Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [118]
He shuddered.
“Snakes have manners, at least—they stay out of your way.”
“Stay out of my way,” Eddie Bondo said to the roof.
“Don’t worry.” She pulled the covers up and put her head on his shoulder. It was true that she had her own irrational fears. She spoke quietly, stroking the hard, indented midline of his chest and thinking of the cartilage that sheltered his heart. “It’s a single-minded predator, and its prey is not us. From a snake’s point of view, we don’t even exist. We’re nothing to him. We’re safe.”
They lay still for a minute, listening to the cricket music of a midsummer night. From somewhere nearby she heard the quiet little chirping call of a screech owl. It was not the breathy hoot of the great owls but a more private sound, a high-pitched descending chuckle. She listened for the answer and immediately it came, a series of soft, quick barks the little owls use at close range in breeding season. They were finding each other out there in the darkness, making their love right under the window. Deanna grazed the length of Eddie Bondo’s collarbone with her lower lip. “So,” she said, “could we go back to our previous conversation?”
“I’m not sure.” He lifted the blankets and looked. “Yes.”
She rolled away from his arms just long enough to blow out the lamp. In a habit carried over from childhood, her mind whispered a prayer of thanks, as small and quick as the extinction of lamplight into darkness: Thanks for this day, for all birds safe in their nests, for whatever this is, for life.
{17}
Old Chestnuts
The bank of Egg Creek was soaked like a sponge with rain. Garnett could only look the hillside up and down and shake his head. The ground had gotten so soft that a fifty-year-old oak growing out of it had leaned over, pulled its roots out of the mud like loose teeth, and fallen over before its time. What a mess. Somebody would have to be called, some young man with a chain saw who could tame this tangle of trunk and branches into a cord of firewood. Oda Black’s son, now there was a polite boy who could do it in one morning and not charge a fortune.
The cost wasn’t the problem, though. Finding a man to do it wasn’t even the problem. This section of Egg Creek stood as the property line dividing Garnett’s land from Nannie Rawley’s, that was the problem. It was only fair that she pay for half the cleanup—or more, really, since it was her tree that had fallen on him. But they would have to come to some agreement, and for the likes of that no precedent existed in the history of Garnett and Nannie.
He stared at the mess and sighed. If only she would come up here and notice it so he wouldn’t have to be the one to take the first step. If Garnett brought it up, she would act like he was asking for a favor. Which of course, he was not. He was calling attention to her negligence, was all. Any farmer worth his salt walked his property lines after every storm to look for damage like this. But then there was Nannie Rawley.
“Oh, me,” he declared aloud to the birds, some of whom were merrily singing from the branches of the fallen oak without a care over their world’s sudden shift from vertical to horizontal. For that matter, the fallen tree still burgeoned with glossy oak leaves—probably still trying to scatter its pollen to the wind and set acorns as if its roots were not straggling in the breeze and its bulk doomed to firewood.
Birds and oak trees have minds like hers, he thought, surveying this profoundly deluded little world with an odd satisfaction.
He noted that more than half a dozen trees along this bank were leaning precariously downhill from her side toward his. The next storm would likely bring down more. One old cherry seemed particularly threatening, with nearly a forty-five-degree lean to it, right out over the path he used to get up here. He made a mental note to walk fast and not tarry anytime he had to pass under it. “Oh, me,” he said again, as he turned