The Bean Trees
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Bean_fm[i-viii]3P.£.qxd 6/8/04 2:54 PM Page i PRAISE FOR The Bean Trees “The Bean Trees is a story propelled by a marvelous ear, a fast- moving humor, and the powerful undercurrent of human struggle. There are surprises in the book. There is adventure. And there is resolution, as believable as it is gratifying.” —Margaret Randall, Women’s Review of Books “A major new talent. From the very first page, Kingsolver’s charac- ters tug at the heart and soul.” —Karen FitzGerald, Ms. “An astonishing literary debut. For a deep breath of fresh air, spend some time in the neighborhood of The Bean Trees.” —Cosmopolitan “This is the story of a lovable, resourceful ‘instant mother,’ one who speaks, acts, and learns for herself, becoming an inspiration to us all.” —Glamour “A lively first novel . an easy book to enjoy.” —The New Yorker “An extraordinarily good first novel, tough and tender and gritty and moving, with a wonderful particularity and tart Southwestern bite. Kingsolver’s heroine is little short of magnificent.” —Anne Rivers Siddons, author of Homeplace and Peachtree Road “A spirited, warm book, wry and at the same time refreshingly guileless, full of jarry insights which are very often jarringly funny. Barbara Kingsolver is obviously a writer of much talent and origi- nality.” —Ella Leffland, author of Rumors of Peace “A lovely, funny, touching, and humane debut, reminiscent of the work of Hilma Wolitzer and Francine Prose.” —Kirkus Reviews “This funny, inspiring book is a marvelous affirmation of risk-taking, commitment, and everyday miracles . an overwhelming delight, as random and unexpected as real life.” —Publishers Weekly Bean_fm[i-viii]3P.£.qxd 6/8/04 2:54 PM Page ii © 2002 by Steven L. Hopp About the Author BAR B ARA KINGSOLVER ’s twelve books of fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction include the acclaimed bestsellers The Poisonwood Bible, a novel, and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. Her work has been translated into more than twenty languages and has earned literary awards and a devoted readership at home and abroad. In 2000 she was awarded the National Humanities Medal, our country’s highest honor for service through the arts. She lives with her family on a farm in southern Appalachia. BeanTree_4p_resize gutter up marks.pdf March 24, 2009 16:37:30 Page Number 1 BY THE SAME AUTHOR Fiction Prodigal Summer The Poisonwood Bible Pigs in Heaven Animal Dreams Homeland and Other Stories Essays Small Wonder High Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now or Never Poetry Another America Nonfiction Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (with Steven L. Hopp and Camille Kingsolver) Last Stand: America’s Virgin Lands (with photographs by Annie Griffiths Belt) Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike of 1983 BeanTree_4p_resize gutter up marks.pdf March 24, 2009 16:37:30 Page Number 2 Bean_fm[i-viii]3P.£.qxd 6/8/04 2:54 PM Page v The Bean Trees A Novel BARBARA KINGSOLVER A hardcover edition of this book was published in 1988 by Harper & Row, Publishers. THE B EAN TREES . Copyright © 1988 by Barbara Kingsolver. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address HarperCollins Publishers, 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022. HarperCollins books may be purchased for educational, business, or sales promotional use. For information please write: Special Markets Department, HarperCollins Publishers, 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022. First Perennial Library edition published 1989. Reissued in HarperPerennial 1991. Ressued in Perennial 2003. First Harper Perennial Modern Classics edition published 2009. The Library of Congress has catalogued the Perennial Library edition as follows: Kingsolver, Barbara. The bean trees. “Perennial Library.” ISBN 0-06-091554-4 I. Title. PS3561.11496B44 1989 813'.54 87-45633 ISBN 978-0-06-176522-3 (Harper Perennial Modern Classics edition) 09 10 11 12 13 NMS /RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 BeanTree_4p_resize gutter up marks.pdf March 24, 2009 16:37:30 Page Number 4 Bean_fm[i-viii]3P.£.qxd 6/8/04 2:54 PM Page vii For Annie and Joe Bean_fm[i-viii]3P.£.qxd 6/8/04 2:54 PM Page viii Bean_01[1-246]3P.£.qxd 6/8/04 2:53 PM Page 1 ONE The One to Get Away I have been afraid of putting air in a tire ever since I saw a trac- tor 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 lad- der 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 practi- cally 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 fence, I had this feeling about what Newt’s whole life was going to Bean_01[1-246]3P.£.qxd 6/8/04 2:53 PM Page 2 2 T HE B EAN T REES 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 was, and which would be the one to get away. Missy was what everyone called me, not that it was my name, but because when I was three supposedly I stamped my foot and told my own mother not to call me Marietta but Miss Marietta, as I had to call all the people including children in the houses where she worked Miss this or Mister that, and so she did from that day forward. Miss Marietta and later on just Missy. The thing you have to understand is, it was just like Mama to do that. When I was just the littlest kid I would go pond fishing of a Sunday and bring home the boniest mess of bluegills and maybe a bass the size of your thumb, and the way Mama would carry on you would think I’d caught the famous big lunker in Shep’s Lake that old men were always chewing their tobacco and thinking about. “That’s my big girl bringing home the bacon,” she would say, and cook those things and serve them up like Thanksgiving for the two of us. I loved fishing those old mud-bottomed ponds. Partly because she would be proud of whatever I dragged out, but also I just loved sitting still. You could smell leaves rotting into the cool mud Bean_01[1-246]3P.£.qxd 6/8/04 2:53 PM Page 3 The One to Get Away 3 and watch the Jesus bugs walk on the water, their four little feet making dents in the surface but never falling through. And some- times you’d see the big ones, the ones nobody was ever going to hook, slipping away under the water like dark-brown dreams. By the time I was in high school and got my first job and all the rest, including the whole awful story about Newt Hardbine which I am about to tell you, he was of course not in school any- more. He was setting tobacco alongside his half-crippled daddy and by that time had gotten a girl in trouble, too, so he was mar- ried. It was Jolene Shanks and everybody was a little surprised at her, or anyway pretended to be, but not at him. Nobody expected any better of a Hardbine. But I stayed in school. I was not the smartest or even particu- larly outstanding but I was there and staying out of trouble and I intended to finish. This is not to say that I was unfamiliar with the back seat of a Chevrolet. I knew the scenery of Greenup Road, which we called Steam-It-Up Road, and I knew what a pecker looked like, and none of these sights had so far inspired me to get hogtied to a future as a tobacco farmer’s wife.