Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [120]
Her dirty white tennis shoes descended two rungs on the ladder, and her face peered down at him through the branches. “Well, you don’t look that much the worse for it, Mr. Walker.”
He shook his head. “There’s no need to behave like a child.”
“It wouldn’t hurt you, though,” she said. “Now and then.” She climbed back up into the boughs of her apple, a June Transparent—he could tell from the yellow fruits lying on the ground. She was picking June apples in the middle of July. It figured.
“I have a piece of business to discuss with you,” he said sternly. “I would appreciate talking with you down here on solid ground.”
She climbed down her ladder with a full apple basket over her arm, muttering about having to work for a living instead of collecting a retirement pension. She set her basket on the ground and put her hands on her hips. “All right. If you’re going to be sanctimonious about it, I have a piece of business to discuss with you!”
He felt his heart stutter a little. It aggravated him no end that she could scare him this way. He stood still, breathed slowly, and told himself that what he beheld was nothing to be afraid of. This was no more daunting than a piece of ground that needed plowing—a small, female terrain. “What is it, then?”
“That god-awful Sevin you’ve been spraying on your trees every blooming day of the week! You think you’ve got troubles, a tree came over on you? Well your poison has been coming down on me, and I don’t just mean my property, my apples, I mean me. I have to breathe it. If I get lung cancer, it will be on your conscience.”
Her hail of words stopped; their gazes briefly met and then fell to the grass around each other’s feet. Ellen had died of lung cancer, metastasized to the brain. People always remarked on the fact that she never had smoked.
“I’m sorry, you’re thinking about Ellen,” Nannie said. “I’m not saying your poisons caused her to get sick.”
She had thought it, though, Garnett realized with a shock. Thought it and put it about so other people were thinking it, too. It dawned on him with a deeper dread that it might possibly be true. He’d never read the fine print on the Sevin dust package, but he knew it got into your lungs like something evil. Oh, Ellen. He raised his eyes to the sky and suddenly felt so dizzy he was afraid he might have to sit down on the grass. He put a hand to his temple and with the other reached for the trunk of a June Transparent.
“This isn’t going well,” Nannie observed. “I didn’t mean to start off hateful, right off the bat. I thought I’d give us some room to work up to it.” She hesitated. “Could you maybe use a glass of water?”
“I’m fine,” he said, recovering his balance. She turned over a pair of bushel baskets and motioned for him to sit.
“I’ve just been festering about it too long,” she said. “Just now I was up there stewing over a whole slew of things at once: your poison, the bills I need to pay, the shingles off my roof I can’t replace. Dink Little claims they don’t make that kind anymore, can you imagine? It’s just been one darn thing after another this week, and when you came hollering at me all of a sudden, I let the dam burst.” She reached between her knees and scooted her bushel forward so they faced each other directly, within spitting distance. “What we need is to have a good, levelheaded talk about this pesticide business, farmer to farmer.”
Garnett felt a pang of guilt about the shingles but let it pass. “It’s the middle of July,” he said. “The caterpillars are on my seedlings like the plague. If I didn’t spray I’d lose all this year’s new crosses.”
“See, but you’re killing all my beneficials. You’re killing my pollinators. You’re killing the songbirds that eat the bugs. You’re just a regular death angel, Mr. Walker.”
“I have to take care of my chestnuts,” he replied firmly.
She gave him a hard look. “Mr. Walker, is it my imagination, or do you really think your chestnuts are more important than my apples? Just because you’re a man and I’m a woman? You seem to forget, my apple crop is my living. Your trees are a hobby.”
Now,