E-Book Overview
Clear-eyed and spirited, Taylor Greer grew up poor in rural Kentucky with the goals of avoiding pregnancy and getting away. But when she heads west with high hopes and a barely functional car, she meets the human condition head-on. By the time Taylor arrives in Tucson, Arizona, she has acquired a completely unexpected child, a three-year-old American Indian girl named Turtle, and must somehow come to terms with both motherhood and the necessity for putting down roots. Hers is a story about love and friendship, abandonment and belonging, and the discovery of surprising resources in apparently empty places. Available for the first time in mass-market, this edition of Barbara Kingsolver's bestselling novel, The Bean Trees, will be in stores everywhere in September. With two different but equally handsome covers, this book is a fine addition to your Kingsolver library.
E-Book Content
The Bean Trees A NOVEL BY
BARBARA KINGSOLVER
For Ismene, and all the mothers who have lost her.
CONTENTS
ONE The One to Get Away
1
TWO New Year’s Pig
33
THREE Jesus Is Lord Used Tires
47
FOUR Tug Fork Water
71
FIVE Harmonious Space
87
SIX Valentine’s Day
103
SEVEN How They Eat in Heaven
121
EIGHT The Miracle of Dog Doo Park
146
NINE Ismene
176
TEN The Bean Trees
190
ELEVEN
203
Dream Angels TWELVE Into the Terrible Night
215
THIRTEEN Night-Blooming Cereus
231
FOURTEEN Guardian Saints
254
FIFTEEN Lake o’ the Cherokees
273
SIXTEEN Soundness of Mind and Freedom of Will
284
SEVENTEEN Rhizobia
291
ABOUT THE AUTHOR PRAISE OTHER BOOKS BY BARBARA KINGSOLVER COVER COPYRIGHT ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
ONE
The One to Get Away I have been afraid of putting air in a tire ever since I saw a tractor tire blow up and throw Newt Hardbine’s father over the top of the Standard Oil sign. I’m not lying. He got stuck up there. About nineteen people congregated during the time it took for Norman Strick to walk up to the Courthouse and blow the whistle for the volunteer fire department. They eventually did come with the ladder and haul him down, and he wasn’t dead but lost his hearing and in many other ways was never the same afterward. They said he overfilled the tire. Newt Hardbine was not my friend, he was just one of the big boys who had failed every grade at least once and so was practically going on twenty in the sixth grade, sitting in the back and flicking little wads of chewed paper into my hair. But the day I saw his daddy up there like some old overalls slung over a
1
The Bean Trees
fence, I had this feeling about what Newt’s whole life was going to amount to, and I felt sorry for him. Before that exact moment I don’t believe I had given much thought to the future. My mama said the Hardbines had kids just about as fast as they could fall down the well and drown. This must not have been entirely true, since they were abundant in Pittman County and many survived to adulthood. But that was the general idea. Which is not to say that we, me and Mama, were any better than Hardbines or had a dime to our name. If you were to look at the two of us, myself and Newt side by side in the sixth grade, you could have pegged us for brother and sister. And for all I ever knew of my own daddy I can’t say we weren’t, except for Mama swearing up and down that he was nobody I knew and was long gone besides. But we were cut out of basically the same mud, I suppose, just two more dirty-kneed kids scrapping to beat hell and trying to land on our feet. You couldn’t have said, anyway, which one would stay right where he w