The Bean Trees

by Barbara Kingsolver

in the bar sitting at one of the tables near the back. She was a round woman, not too old, wrapped in a blanket. It was not an Indian blanket but a plain pink wool blanket with a satin band sewed on the edge, exactly like one Mama and I had at home. Her hair lay across her shoulders in a pair of skinny, lifeless plaits. She was not eating or drinking, but fairly often she would glance up at the two men, or maybe just one of them, I couldn’t really tell. The way she looked at them made me feel like if I had better sense I’d be scared.

“No thanks,” I said. I thought she wanted to wash the windshield, but instead she went around to the other side and opened the door. “You need a lift someplace?” I asked her. Her body, her face, and her eyes were all round. She was someone you could have drawn a picture of by tracing around dimes and quarters and jar tops. She opened up the blanket and took out something alive. It was a child. She wrapped her blanket around and around it until it became a round bundle with a head. Then she set this bundle down on the seat of my car.

“Is this your kid?” She shook her head. “My dead sister’s.” “Are you saying you want to give me this child?” “Yes.” “If I wanted a baby I would have stayed in Kentucky,” I informed her. “I could have had babies coming out my ears by now.”

“You seem like a very kind person,” I said, “so I’m not going to beat around the bush. I’ve got a big problem. I can’t really afford to pay for a room, and I wouldn’t even bother you except I’ve got a child out in that car that’s wet and cold and looking to catch pneumonia if I don’t get it to bed someplace warm.” She looked out toward the car and shook her head, but of course I couldn’t tell what that meant. She said, “Well, honey, I don’t know.” “I’ll take anything you’ve got, and I’ll clean up after myself, and tomorrow morning I’ll change every bed in this place. Or anything else you want me to do. It’s just for one night.” “Well,” she said, “I don’t know.” “Let me go get the baby,” I said. “You won’t mind if I just bring the poor kid in here to warm up while you decide.”

There was a bruise twice the size of my thumb on its inner arm. I threw the soggy shirt in the sink to soak. The child’s hands constantly caught my fingers and wouldn’t let go. “You little booger,” I said, shaking my finger and the little fist. “You’re like a mud turtle. If a mud turtle bites you, it won’t let go till it thunders.” I hadn’t any sooner gotten the hands pried loose from my fingers before they grabbed onto my shirt sleeves and my hair. When I pulled off the pants and the diapers there were more bruises. Bruises and worse.

This I didn’t believe. I never could figure out why men thought they could impress a woman by making the world out to be such a big dangerous deal. I mean, we’ve got to live in the exact same world every damn day of the week, don’t we?

had never seen a woman with this kind of know-how. It made me feel proud, somehow.

“Anything, really. I have experience in house-cleaning, x-rays, urine tests, and red blood counts. And picking bugs off bean vines.”

The fight had been about the Burger Derby uniform. The shorts weren’t actually plastic, it turned out, but cotton-polyester with some kind of shiny finish that had to be dry-cleaned. Three twenty-five an hour plus celery and you’re supposed to pay for dry-cleaning your own shorts.

“Stop it, would you? Quit making everybody out to be better than you are. I’m just a plain hillbilly from East Jesus Nowhere with this adopted child that everybody keeps on telling me is dumb as a box of rocks. I’ve got nothing on you, girl. I mean it.” Lou Ann hid her mouth with her hand. “What?” I said. “Nothing.” I could see perfectly well that she was smiling. “Come on, what is it?” “It’s been so long,” she said. “You talk just like me.”

‘Please Note. Parts are included for all installations, but no installation requires all of the parts.’ That’s kind of my philosophy about men. I don’t think there’s an installation out there that could use all of my parts.”

I’ve heard you say yourself that you think the reason most people have kids is because they get pregnant.”

“You’re asking yourself, Can I give this child the best possible upbringing and keep her out of harm’s way her whole life long? The answer is no, you can’t. But nobody else can either. Not a state home, that’s for sure. For heaven’s sake, the best they can do is turn their heads while the kids learn to pick locks and snort hootch, and then try to keep them out of jail. Nobody can protect a child from the world. That’s why it’s the wrong thing to ask, if you’re really trying to make a

“Do I want to try? Do I think it would be interesting, maybe even enjoyable in the long run, to share my life with this kid and give her my best effort and maybe, when all’s said and done, end up with a good friend.”

“Mi’ija, in a world as wrong as this one, all we can do is to make things as right as we can.”

“It’s like this,” I told Turtle. “There’s a whole invisible system for helping out the plant that you’d never guess was there.” I loved this idea. “It’s just the same as with people. The way Edna has Virgie, and Virgie has Edna, and Sandi has Kid Central Station, and everybody has Mattie. And on and on.” The wisteria vines on their own would just barely get by, is how I explained it to Turtle, but put them together with rhizobia and they make miracles.