Prodigal Summer

In a farmhouse in Zebulon Valley, Lusa Landowski is reading when she smells honeysuckle drifting through the open window and looks out to see her husband, Cole Widener, breaking off a branch of the plant to bring back to her. Lusa thinks back to her fight with Cole that morning—an increasingly common occurrence since Cole and Lusa married and moved onto Cole’s farm. This morning, the fight began with an article in the local paper about killing honeysuckle with “a stout chemical defoliant” (32). Lusa, a lover of nature and particularly insects, can’t stand the Zebulon farmers’ “determine[ation] to exterminate every living thing in sight” (32). The fact that the farm is surrounded by the houses of Cole’s five sisters, a “hurricane of hateful women” (4), only adds to her sense of being trapped somewhere she doesn’t belong.

Lusa remembers how she and Cole met at the University of Kentucky: Cole was attending a workshop on “integrated pest management” (36), while Lusa was a postdoctoral assistant studying moths. Cole wanted Lusa’s advice on a pest-like moth species, and she soon discovered this man “could only love sex more if he had antennae the shape of feathers, like a moth” (37), an insect with a life of “romantic extravagance” (34). After only a few days, Cole proposed marriage, and courted Lusa for a year, until she agreed.

Now transported from her relatively-large hometown to Zebulon, Lusa is known as the “Lexington girl who got down on all fours to name the insects in the parlor rather than squashing them” (39), and her ambivalence about farm life is placing an unbearable strain on her marriage. She reminds her husband how after eating off of Lusa’s wedding china, painted with insects, Cole’s eldest sister, Mary Edna, refused to visit the Widener “family home” (41) again, despite having grown up there. Lusa also says she heard that Mary Edna’s husband, Herb Goins, killed a den of coyotes last spring.

Ten days after Lusa watches her husband pluck the honeysuckle, on May 19, Cole dies in an unspecified accident while making a grain delivery, a part-time job he’s begrudgingly taken to supplement his farming income. As the chapter ends, Lusa reflects that her decision about what to do next rests not on the “layers of contempt” (45) that have grown up between her and her husband, but on the moment she smelled the honeysuckle he picked for her, and “she’d received his wordless message by scent across a field” (48).

This brief chapter describes a nearly 80-year-old widower, Garnett Walker, awakening on May 19 on his farm in the Zebulon Valley and looking out the window at the same view he’s seen since he was a boy. On this farm, inherited from father and grandfather, Garnett listens to the birds singing “their morning chorus” (50), and thinks that “as a boy he had never dreamed of an age when there was no song left, but still some heart” (50).

The author returns to Deanna’s story in the third week of May, as the promise of spring has blossomed and “prodigal summer” has arrived (51). Brushing out her long hair, Deanna remembers that, raised by a single father in Zebulon County, her dad never cut her hair until “her wild mane grew down to the backs of her knees” (54). Later, as a schoolteacher and “attempted wife in Knoxville” (54-55), Deanna continued to live with wild hair, as it was “the only kind of woman she had ever known how to be” (54).

Deanna can’t help thinking of Eddie, who has left and claimed he’d return in a few days, and who said her hair was “a miracle” (55). Now that Eddie’s gone, she can check on the den of coyotes she discovered. She remembers the one time she’s seen a live coyote, in the Tinker Mountain Zoo, where the social animal was cruelly caged alone, a “pathetic captive” (59). At the time, Deanna was a graduate student in wildlife biology, writing her thesis on “the coyote range extension in the twentieth century” (59). Deanna wasn’t able to convince the zookeeper to change the exhibit, so instead she “invented” (59) the job she currently works, guarding the Zebulon Forest from poachers so that its “becoming an intact ecosystem again” (59).

Deanna finds the tracks and scat of a large male coyote and thinks, “who but a big male would make such a show out of his excrement?” (60). By examining the scat, she realizes the coyote has been eating her birdseed. Back in her cabin, Deanna considers the implication of coyotes returning to the Zebulon Mountains—they could become a “keystone predator” that would lead to a “reordering of species” (62). She hopes the coyotes will fill the “ragged hole” (63) left by the extinction of the red wolf 200 years ago, and restore order to the ecosystem.

Struggling with some vague “cravings” (64), Deanna decides to eat the cornbread Eddie made and left behind, but she discovers she’s left the lid off and mice have gotten to it. She adds the rest of the cornbread to the birdseed the coyote has been eating, and spies the unusual phenomenon of a luna moth flying in daylight. Deanna loves the “ethereal” (66) insects but remembers catching a dying luna as a child and becoming horrified by its “ferocious face” up close (66).

That night, Deanna is nearly asleep when she hears noises, and ventures outside to see the “greenish gold” (67) eyes of a coyote; the animal is eating her birdseed.

Lusa is attending Cole’s wake, and in her shock she finds it “impossible to feel anything” (70). Listening in on her sisters-in-law’s conversation, she realizes everyone expects her to go back to Lexington and feels relieved for a moment, but quickly descends back into despair. A “tiny old woman” (72) approaches Lusa and tells her she also lost a child, and that Cole used to play with her daughter when they were children.

With a “dogged single-mindedness” (73), Lusa remains till the wake is over, despite her exhaustion, then finds she can’t sleep for several days. While Cole’s sisters have practically “moved in” (74) downstairs, Lusa feels she’s “living among ghosts” (76)—the legacy of generations of Wideners in the house she’s now inherited. Jewel, whose own husband abandoned her with two kids, gives her some sleeping pills, and Lusa is surprised by Jewel’s “wise compassion” (77) as she comforts Lusa.

Lusa finally sleeps and dreams that a creature comes to her in a pasture—not a man but “a mountain with the silky, pale-green extremities and maroon shoulders of a luna moth” (79)—and they sleep together. Waking up, Lusa smells honeysuckle and remembers Cole plucking a branch of the plant for her. As the chapter ends, she thinks that “what she’d love was here, and still might be, if she could find her way to it” (80).

Garnett Walker reminisces about the gigantic, hollow chestnut log he used to play in as a boy, called Indian Tunnel. He realizes his grandfather, who once owned “the whole southern slope” (82) of Zebulon Mountain, must have chopped down that tree himself. Then his thoughts turn to Nannie Land Rawley, his closest neighbor, owner of an organic apple orchard, and “the bane of his life” (82). Garnett disapproves of Nannie because she once bore a child out of wedlock and now refuses to use pesticides and similar chemicals; she “harbor[s] the devil” (83), as Garnett puts it.

Garnett is attempting to take down Nannie’s sign reading “NO SPRAY ZONE,” which is on his side of the property line. Because of the lack of herbicide, weeds have overgrown the area, and he “fight[s]” his way through them “like one of the knights of old” (85). His left leg grows unbearably heavy, and he fears he’s having a stroke and calls out for help. Nannie herself arrives and drags him to the front of her orchard, then tells him he hasn’t gotten a stroke, but a turtle—a huge snapper is clamped on to his foot. She intends to get a stick and whack the turtle off, but Garnett stubbornly refuses her help and struggles back to his farm with the snapper still attached. He calls back that her sign has landed in the weeds somewhere, and she answers that the spray truck already went by that morning.