Authors: Barbara Kingsolver
The line rang twice, three times, and then a recording came on. It told me that the Lord helps those that help themselves. Then it said that this was my golden opportunity to help myself and the entire Spiritual Body by making my generous contribution today to the Fountain of Faith missionary fund. If I would please hold the line an operator would be available momentarily to take my pledge. I held the line.
“Thank you for calling,” she said. “Would you like to state your name and address and the amount of your pledge?”
“No pledge,” I said. “I just wanted to let you know you’ve gotten me through some rough times. I always thought, ‘If I really get desperate I can call I-800-THE LORD.’ I just wanted to tell you, you have been a Fountain of Faith.”
She didn’t know what to make of this. “So you don’t wish to make a pledge at this time?”
“No,” I said. “Do you wish to make a pledge to me at this time? Would you like to send me a hundred dollars, or a hot meal?”
She sounded irritated. “I can’t do that, ma’am,” she said.
“Okay, no problem,” I said. “I don’t need it, anyway. Especially now. I’ve got a whole trunkful of pickles and baloney.”
“Ma’am, this is a very busy line. If you don’t wish to make a pledge at this time.”
“Look at it this way,” I said. “We’re even.”
After I hung up I felt like singing and dancing through the wide, carpeted halls of the Oklahoma City Main Library. I once saw a movie where kids did cartwheels all over the library tables while Marian the librarian chased them around saying “Shhhh!” I felt just like one of those kids.
But instead Turtle and I snooped politely through the stacks. They didn’t have
Old MacDonald Had an Apartment
, and as a matter of fact we soon became bored with the juvenile section and moved on to Reference. Some of these had good pictures. Turtle’s favorite was the
Horticultural Encyclopedia
. It had pictures of vegetables and flowers that were far beyond both her vocabulary and mine. She sat on my lap and together we turned the big, shiny pages. She pointed out pictures of plants she liked, and I read about them. She even found a picture of bean trees.
“Well, you smart thing, I would have missed it altogether,” I said. I would have, too. The picture was in black and white, and didn’t look all that much like the ones back home in Roosevelt Park, but the caption said it was wisteria. I gave Turtle a squeeze. “What you are,” I told her, “is a horticultural genius.” I wouldn’t have put it past her to say “horticulture” one of these days, a word I hadn’t uttered myself until a few months ago.
Turtle was thrilled. She slapped the picture enthusiastically, causing the young man at the reference desk to look over his glasses at us. The book had to have been worth a hundred dollars at least, and it was very clean.
“Here, let’s don’t hit the book,” I said. “I know it’s exciting. Why don’t you hit the table instead?”
She smacked the table while I read to her in a whisper about the life cycle of wisteria. It is a climbing ornamental vine found in temperate latitudes, and came originally from the Orient. It blooms in early spring, is pollinated by bees, and forms beanlike pods. Most of that we knew already. It actually is in the bean family, it turns out. Everything related to beans is called a legume.
But this is the most interesting part: wisteria vines, like other legumes, often thrive in poor soil, the book said. Their secret is something called rhizobia. These are microscopic bugs that live underground in little knots on the roots. They such nitrogen gas right out of the soil and turn it into fertilizer for the plant.
The rhizobia are not actually part of the plant, they are separate creatures, but they always live with legumes: a kind of underground railroad moving secretly up and down the roots.
“It’s like this,” I told Turtle. “There’s a whole invisible system for helping out the plant that you’d never guess was there.” I loved this idea. “It’s just the same as with people. The way Edna has Virgie, and Virgie has Edna, and Sandi has Kid Central Station, and everybody has Mattie. And on and on.”
The wisteria vines on their own would just barely get by, is how I explained it to Turtle, but put them together with rhizobia and they make miracles.
At four o’clock we went to the Oklahoma County Courthouse to pick up the adoption papers. On Mr. Armistead’s directions we found a big bright office where about twenty women sat typing out forms. All together they made quite a racket. The one who came to the front counter had round-muscled shoulders bulging under her pink cotton blazer and a half grown-out permanent in her straight Cherokee hair—a body trying to return to its natural state. She took our names and told us to have a seat, that it would be awhile. The waiting made me nervous, even though no one here looked important enough to stop what had already been set in motion. It was only a roomful of women with typewriters and African violets and pictures of their kids on their desks, doing as they were told. Still, I was afraid of sitting around looking anxious, as if one of them might catch sight of me fidgeting and cry out, “That’s no adoptive mother, that’s an impostor!” I could imagine them all then, scooting back their chairs and scurrying after me in their high-heeled pumps and tight skirts.
I needed to find something to do with myself. I asked if there was a telephone I could use for long distance. The muscular woman directed me to a pay phone out in the hall.
I dialed Lou Ann. It seemed to take an eternity for all the right wires to connect, and when she finally did take the call she sounded even more nervous than I was, which was no help.
“It’s okay, Lou Ann, everything’s fine, I just called collect because I’m about out of quarters. But we’ll have to keep it short or we’ll run up the phone bill.”
“Oh, hell’s bells, Taylor, I don’t even care.” Lou Ann relaxed immediately once she knew we hadn’t been mangled in a car crash. “I don’t know how many times this week I’ve said I’d give a million dollars to talk to Taylor, so here’s my chance. It just seems like everything in the world has happened. Where in the tarnation are you, anyway?”
“Oklahoma City. Headed home.” I hesitated. “So what all’s happened? You’ve decided to take Angel back? Or go up there and live in his yurdle, or whatever?”
“Angel? Heck no, not if you paid me. Listen, do you know what his mother told me? She said Angel just wants what he can’t have. That I’d no sooner get up to Montana before he’d decide he’d had enough of me again. She said I was worth five or six of Angel.”
“His own mother said that?”
“Can you believe it? Of course it was all in Spanish, I had to get it secondhand, but that was the general gist. And it makes sense, don’t you think? Isn’t there some saying about not throwing good loving after bad?”
“I think it’s money they say that about. Good money after bad.”
“Well, the same goes, is what I say. Oh shoot, can you hang on a second? Dwayne Ray’s got something about ready to put in his mouth.” I waited while she saved Dwayne Ray’s got something about ready to put in his mouth.” I wanted while she saved Dwayne Ray from his probably nineteen-thousandth brush with death. I loved Lou Ann.
Turtle was playing the game where you see how far you can get without touching the floor, walking only on the furniture. She was doing pretty well. There was a long row of old-fashioned wooden benches with spindle backs and armrests, lined up side by side down one wall of the hallway. For some reason it made me think of a chain gang—a hundred guys could sit on those benches, all handcuffed together. Or a huge family, I suppose, waiting for some important news. They could all hold hands.
“Okay, I’m back. So there’s one more thing I have to tell you. Remember about the meteors? I called up Ramona Quiroz in San Diego, long distance. There wasn’t any meteor shower. Not at all! Can you believe it? That was just the absolute last straw.”
“Well, thank heavens,” I said. It occurred to me that nobody else on earth could have understood what Lou Ann had just said.
“So that’s the scoop, Angel’s history. Now I’m seeing this guy from Red Hot Mama’s by the name of Cameron John. Cameron’s his first name and John’s his last. Can you believe it?”
“I had a science teacher like that once,” I said. “So does Red Hot Mama’s give out a sex manual for the chile packers—how to do it without touching anything?”
“Taylor, I swear. He does tomatillos, and I just boss people now, as you very well know. Anyway I can’t wait till you meet him, to see what you think. I know Mama would take one look and keel over dead—he’s about seven feet tall and black as the ace of spades. But, Taylor, he is so sweet. My biggest problem is I keep feeling like I don’t deserve anybody to be that nice to me. He invited me over for dinner and made this great something or other with rice and peanuts and I don’t know what all. He used to be a Rastafarian.”
“A what?”
“Rastafarian. It’s a type of religion. And he’s got this dog, a Doberman pinscher? Named Mister T, only Cameron didn’t name it that, somebody gave it to him. It’s got pierced ears, Taylor, I swear to God, with all these little gold rings. I can’t believe I actually went out with this guy. I’ve gotten so brave hanging around you. Six months ago it would have scared the living daylights out of me just to have to walk by him on the street.”
“Which, Cameron or Mister T?”
“Either one. And oh, I can’t tell you, he was so good with Dwayne Ray. It just made me want to cry, or take a picture or something, to see this great big man playing with a little teeny pale white baby.”
“So are you moving in with him, or what?” I tried my best to sound happy for her.
“What, me?” No! Cameron’s sweet as can be, but I’m real content with things the way they are now. To tell you the truth, I’m sure you’re a lot easier to live with than him and Mister T.”
“Oh. Well, I’m glad.”
“Taylor, remember that time you were made at me because you didn’t want us to act like a family? That all we needed was a little dog named Spot? Well, don’t get mad, but I told somebody that you and Turtle and Dwayne Ray were my family. Somebody at work said, ‘Do you have family at home?’ And I said, ‘Sure,’ without even thinking. I meant you all. Mainly I guess because we’ve been through hell and high water together. We know each other’s good and bad sides, stuff nobody else knows.”
It was hard for me to decide what to say.
“I don’t mean till death do us part, or anything,” she said. “But nothing on this earth’s guaranteed, when you get right down to it, you know? I’ve been thinking about that. About how your kids aren’t really
yours
, they’re just these people that you try to keep an eye on, and hope you’ll all grow up someday to like each other and still be in one piece. What I mean is, everything you ever get is really just on loan. Does that make sense?”
“Sure,” I said. “Like library books. Sooner or later they’ve all got to go back into the night drop.”
“Exactly. So what’s the point worrying yourself sick about it. You’d just as well enjoy it while you’ve got it.”
“I guess you could say we’re family,” I said. I watched Turtle climb over the armrests onto the last bench by the front door, which stood wide open to the street. She turned around and looked for me, and started making her way back.
There was silence on the other end of the line. “Lou Ann? You still there?” I asked.
“I can’t stand the suspense, Taylor. Do you still have her?”
“Have who?”
“Turtle, for heaven’s sake.”
“Oh, sure. She’s my legal daughter now.”
“What!” Lou Ann shrieked. “You’re kidding!”
“Nope. It’s done, for all practical purposes. There’s still some rigamarole in court for getting a birth certificate that takes about six months, but that’s not too bad. It takes longer than that to make a kid from scratch, is how I look at it.”
“I can’t believe it. You found her mother? Or her aunt, or whatever it was?”
I looked down the hall. “I can’t really talk here. We’ll be home in two days at the outside, and I’ll tell you everything then, okay? But it’s going to take all night and a lot of junk food. Do you know what? I missed your salsa. The medium, though, not the firecracker style.”
Lou Ann’s breath came out like a slow leak in a tire. “Taylor, I was scared to death you’d come back without her.”
We had cleared Oklahoma City and were out on the plain before sundown. It felt like old times, heading into the low western horizon. I let Turtle see the adoption certificate and she looked at it for a very long time, considering that there were no pictures on it.
“That means you’re my kid,” I explained, “and I’m your mother, and nobody can say it isn’t so. I’ll keep that paper for you till you’re older, but it’s yours. So you’ll always know who you are.”
She bobbed her head up and down like a hen, with her eyes fixed on something out the window that only she could see.
“You know where we’re going now? We’re going home.”
She swung her heels against the seat. “Home, home, home, home,” she sang.
The poor kid had spent so much of her life in a car, she probably felt more at home on the highway than anywhere else. “Do you remember home?” I asked her. “That house where we live with Lou Ann and Dwayne Ray? We’ll be there before you know it.”
But it didn’t seem to matter to Turtle, she was happy where she was. The sky went from dust-color to gray and then cool black sparked with stars, and she was still wide awake. She watched the dark highway and entertained me with her vegetable-soup song, except that now there were people mixed in with the beans and potatoes: Dwayne Ray, Mattie, Esperanza, Lou Ann and all the rest.
And me. I was the main ingredient.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER grew up in eastern Kentucky. She is the author of eight books, including three other novels (
Animal Dreams, Pigs in Heaven
, and most recently,
The Poisonwood Bible
), a collection of stories (
Homeland
), and a book of essays (
High Tide in Tucson
). Since writing
The Bean Tress
, she has had two children, whom she raises with her husband, Steven Hopp. They live near the mountains outside of Tucson, Arizona.