Prodigal Summer

Garnett is driving home from town when two dog-like animals cross the road, “wild, fawn-colored” creatures (392) that leave Garnett with the “strangest feeling that what he’d witnessed was […] magic” (393). Next, Garnett runs into a strange young man who turns out to be Jerry. He is looking for Nannie’s place so he can deliver Deanna’s letter.

Garnett is nervous about the stranger—men Jerry’s age “scared elderly ladies just for sport” (395)—so he goes to check on her. He watches Jerry leave but sees Nannie “acting strange,” standing outside of her house with the letter as if “glue[d] […] to the spot” (396). Trying to distract himself, he considers the girl at the Wideners’ “with her goat troubles” (397); Lusa apparently asked him for advice about a vaccine for the goats, and he even visited the Widener farm. Garnett remarks that being at the Widener house felt as if his wife Ellen “could be alive again” (397), and that Ellen’s “greatest regret” was never going to see “that baby” (397). Now, he reflects, there were “two babies”; Ellen never learned about the younger one (397). Garnett had nearly asked Lusa about the two children, but couldn’t bring himself to do so.

Later that evening, Garnett watches Nannie picking tomatoes while another strange man, this one “a heavier-set kind of fellow” (398), stands talking to her. The chapter ends as Garnett feels a strange hatred for this man, and a “murky, un-Christian feeling” that seems quite a bit like jealousy “clouding in his heart” (399). 

Like Deanna, Lusa notes the cooling weather as summer draws to a close, and she frantically harvests as her garden keeps on “opening its maw and giving, giving” (400). Jewel visits to show Lusa her ex-husband has signed the papers relinquishing all custody of his children, and Lusa notes his full name: Garnett Sheldon Walker the Fourth. Lusa mentions that another Garnett Walker has been helping her with her goats, and Jewel says that Garnett is Shel’s father, Jewel’s father-in-law. Jewel adds that none of the Wideners have spoken to Garnett since his wife’s funeral; she speculates the Walkers were “embarrassed to death by Shel’s drinking” (403-04).

Lusa asks if Jewel would mind if Lusa attempted to rekindle the relationship between Crys and Lowell and their grandfather, and Jewel tells Lusa not to get her “hopes up,” as Garnett is “a sour old pickle” (404). Thinking that if she hadn’t married Shel, Jewel would never have had her children, she asks Lusa to tell Crys and Lowell “I would not have traded [them] for anything. Not for a hundred extra years of living” (405).

That afternoon, Lusa vaccinates her goats with Little Rickie’s help—the animals have worms, and Garnett recommended the vaccine. Lusa spots a coyote at the top of the field, and when Rickie offers to shoot it, Lusa asks him not to “turn into [his] uncles” (407). She thinks the coyote is more likely to eat rabbits than her goats.

Finally finished with their exhausting task, Lusa and Rickie hose each other off outside. When Rickie takes off his shirt, Lusa can’t help thinking how “deprived” she’s been in a world that seems like “one big sexual circus” (409). She offers him sweet tea, and as they sit together Rickie says that Lusa was “meant for” farming (411). Lusa agrees; after a childhood with “scholarly parents” (411), she’s found her true place and her true self.

Rickie admits he has a crush on Lusa, and Lusa thinks how “easy” and “comforting” it would be to make love to him. She admits she’s attracted to him as well, but insists an affair is “completely out of the question” (416)—they’re relatives, and he’s a minor. Lusa promises Rickie she’ll dance at his wedding, and then proposes they go dancing. They plan to go that Saturday, but “no funny business,” Lusa warns, “just dance till we drop” (418).

Garnett has watched the same strange man hanging around Nannie for two days, leaning on her fence without even offering to help her, and Garnett is convinced the man’s a “sneaky snake” who’s “up to no good” (420). Finally, seeing the man standing there with Nannie nowhere in sight, he heads over to “five that fellow his walking papers” (421). Garnett takes his shotgun and calls out to the man, who doesn’t respond. Garrett then comes close enough to realize “he’d been jealous of a scarecrow” (423).

Nannie sees Garnett before he can make a quick getaway, and he tells her he’s come to see if she needs help loading her truck for the market. Admitting that Garnett has been a better neighbor lately, Nannie says she’s “just blessed off my rocker these days” (424)—she’s inherited two relatives, as Deanna is coming to live with her, and Deanna is pregnant. Garnett thinks about his own grandchildren, and how Lusa called and said the kids wanted to see his chestnut trees. They’re coming on Saturday, and Garnett hopes to teach them about the trees, “to help me keep it all going” (426).

Nannie notices Garnett’s shotgun, and he sheepishly admits that he came to protect her from the scarecrow—he “didn’t care for the way [the scarecrow] was looking at you in your short pants” (427). In response, Nannie hugs him tight, and Garnett realizes that holding her is “like a hard day’s rest”—it’s “the main thing he’d been needing to do” (427). As the chapter ends, both look forward to their grandchildren’s arrival, and when Nannie calls Garnett “a sanctimonious old fart” (427), all malice in the words has turned to affection.

Deanna huddles in bed during a “hellbender” of a rainstorm (431), trying to hide from the vibrations of thunder “shuddering up the legs of the iron bed” (429). She finds a radio and hears a tornado watch is in effect, and offers up a last “small, final hope” (431) to Eddie Bondo, that he made it out of the mountains before the storm. Wondering why she’s so scared of this storm, when she was so “fearless” before, she realizes that now that she’s “commit[ted] [herself] to the living,” there’s “so much to lose” (431).

Deanna ruminates on Eddie, who “left with his mind unchanged” (432), still considering coyotes his enemy, and with no knowledge of the child Deanna carries. He disappeared that morning, while she was out, with only a short note left behind: “It’s hard for a man to admit he has met his match. E.B.” (432) Though Deanna is hurt, she decides he’s offering “a gift” (433)—a guarantee that he’ll leave both Deanna and the coyotes unharmed.

The storm becomes stronger, knocking down trees, and in her terror Deanna begins counting the interlocking chestnut logs of her cabin. Finally Deanna feels safe within the “shelter” of “an old, quiet chestnut” (435). As the chapter ends, the storm breaks, and a mated pair of coyotes begin to sing.

In the same book on moth behavior she was reading the night of Cole’s death, Lusa finds a passage about male Saturniid mouths who have “imperfect, closed mouths” (437), and can’t eat, and thus spend their entire brief adulthood mating. Lusa “recognize[s]” in that passage something “that explained her life” (436)—she believes Cole’s purpose, in his brief life , was to “call” her here (437). Living in Cole’s childhood home, she’s learned the story of his life through the markers he’s left behind, and now the “story” of Cole and the Wideners “was hers as well” (437).

Earlier that day, Lusa learned that she’ll get a dollar eighty a pound for her goats, a price “unheard of in the county” and the culmination of a scheme only a “religious mongrel” like Lusa could concoct (438). Lusa’s multicultural background made her aware of when major holidays of three major religions would coincide, and she was able to raise her goats to sell in that week.

Lusa goes on to reflect that after the terrible storm of the night before, she “awoke resurrected” (439), and hired Little Rickie to be her assistant farm manager. Part of Rickie’s job will be to protect the woods surrounding the farm from hunters—even those going after coyotes. She’s spent the day clearing the yard of all the weeds she’s allowed to “creep in” (439) over the summer, including the honeysuckle over the garage. As she does so, Lusa feels she’s “tearing herself free” (440), but she also knows the honeysuckle will be back, “as soon as next summer” (440).

This final, untitled chapter is told in the voice of an unnamed narrator, whom the reader gradually understands to be a female coyote. As the chapter opens, the coyote sniffs honeysuckle and notices someone out there—Lusa, weeding late into the night. The coyote continues skirting the Zebulon farms, soon reaching Nannie’s apple orchard, then turns away from civilization to meet the rest of her pack.

The coyote begins to follow the scent of another coyote, a male—her pack has heard another coyote family singing at night and knows the two packs will find each other by mating season.

As the novel ends, the author writes that if someone—a hunter—were watching the coyote, he might believe they were “the only two creatures left here in this forest” (444). But the hunter would be wrong, for “solitude is a human presumption” (444)—nature is full of momentous interactions occurring at every moment, predator drawn to prey, mate to mate, in a “world made new” at every moment (444).