Prodigal Summer

Cole’s funeral is over, his sisters have gone home, and Lusa stands on the porch of “her farmhouse” (101)—she has decided to stay, at least for the time being. She thinks about her grandfather—her “zayda”—who owned a sugar-beet farm in Poland and lost it during the war. In America, her grandfather left his wife and Lusa’s father for his mistress, then died along with his new family in a tenement fire. Lusa reflects that he “started out as a farmer before bending the rest of his life around loss” (102)—the same loss Lusa is now dealing with.

Two of Cole’s sister’s husbands, Herb and Big Rickie, arrive, and say they need to set Cole’s tobacco on Saturday. Lusa asserts that “it’s my farm now” (105) and says she’s not sure about planting tobacco. When the men explain the problems with other crops, Lusa realizes how little she knows about farming, but tells them she’ll make a decision before Saturday.

Later that day, Lusa runs out of jars while canning cherries and asks Jewel to bring some over. Jewel again commiserates with Lusa, as both have lost husbands. Four years after Jewel’s husband, Shel, left, people still avoid her “so they won’t have to stand there and not say something to me about Shel” (111). Lusa has already experienced similar treatment. Jewel also agrees that “this family’s intimidating” (111), and Lusa realizes Jewel is an unexpected ally. Jewel supports Lusa’s right to keep the farm—she says because Cole had no will, the property goes to Lusa—and they discuss the financial challenges of running a farm. Lusa agrees to watch Jewel’s children when Jewel works late. Jewel also shares tidbits about Cole’s “starry-eyed” (123) teenage years, when he tried to farm vegetables, rather than tobacco.

As the conversation continues, Lusa becomes increasingly worried that Jewel and her sisters are questioning Lusa’s love for her husband. Lusa defends her decision to keep her maiden name—she says “my mom’s Palestinian and my dad’s a Polish Jew, and never […] did I think that was anything to be ashamed of” (126). Lusa tears up, realizing she’s berating “the nearest thing she had to a friend in the family” (126), and the two women embrace as the chapter ends.

As the chapter opens, Garnett is admiring the chestnut wood of his barn—he is “haunted by the ghosts of these old chestnuts” (128), with their “miraculous[ly]” (128) strong wood, which perished in the chestnut blight of 1904. Garnett’s family built an “empire” (129) off of chestnuts, with his grandfather founding Walker’s Mill and purchasing and naming Zebulon Mountain, until losing most of their land by 1950. Garnett spent most of his life as a vocational agriculture teacher, and since retiring he’s devoted himself to cross-breeding American chestnut seeds and Chinese chestnuts, hoping to create a new “Walker American chestnut” (130), a tree as strong as the American chestnut but with the Chinese chestnut’s ability to withstand the blight.

Garnett notices Japanese beetle damage to his grapevines and blames Nannie Rawley’s compost piles. He heads to town to run some errands, although he dreads seeing the local storeowner; with all the weeds around his property line, caused by Nannie’s refusal to use herbicide, he imagines the storeowner calls him “Mr. Pokeweed” (133). Continuing to fixate on Nannie, Garnett considers that her “terror of chemicals” is probably connected to her “illegitimate child with mental deficiencies” (136)—a daughter she named after anti-DDT scientist Rachel Carson.

In town, Garnett wants to go to the Amish market but sees Nannie’s truck and fears she’s selling her apples there. He goes to a store called Little Brothers’ but overhears Nannie inside, describing a big “snapper” (143) to the owners. Garnett, assuming she’s telling them about the snapping turtle that bit his shoe, is so embarrassed and outraged that he walks out of the store and drives straight home, then realizes he’s carried out a bottle of weed killer without paying. What’s more, he remembers that Nannie’s lawn mower—which she bought at Little Brothers’—is a Snapper, and she likely wasn’t discussing the turtle at all.

Lusa is in the barn milking the cow on Friday evening, when 17-year-old Little Rickie—son of Cole’s brother-in-law, Big Rickie—arrives to tell her the men won’t be coming to set tobacco the next day. As Little Rickie puts it, “Dad said you wasn’t all that interested in us setting your tobacco” (147). Further, they don’t have enough tobacco left anyway. Little Rickie tells Lusa how sorry he is about Cole’s death, and that Cole was like a big brother to him.

Little Rickie asks about Lusa’s mixed Jewish-Arab background, and Lusa mentions the Arab religious feasts and her love for goat meat. Little Rickie remarks that Zebulon County is so full of goats “people can’t give [them] away,” thanks to a “slaughter-goat craze” Walker Garrett started as a Four-H adviser (156). Lusa starts smoking with Rickie—her first cigarette—and she finds herself both “seized and simultaneously mortified by” a sudden attraction to the teenager (158). She asks Rickie for advice about breeding goats, and begins hatching a plan to raise goats to sell for religious holidays. Lusa sees Rickie, who both comforts her and makes her “laugh out loud,” as “a peer suddenly, earnest and kind” (164). By the end of the chapter, she considers him her “coconspirator” (166) in her goat-raising plan.

Deanna is lying in bed on a chilly June morning as Eddie retrieves firewood. Eddie stops to catch a moth so he can free it outside, which leads to a conversation about Deanna’s father, who seemed to know everything about moths and every other plant and animal in Zebulon County. Deanna tells Eddie her mother died when she was very young, but her father had a “friend”—an “amazing lady” who gave birth to Deanna’s half-sister Rachel, a “little girl […] with Down’s syndrome and a hole in her heart that couldn’t be fixed” (171).

Eddie asks who built Deanna’s cabin, and she says Garnett Walker—“there was this whole line of them, all with the same name” (173), who “logged out all these mountains” (174). She adds that the cabin is chestnut wood; when the chestnut blight took over, there was a “huge rush” (174) to cut down all the remaining trees. If people had let a few chestnuts live, she says, they might have survived and kept the species from going extinct.

Deanna asks Eddie if he came to the mountains for the coyote bounty hunt, and he doesn’t deny it. He considers coyotes “an enemy” (176)—they killed sheep on his family’s ranch—but Deanna bristles at the idea of killing natural predators and interfering with nature’s order. She believes animals “should have the right to persist in their own ways” (177). Eddie is aware Deanna knows the location of the local coyote den, but she doesn’t “trust” him enough to show him (181). If he kills any coyote pups, she warns him, she’ll “put a bullet in [his] leg” (182).

Deanna sees that the moth Eddie found earlier has laid eggs on the window curtain—“a last, desperate stab at survival” (183)—and she takes the insect outside. It flies off, “grasping at sudden freedom” (184), but moments later a bird snatches the moth and flies off “to feed her nestlings” (184).

Chapter 12 consists mainly of a letter written by Garnett to Nannie Rawley, saying that he overheard her conversation about a “snapper,” and that he hopes she wasn’t “slander[ing]“ (185) his name by spreading rumors about the snapping turtle that attacked him. He also mentions the salamanders Nannie has a habit of buying from the bait store and setting free, hoping to save them from extinction. He argues that if humans are equal to all other animal species, as Nannie always “insist[s]”, then people have no special “duty” to free these salamanders (186). If, on the other hand, humans are “keepers and guardians of the earth” as “instructed” by God (186), then people have the right to use salamanders “four [sic] our own purposes” (186), even if this leads to the lizards’ extinction. Garnett himself, clearly siding with his second argument, feels satisfied he’s “telling” (187) Nannie as he mails the letter.