Barbara Kingsolver - The Bean Trees

That was when we smelled the rain. It was so strong it seemed like more than just a smell. When we stretched out our hands we could practically feel it rising up from the ground. I don’t know how a person could ever describe that scent. It certainly wasn’t sour, but it wasn’t sweet either, not like a flower. “Pungent” is the word Estevan used. I would have said “clean.” To my mind it was like nothing so much as a wonderfully clean, scrubbed pine floor.

Mattie explained that it was caused by the grease-wood bushes, which she said produced a certain chemical when it rained. I asked her if anybody had ever thought to bottle it, it was so wonderful. She said no, but that if you paid attention you could even smell it in town. That you could always tell if it was raining in any part of the city.

I wondered if the smell was really so great, or if it just seemed that way to us. Because of what it meant.

It was after sunset when we made our way back to the truck. The clouds had turned pink, then blood red, and then suddenly it was dark. Fortunately Mattie, who was troubled by night-blindness, had thought to bring a flashlight. The night was full of sounds-bird calls, a high, quivery owl hoot, and something that sounded like sheep’s baahs, only a hundred times louder. These would ring out from the distance and then startle us by answering right from under our feet. Mattie said they were spadefoot toads. All that noise came from something no bigger than a quarter. I would never have believed it, except that I had seen cicadas.

“So how does a toad get into the middle of the desert?” I wanted to know. “Does it rain toad frogs in Arizona?”

“They’re here all along, smarty. Burrowed in the ground. They wait out the dry months kind of dead-like, just like everything else, and when the rain comes they wake up and crawl out of the ground and start to holler.”

I was amazed. There seemed to be no end to the things that could be hiding, waiting it out, right where you thought you could see it all.

“Jeez,” I said, as one of them let out a squall next to my sneaker.

“Only two things are worth making so much noise about: death and sex,” Estevan said. He had the devil in him tonight. I remembered a dream about him from a few nights before, one that I had not until that minute known I’d had. A very detailed dream. I felt a flush crawling up my neck and was glad for the dusk. We were following Matties voice to keep to the trail, concentrating on avoiding the embrace of spiny arms in the darkness.

“It’s all one to a toad,” Mattie said. “If it’s not the one, it’s the other. They don’t have long to make hay in weather like this. We might not get another good rain for weeks. By morning there’ll be eggs in every one of these puddles. In two days’ time, even less, you can see tadpoles. Before the puddles dry up they’ve sprouted legs and hit the high road.”

We were following behind Mattie in single file now, holding to one another’s damp sleeves and arms in the darkness. All at once Esperanza’s fingers closed hard around my wrist. The flashlight beam had found a snake, just at eye level, its muscular coils looped around a smooth tree trunk.

“Better step back easy, that’s a rattler,” Mattie said in a calm voice. With the flashlight she followed the coils to the end and pointed out the bulbs on the tail, as clear and fragile-looking as glass beads. The rattle was poised upright but did not shake.

“I didn’t know they could get up in trees,” I said.

“Sure, they’ll climb. After birds’ eggs.”

A little noise came from my throat. I wasn’t really afraid, but there is something about seeing a snake that makes your stomach tighten, no matter how you make up your mind to feel about it.

“Fair’s fair,” Mattie pointed out, as we skirted a wide path around the tree. “Everybody’s got her own mouths to feed.”

I knew right away that something had gone wrong. Lou Ann was standing on the front porch waiting and she looked terrible, not just because she was under a yellow light bulb. She had been crying, possibly screaming-her mouth looked stretched. She wasn’t even supposed to be home yet.

I ran up the sidewalk, almost tripping twice on the steps. “What is it? Are you okay?”

“It’s not me. Taylor, I’m so sorry to have to tell you this. I’m so sorry, Taylor. It’s Turtle.”

“Oh God, no.” I went past her into the house.

Edna Poppy was sitting on the sofa with Turtle in her lap, all in one piece as far as I could see, but Turtle was changed. All these months we had spent together were gone for her. I knew it from her eyes: two cups of black coffee. I remembered exactly, exactly, how the whites of her eyes had been thin slivers of moon around the dark centers, how they had glowed orange, on and off, with the blinking neon sign from that Godforsaken bar.

I didn’t go to her, because I couldn’t. It is that simple. I didn’t want any of this to be happening.

Mrs. Parsons was standing in the kitchen door with a broom. “A bird has got into the house,” she explained, and disappeared into the kitchen again, and for a confused second I thought she meant that this was the terrible thing that had happened.

But Lou Ann was right behind me. “They were in the park, Edna and Turtle. It was so cool after the rain they thought they’d enjoy the air for a little bit, and Virgie was to come tell them if it looked like another storm was coming. But Virgie didn’t come, and Edna never realized it was getting dark.”

“So what happened.” I was sick to my stomach.

“We don’t know, exactly. I’ve called the police and they’re coming over with a medical examiner or a social worker or, Christ, I don’t know, somebody that can talk to Turtle.”

“But what happened? How much do you know happened?”

Edna’s eyes looked more glassy than usual. I noticed, now that I looked at her, that her clothes were a little messed up. Just traces, the red sweater pulled down on one shoulder, a hole in her stocking.

“I heard a peculiar sound,” Edna said. She seemed almost in another world, a hypnotized person speaking out of a trance. “It sounded just like a bag of flour hitting the dirt. Turtle had been talking, or singing I suppose would be more like it, and then she was quiet, just didn’t make a peep, but I heard struggling sounds. I called out, and then I swung my cane. Oh, I swung it high, so I wouldn’t hit the baby. I know how tall she is.” She held her hand just where Turtle’s head would be, if she had been standing on the floor in front of Edna.

“Did you hit anything?”

“Oh, yes, dear. Yes. I don’t know what, but something that had some-I’d say some give to it. Do you understand what I mean? Oh, and I shouted too, some terrible things. The next thing I knew, I felt a great heavy weight on the hem of my skirt, and that was Turtle.”

“It took us twenty minutes to get her to turn loose,” Lou Ann said. Now she was holding on to Edna’s sleeve instead of her hem.

“Oh my dear, I feel terrible. If I had only thought to come in a little sooner.”

“It could have happened to anybody, Edna,” Lou Ann said. “You couldn’t have known what was going to happen, I might have done the exact same thing. You saved her, is what you did. Anybody else might have been scared to swing at him.”

Anybody else, I thought, might have seen he had a gun, or a knife.

Someone knocked at the door and we all jumped. It was the police, of course, a small man who showed his detective badge and a woman who said she was a social worker, both of them dressed in ordinary clothes. Edna told what there was of her story again. The social worker was a prim-looking strawberry blonde who was carrying two rag dolls with yarn hair, a boy and a pigtail-girl. She asked if I was the mother. I nodded, a dumb animal, not really a mother, and she took me into the hallway.