious. Eventually it was the waterbug who volunteered to go exploring. She flew down and landed on top of the water, which was beautiful, but not firm as it had appeared. She skated in every direction but could not find a place to stop and rest, so she dived underneath.
She was gone for days and the star people thought she must have drowned, but she hadn't. When she joyfully broke the surface again she had the answer: on the bottom of the sea, there was mud. She had brought a piece of it back with her, and she held up her sodden bit of proof to the bright light.
There, before the crowd of skeptical star eyes, the ball of mud began to grow, and dry up, and grow some more, and out of it came all the voices and life that now dwell on this island that is the earth. The star people fastened it to the sky with four long grape vines so it wouldn't be lost again.
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“In school,” I told Great Mam, “they said the world's round.”
“I didn't say it wasn't round,” she said. “It's whatever shape they say it is. But that's how it started. Remember that.”
These last words terrified me, always, with their impossible weight. I have had dreams of trying to hold a mountain of water in my arms. “What if I forget?” I asked.
“We already talked about that. I told you how to remember.”
“Well, all right,” I said. “But if that's how the world started, then what about Adam and Eve?”
She thought about that. “They were the waterbug's children,” she said. “Adam and Eve, and the others.”
“But they started all the trouble,” I pointed out. “Adam and Eve started sin.”
“Sometimes that happens. Children can be your heartache. But that doesn't matter, you have to go on and have them,” she said. “It works out.”
IV
Morning Glory looked no different after we had seen the world and returned to it. Summer settled in, with heat in the air and coal dust thick on the vines. Nearly every night I slipped out and sat with Great Mam where there was the tangible hope of a cool breeze. I felt pleased to be up while my brothers breathed and tossed without consciousness on the hot mattress. During those secret hours, Great Mam and I lived in our own place, a world apart from the arguments and the tired, yellowish light bulbs burning away inside, seeping faintly out the windows, getting used up. Mother's voice in the kitchen was as distant as heat lightning, and as unthreatening. But we could make out words, and I realized once, with a shock, that they were discussing Great Mam's burial.
“Well, it surely can't do her any harm once she's dead and gone, John, for heaven's sakes,” Mother said.
Papa spoke more softly and we could never make out his answer.
Great Mam seemed untroubled. “In the old days,” she said, “whoever spoke the quietest would win the argument.”
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She died in October, the Harvest Month. It was my mother who organized the burial and the Bible verses and had her say even about the name that went on the gravestone, but Great
Mam secretly prevailed in the question of flowers. Very few would ever have their beauty wasted upon her grave. Only one time for the burial service, and never again after that, did Mother trouble herself to bring up flowers. It was half a dozen white gladiolus cut hastily from her garden with a bread knife, and she carried them from home in a jar of water, attempting to trick them into believing they were still alive.
My father's shoes were restless in the grass and hickory saplings at the edge of the cemetery. Mother knelt down in her navy dress and nylon stockings and with her white-gloved hands thumped the flower stems impatiently against the jar bottom to get them to stand up straight. Already the petals were shriveling from thirst.
As soon as we turned our backs, the small people would come dancing and pick up the flowers. They would kick over the jar and run through the forest, swinging the hollow stems above their heads, scattering them like bones.
T
HE SOUP BOWLS SLAM
against the sink, she's being careless, and Lydia wonders how it would feel to break something important on purpose. The crockery set would qualify. It has matching parts: the bowls, a large tureen, and a ladle in the elongated shape of a water fowl, all handmade by a woman in Sacramento named Earth, who gave it to Whitman last year as a solstice present. Lydia likes the crockery well enough. That isn't the problem.
“You sleep in the bathtub,” she says to Whitman. “I'm sorry the light keeps you awake. But I'm not going to do my lesson plans in the bathroom.”
The bathroom is the only part of the cabin that is actually a separate room, with a door. Lydia is standing at the kitchen sink and Whitman is still at the dining table and they are not very far apart at all.
“Last night you were up till eleven forty-five,” he says.
“So sleep with the blanket over your head,” she tells him in a reasonable voice. “For God's sake, Whitman, give me a break. It's not like you have to get up early to milk cows.”
“I don't have to get up for any reason, you mean. And you do.”
“That's not what I mean.” She's about to say, “I respect your
work,” but instead decides she will just stop talking. Men do it all the time, she reasons, and men run the world.
What they told themselves last summer, when they moved from Sacramento to Blind Gap, was that the cabin would be romantic. Her mother pointed out that it's hard moving from a larger to a smaller place, that she and Hank did it once early in their marriage and the storage-space problem drove her insane. Lydia smiles into the dishwater, imagining her mother wild-haired and bug-eyed, stalking the house for a place to stash the punch bowl. Can this marriage be saved? Why, yes! By storage space. It's true, the Sacramento house had had plenty of it, closets gone to waste in fact, and bedrooms enough for an Indian tribe. But Whitman and Lydia had been living under the same roof for nine years and had reason to believe they were infinitely compatible. They figured they'd make it without closets.
They aren't making it, though. The couple they were then seems impossible to Lydia now, a sort of hippie Barbie and Ken sharing a life of household chores in that big, rundown house. Her memories from Sacramento smell like salt-rising breadâthey used to do such wholesome, complicated cooking: Whitman with his sleeves rolled up, gregarious in a way that never came easily to Lydia, kneading dough and giving his kindest advice on copper plumbing and boyfriend problems to the people who gravitated endlessly to their kitchen. But when the Whitman-doll was removed from that warm, crowded place he'd hardened like a rock. Lydia would give her teeth right now to know why. She dries her hands and spreads papers over the table to prepare her lessons for the next day. Whitman hasn't surrendered his corner of the table. He leans on his elbows and works a spoon in his hands as if preparing to bend it double, and it occurs to Lydia that she can't predict whether or not he'll destroy the spoon. Certainly he is capable of it. Whitman is large and bearded and given to lumberjack flannel, and people often say of
him that he has capable hands. The kitchen table is one of his pieces. He builds furniture without the use of power tools, using wooden pegs instead of nails. People in Sacramento were crazy about this furniture, and Lydia expected it would sell well up here too, but she was wrong. In Blind Gap, people's tastes run more along the lines of velveteen and easy-care Formica. They drive the hour to Sacramento to make their purchases in places like the Bargain Heaven Direct-2-U Warehouse. Whitman has to pile his pieces onto the truck and make the same drive, to show them on consignment in the Country Home Gallery.
David, the retriever, is pacing between the kitchen and bedroom areas. The click of his toenails on the wood floor is interrupted when he crosses the braided rug.
“Pantry,” Whitman says, and David flops down in the corner behind the wood stove, sounding like a bag of elbows hitting the floor. David responds to eleven different commands regarding places to lie down. The house in Sacramento had eleven usable rooms, and the dog would go to any one of them on command. He was nervous after the move, circling and sniffing the walls, until Whitman and Lydia reassigned the names to eleven different areas of the new place. Now he's happy. Dogs like to know exactly what's expected of them.
Whitman is spinning the spoon on the table, some unconscious derivative of Spin the Bottle maybe. Or just annoyance. “We could just not talk to each other, that's always a good idea,” says Lydia. “I heard about these two guys who lived in the same cabin and didn't talk to each other for fifty years. They painted a line down the middle.”
“It was sixty-three years,” he says. “You got that out of the
Guinness Book of Records
. The guys were brothers.”
Whitman has an astonishing memory for details. Often he will draw out the plans for something he's building and then complete the whole piece without referring again to the blue
prints. This talent once made Lydia go weak with admiration, but at this moment it doesn't. She looks up from her book, called
Hands-On Learning
, which is about teaching science to kids.
“Sometimes I think you try not to hear what I'm saying.”
Whitman gets up and goes outside, leaving the spoon spinning on the table. When it stops, it's pointing at Lydia.
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The best part of her day is the walk home from school. From Blind Gap Junior High she takes a dirt road that passes through town, winds through a tunnel of hemlocks, and then follows Blind Creek up the mountain to their six acres. She could have used this in Sacramentoâa time to clear her mind of the day's frustrations.
Even at the stoplight, the dead center of Blind Gap, Lydia can hear birds. She inhales deeply. A daily hike like this would be a good tonic for some of her students too, most of whom are obliged to spend a couple of hours a day behaving like maniacs on the school bus. The area served by the school is large; there are probably no more than a dozen kids of junior-high age in Blind Gap itself. The town's main claim to fame is a Shell station and a grocery store with a front porch.
She leaves town and walks through the hemlock forest, content to be among the mosses and beetles. “Bugs are our friends,” Whitman says, mocking her, but Lydia feels this friendship in a more serious way than he imagines. The bugs, and the plants too, are all related to her in a complicated family tree that Lydia can describe in convincing detail. Back in college her friends were very concerned about the Existential Dilemma, and in the cafeteria would demand while forking up potatoes and peas, “Why are we here?” Lydia would say, “Because we're adapted for survival.” The way she explained it, whatever ancestors were more dexterous and quick would live longer and reproduce
more. Each generation got to be more like us, until here we were. “It's still going on,” she would point out. “We're not the end of the line, you know.” It all started with the blue-green algae, and if humans blew themselves off the map it would start all over again. Blue-green algae had been found growing on the inside of the nuclear reactors at San Onofre.
When she told this to her ninth grade class they just stared at her. None of them had ever been to San Onofre. They were waiting for the part about apes turning into men, so that according to their parents' instructions they could stop listening. Lydia thinks this is a shame. Evolution is just a way of making sense of the world, which is something she figures most ninth graders could use.
If they tell her to stop teaching evolution, she decides, she'll just call it something else. No one will be the wiser if she leaves out the part about ape-to-man. They couldn't seem to understand, ape-to-man was the least important part.
On her way up the last hill Lydia stops at Verna Delmar's. Verna is a sturdy woman of indeterminate age who owns the farm next to theirs. She has chickens and gives Lydia a good price on eggs because, she says, she had this same arrangement with the couple who owned the six-acre place before Whitman and Lydia bought it. Lydia is curious about how those people got along in the little cabin, and is tempted to ask, but doesn't, because she's afraid of hearing something akin to a ghost story.
Today Verna details a problem she's having with chicken mites, and then asks after Lydia's garden and her husband's furniture business. Lydia tactfully doesn't correct Verna, but expects that eventually her neighbor will find out they aren't husband and wife. She has perpetuated this deception since their first conversation, when Verna asked how long they'd been married and Lydia, fearing the disapproval of her first acquaintance in Blind Gap, didn't lie outright but said they had “been
together” for almost ten years, which was true. “We both turned thirty this year,” she said.
“Lots of kids been married and divorced two or three times before they're your age,” Verna had said, and Lydia agreed that ten years was longer than most people they knew. In Sacramento their friends referred to Lydia and Whitman as an institution. Now the word makes Lydia think of a many-windowed building with deranged faces pressing at the glass.
Whitman is building a bridge over Blind Creek, and she stops to watch him work. Their house is near the road, but the creek bank cuts steeply down from the shoulder, cutting off access to all the land on the left side of the road. Verna's farm has a front entrance bridge, but theirs doesn't; they have to continue on for a quarter mile to where the road passes over an old concrete bridge, then circle back by way of the orchard road at the back of their property. The new bridge will create a front entrance to their farm. Whitman is absorbed and doesn't see her. The design of the bridge is unusual, incorporating a big old sycamore. Lydia likes the tree, with its knotty white roots clutching at the creek boulders like giant, arthritic hands. He's left a square hole in the bridge for the tree trunk to pass through, with just enough room on the side for the truck to get by. She watches his hands and arms and feels he's someone she's never talked with or made love to. She has no idea how this happened.
Whitman looks up. Possibly he did know she was watching. “Your friend Miss Busybody Delmar was up here earlier,” he says.
“I know, she mentioned it. She doesn't think it's a good idea to build the bridge that way. She says that old tree is due to come down.”
Whitman drives a nail too close to the end of a board and curses when it splits. Unlike his furniture construction, this proj
ect requires nails and a gasoline-powered table saw. “You tell her I admire her expertise in bridge building,” he says. “Tell her I'd appreciate it if she would come up here and tell me how to build an end table.”
Lydia can feel her bones dissolving, a skeleton soaking in acid. “It's a real nice bridge, Whitman. I like the design.”
For the rest of the afternoon she tries to work on lesson plans so she won't keep him up late, but she can't concentrate on the families of the animal kingdom. She finishes the dishes she abandoned the night before. Whitman has gradually stopped doing housework, and Lydia has lost the energy to complain about it. For some reason she thinks of Whitman's mother. Lydia never met her, she has been dead a long time, but she wishes she could ask her what kind of little boy Whitman was. She used to imagine light brown curls, a woman's child, but now she pictures a tight-lipped boy waiting for his mother to guess where the hurt is and kiss it away. Whitman's story on his mother is that she was mistreated by his father, a Coast Guard man who eventually stopped coming home on leave. The martyred wife, the absent husband. Lydia's own mother is alive and well but equally martyred, in her way: the overly efficient, do-it-all-and-don't-complain type. Back when things were going well, when everybody was telling Whitman how evolved he was, the cliché of their parents' lives seemed like a quaint old photograph you'd hang on the wall. Now it's not so charming. Now it looks like one of those carnival take-your-picture setups with Lydia and Whitman's faces looking out through the holes. She realizes this with a physical shock, as if she's laid hands on a badly wired appliance. This is what's happened to them. They struck out so boldly as a couple, but the minute they lost their bearings they'd homed in on terra firma. It's frightening, she thinks, how when the going gets rough you fall back on whatever awful thing you grew up with.
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The mail brings in the usual odd assortment of catalogues: one with clever household items and one called “Ultimate Forester,” which sells chainsaws and splitting mauls and handmade axes as expensive as diamond jewelry. Lydia hates the people who lived here before and calls them “Betty and Paul,” for Betty Crocker and Paul Bunyan. There's also a catalogue for LydiaâCarolina Biological Supplyâand some legal forms for Whitman. Of all things, he's changing his name: it's Walter Whitman Smith, and he's legally dropping the Walter, which he doesn't use anyway.
Lydia can't relate. People often find Bogtreeâher own last nameâhumorous, but growing up with it has planted in her imagination a wonderful cypress tree spreading its foliage over a swamp at the dawn of the world. She believes now she got this image from a James Weldon Johnson poem containing the line “Blacker than a hundred midnights down in a cypress swamp.” Lydia was the kind of child who knew “bog” meant swamp. The poem was about the creation of the earth. “I've always been a Bogtree and always will, don't blame me,” she says, whenever her mother hints about Lydia and Whitman getting married. She knows, of course, that she could keep her own name, but even so, being married would sooner or later make her Mrs. Smith, she suspects.
Their old friends in Sacramento had gone through names like Kleenex. A woman she considered to be mainly Whitman's friend had christened herself Tofu, and actually named her children Maize, Amaranth, and Bean. In Lydia's opinion this was a bit much. “Aren't you kind of putting your own expectations on them?” she'd asked. “What if when they grow up they don't want to be vegetarians? What if your mother had named you Pot Roast?”