Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [119]
It would have to be face-to-face. Not over the telephone. She was never in her house, and she had one of those confounded machines that beeped at you and expected you to speak your whole mind on the spot without even warming up to the subject. His heart couldn’t take those things; whenever one surprised him these days he’d have to go lie down afterward. No, he would walk over there today and get Nannie Rawley over with, like a dose of castor oil. Garnett felt a flutter of anger against his fate. Anytime he thought he’d washed his hands of the woman, she’d turn up again somewhere else nearby. She was worse than mildew. Why did God insist on running this woman smack up against him, time and again? He knew the answer, of course: Nannie Rawley was a test of his faith, his cross to bear. But when would enough be enough?
“Haven’t I done what I could?” he asked as he walked, raising the palms of his hands and mouthing the words without sound. “I’ve written letters. I’ve explained the facts. I’ve given her scientific advice, and I have given her the Holy Word. Good God, have I not done enough on behalf of that woman’s mortal soul?”
One of the leaning trees in the bank shifted hard, with a groan and a crack, causing the old man’s heart to leap in his chest like a crazed heifer trapped in the loading chute. He stopped dead on the trail, laying a hand on his chest to calm that poor doomed beast.
“All right,” Garnett Walker said to his God. “All right!”
Garnett did admire a well-set orchard, he’d give her that much. He liked the cool, shaded ground spread under the trees like a broad picnic blanket, and he liked how the trunks lined up for your eye as you walked through: first in straight rows and then in diagonals, depending on how you looked. A forest that obeyed the laws of man and geometry, that was the satisfaction. Of course, these trees had been planted by old Mr. Rawley back in ’fifty-one or so, while she was off at her college. If she’d done the planting, why, they’d surely be all higgledy-piggledy like trees in a woodland glade. She’d have some theory about that being better for the apples.
He knew for a fact she was putting in a new section of trees in the field on the other side of her house, though he hadn’t been over there, so he couldn’t say if they were straight or not. She’d mentioned that they were scions cloned off one of the wildings that had sprung up in the fallow pasture on the hill behind her orchard. That field looked awful, the way she was letting it grow up, but she claimed it was her and the birds’ big experiment and that she’d discovered a particularly good accidental cross up there, which she’d patented under the name “Rachel Carson.” What did she think she was doing, patenting a breed and grafting out a whole new orchard? Those trees wouldn’t start to bear apples for another ten years. Who did she think would be around to pick them?
Garnett’s plan today had been to go right up and rap on her screen door, but on his way up the drive he’d spied her ladders and picking paraphernalia scattered around out here in the orchard on the west side. He crossed over just below her big vegetable garden, which looked well tended, he had to admit. By some witchcraft she was getting broccoli and eggplant without spraying. Garnett didn’t even plant broccoli anymore—it was just fodder for the looper worms—and his eggplants got so full of flea beetles they looked like they’d taken a round of buckshot. He inspected her corn, which was tasseling nicely, two weeks ahead of his. Did she have corn earworms, at least? He tried not to hope so. He’d gone almost as far as the line fence that separated their fields when he heard her humming up in the foliage and saw her legs on the ladder, sticking out below the ceiling of green leaves overhead. This is how a duck must look to a turtle underwater, he thought wickedly. Then he took a deep breath. He wasn’t going to dally around here.
“Hello! I have some news,” he called. “One of your trees came down on me.