Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [122]
“If you don’t believe those fellows are bad eggs, then you’re a dupe, Mr. Walker. Have you been getting those fliers from the Extension? Now all the companies are pushing that grain with its genes turned out of whack, and fools are growing it!”
“Modern farmers try new things,” he said. “Even in Zebulon County.”
“Half the world won’t eat that grain; there’s a boycott on it. Any farmer that plants it will go bankrupt in a year or two. That’s modern farming for you.”
“That’s taking a dim view.”
She slapped her hands on her knees. “Look around you, old man! In your father’s day all the farmers around here were doing fine. Now they have to work night shifts at the Kmart to keep up their mortgages. Why is that? They work just as hard as their parents did, and they’re on the same land, so what’s wrong?”
Garnett could feel the sun’s insistent heat on the back of his neck. Nannie, facing him, was forced to squint. They’d started this conversation in the shade, but now the sun had moved out from behind a tree—that was how long they’d been sitting here on bushel baskets speaking of nonsense. “Times change,” Garnett said. “That’s all.”
“Time doesn’t change; ideas change. Prices and markets and laws. Chemical companies change, and turn your head along with them, looks like. If that’s what you mean by ‘time,’ then yes, sir, we have lived to see things get worse.”
Garnett laughed, thinking for some reason of the boy who drove the UPS truck. “I won’t argue with that,” he said.
She shaded her eyes and looked right straight at him. “Then why do you make fun of my way of farming for being old-fashioned, right to my face?”
Garnett stood up, brushing invisible dirt off the knees of his trousers. There was a high, steady buzz that he’d thought was his hearing aid, but now he decided it was coming from the trees and the air itself. It made him feel jumpy. This whole place was giving him the all-overs.
She stayed seated but followed him around the glade with her eyes, waiting for an answer he couldn’t assemble. Why did Nannie Rawley bother him so? Dear Lord, if he had world enough and time, he still couldn’t answer. He stopped pacing and looked down at her sitting there wide-eyed, waiting for judgment. She didn’t look old-fashioned, exactly, but like a visitor to this day from an earlier time—like a girl, with her wide, dark eyes and her crown of braided hair. Even the way she was dressed, in denim dungarees and a sleeveless white shirt, gave her the carefree air of a child out of school for summer, Garnett thought. Just a girl. And he felt tongue-tied and humiliated, like a boy.
“Why does everything make you so mad?” she asked finally. “I only wish you could see the beauty in it.”
“In what?” he asked. A cloud passed briefly over the sun, causing everything to seem to shift a little.
“Everything.” She flung out an arm. “This world! A field of plants and bugs working out a balance in their own way.”
“That’s a happy view of it. They’re killing each other, is what they’re doing.”
“Yes, sir, eating others and reproducing their own, that’s true. Eating and reproducing, that’s the most of what God’s creation is all about.”
“I’m going to have to take exception to that.”
“Oh? Are you thinking you got here some way different than the rest of us?”
“No,” he said irritably. “I just don’t choose to wallow in it.”
“It’s not mud, Mr. Walker. It’s glory, to be part of a bigger something. The glory of an evolving world.”
“Oh, now,” he cried. “Don’t even get started on your evolution. I already put you straight on that.” He paced in a circle like a dog preparing to lie down, and then stopped. “Didn’t you get my letter?”
“Your thank-you note for the blackberry pie I baked you? No, I don’t believe I got any such a thing. I got some evil words about bra-burning Unitarian women and casting my soul to the jaws of Satan like the snapper that ate my duckling. I think some crazy man must