Homeland and Other Stories by Barbara Kingsolver Read Free Book Online

from here.”
    â€œFine, Lydia, forge ahead. It’s easy for you, you always know exactly where you’re headed.” Every time he shoves the plane forward, a slice of wood curls out and drops to the floor, and she wonders if he’s going to plane the board right down to nothing.
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    The rain starts on Sunday night and doesn’t let up all week. The old people in Blind Gap are saying it’s because of those bomb tests, the weather is changing. It’s too warm. If it were colder it would have been snow, rather than rain, and would come to no harm.
    After Tuesday, school is shut down for the week. So many bridges are out, the buses can’t run. One of the bridges washed away in the flood is the new one Whitman built on their farm. Lydia sees now that Verna was right, the design was a mistake. The flood loosened the ground under the roots of the sycamore and pulled it down, taking the bridge with it. Whitman blames the tree, saying that if it had been smaller or more flexible it wouldn’t have taken out the whole bridge. Lydia can see that his pride is badly damaged. He’s trapped inside the house now, despondent, like a prisoner long past the memory of fresh air. The rain makes a constant noise on the roof, making even the sounds inside her skull seem to go dead.
    She wonders if everything would be all right if they could just scream at each other. Or cry. The first time she saw him cry was when David had parvo virus as a puppy and they expected him not to make it. Whitman sat up all night beside David’s box on the kitchen floor, and when she found him the next morning asleep against the doorsill she told herself that, regardless of the fate of the puppy, this was the man she would be living with in her seventies. Forty years to go, she says aloud into the strange, sound-dead air. She can’t begin to imagine it. Now Whitman doesn’t even notice if David has food or water.
    As she pads around the cabin in wool socks and skirt and down vest, Lydia develops a bizarre fantasy that they are part of some severe religious order gone into mourning, observing the silence of monks. Industrious out of desperation, she freezes and cans the last of the produce from the garden, wondering how it is that this task has fallen to her. Their first week here they had spaded up the little plot behind the cabin, working happily, leaning on each other’s shoulders to help dig the shovel in, planting their garden together. But by harvest time it’s all hers. Now Whitman only comes into the kitchen to get his beer and get in the way, standing for minutes at a time with the refrigerator door open, staring at the shelves. The distraction annoys her. Lydia hasn’t canned tomatoes before and needs to concentrate on the instructions written out by Verna.
    â€œIt’s cold enough, we don’t have to refrigerate the state of California,” she shouts above the roar of the rain, but feels sorry for him as he silently closes the refrigerator. She tries to be cheerful. “Maybe we ought to bring back the TV next time we go into the city. If Randy would give it back. Think she’s hooked on the soaps by now?”
    â€œProbably couldn’t get anything up here,” he says. He stands at the windows and paces the floor, like David.
    â€œBedroom,” she commands, wishing Whitman would lie down too.
    On Monday it’s a relief for both of them when school starts again. But the classroom smells depressingly of damp coats and mildew, and after nearly a week off, the kids are disoriented and wild. They don’t remember things they learned before. Lydia tries to hold their attention with stories about animal behavior, not because it’s part of the curriculum but because it was her subject in graduate school and she’s now grasping at straws. She tells them about imprinting in ducks.
    â€œIt’s something like a blueprint for life,” she explains.