Pigs in Heaven by Barbara Kingsolver

Author:Barbara Kingsolver
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Contemporary, Adult
ISBN: 9780061842214
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 1992-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

18

Natural Systems

ALONG THE HIGHWAY THE CORNFIELDS lie newly flayed, mile after mile, their green skin pulled back to reveal Oklahoma’s flesh of orange velvet dirt. The uncultivated hills nearby show off a new summer wardrobe of wildflowers. The massed reds flecked with gold are Indian blanket; Cash recalls this name with pleasure, like a precious possession lost and retrieved. He fixes the radio on the sweet, torn voice of George Jones and breathes deeply of the air near home.

A woman in the Oklahoma Welcome Station told him that schoolkids take up collections of pennies to buy the wildflower seeds. Cash had thought wildflowers just grew. He considers this now as he drives, and decides maybe they just tell the kids they use their money for wildflowers. So the little ones can look out the car window and think they did all that with their pennies.

Cash hums along with George, who is gloating about putting a gold ring on the right left hand this time. He thinks briefly of Rose, back in Jackson Hole, admiring the rear ends of boys in McDonald’s; he wonders how quickly she’ll forget about his tired, flat hind end altogether. He doesn’t much care. He is headed back to the home he never should have left, and right now he feels the possibility of fresh love for his own life. When he stopped for the restroom at the welcome station, he gazed at the educational display of the seven different types of barbed-wire and felt he could leap over all seven in one bound.

As he nears the Arkansas River and Cherokee country, the fields give way to trees and there are more varieties of living things, it seems: scissortail birds snipping over the meadows catching bugs, and big-headed kingfishers sitting on high lines overlooking the river. He drives into the outskirts of Tahlequah, through the motel strip along the Muskogee Highway and then into the older, pretty part of town. The old brick courthouse and the seminary building and all the old oaks haven’t changed. The main road leads him out again, into the woods.

At a bend in the road outside Locust Grove, Cash is moved by the sight of a little field with a heartbreaking hedgerow of wild pink roses and one small, sweet hickory in the center, left standing because the Cherokee man or woman who plowed that field wouldn’t cut down a hickory. He keeps an eye out, afraid to miss one single sight as he makes his way. Crowds of black-eyed susans stand up to be counted, and five beagles sit side by side in someone’s yard, reverent as a choir, blessing his overdue return.

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