Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [123]
He had never seen her get quite this agitated before. Garnett said nothing. She got up and picked up an apple from the grass, then tossed it from hand to hand. “That was mean, about my duckling,” she added. “And the Unitarian position on underwear is none of your business, if there even was one, which there isn’t. Nobody’s seen my underwear since Ray Dean Wolfe died, so you can keep your thoughts about my body to yourself.”
“Your body!” he said, mortified. “That letter was not how you’re telling it. It was about your mistaken belief in a flawed theory of the earth’s creation, answered clear and plain beyond a shadow of a doubt.”
“You live your whole darn life beyond a shadow of a doubt, don’t you?”
“I have convictions,” he said.
She tilted her head, looking up at him. He could never tell if she was coy or just a little hard of hearing. “You want to make everything so simple,” she said. “You say only an intelligent, beautiful creator could create beauty and intelligence? I’ll tell you what. See that basket of June Transparents there? You know what I put on my trees to make those delicious apples? Poop, mister. Horse poop and cow poop.”
“Are you likening the Creator to manure?”
“I’m saying your logic is weak.”
“I’m a man of science.”
“Well, then, you’re a poor one! Don’t tell me I can’t understand the laws of thermodynamics. I went to college once upon a time, and it was after they discovered the world was round. I’m not scared of big words.”
“I didn’t say you were.”
“You did, too! ‘I realize you’re no scientist, Miss Rawley,’” she mocked, in an unnecessarily prissy version of his voice.
“No, now, I just meant to set you straight on a few points.”
“You self-righteous old man. Do you ever wonder why you don’t have a friend in the world since Ellen died?”
He blinked. He may have even allowed his jaw to go a little slack.
“Well, I’m sorry to be the one to break it to you. But just listen to yourself talk!” she cried. “‘How could random chance—i.e. evolution—create complex life-forms?’ How can you be so self-satisfied and so ignorant at the same time?”
“Goodness. Did you memorize my letter before you threw it in the trash?”
“Oh, phooey, I didn’t have to, I’ve heard it all before. You get your arguments straight out of those dumb little pamphlets. Whoever writes those things should get some new material.”
“Well, then,” he said, crossing his arms, “how does random chance create complex life-forms?”
“This just seems ridiculous, a man who does what you do claiming not to believe in the very thing he’s doing.”
“What I do has nothing to do with apes’ turning helter-skelter into thinking men.”
“Evolution isn’t helter-skelter! It’s a business of choosing things out, just like how you do with your chestnuts.” She nodded toward his seedling field and then frowned, looking at it more thoughtfully. “In every generation, all the trees are a little different, right? And which ones do you choose to save out for crossing?”
“The ones that survive the blight best, obviously. I inoculate the trees with blight fungus and then measure the size of the chancres. Some of them hardly get sick at all.”
“All right. So you pick out the best survivors, you cross their flowers with one another and plant their seeds, and then you do it all over again with the next generation. Over time you’re, what, making a whole new kind of chestnut plant?”
“That’s right. One that can resist the blight.”
“A whole new species, really.”
“No, now, only God can do that. I can’t make a chestnut into an oak.”
“You could if you had as much time as God does.”
Oh, if only I did, Garnett thought with the deep despair of a man running out of time. Just enough years to make a good chestnut, that was all he wanted, but in his heart he knew he couldn’t expect them. He had thought sometimes of praying for this but trembled to think what God would make of his request. Ellen had not been granted time enough even to make peace with her own son.
But he was drifting. “I don’t know what you’re