Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [124]
“What you’re doing is artificial selection,” she replied calmly. “Nature does the same thing, just slower. This ‘evolution’ business is just a name scientists put on the most obvious truth in the world, that every kind of living thing adjusts to changes in the place where it lives. Not during its own life, but you know, down through the generations. Whether you believe in it or not, it’s going on right under your nose over there in your chestnuts.”
“You’re saying that what I do with chestnut trees, God does with the world.”
“It’s a way to look at it. Except you have a goal, you know what you want. In nature it’s predators, I guess, a bad snap of weather, things like that, that cull out the weaker genes and leave the strong ones to pass on. It’s not so organized as you are, but it’s just as dependable. It’s just the thing that always happens.”
“I’m sorry, but I can’t liken God’s will to a thing that just happens.”
“All right, then, don’t. I don’t care.” She sounded upset. She sat back down on her bushel, tossed the apple away, and put her face in her hands.
“Well, I can’t.” He tried to hold still instead of pacing around, but his knees hurt. “That’s just a godless darkness, to think there’s no divine goal. Mankind can’t be expected to function in a world like that. The Lord God is good and just.”
When she looked up at him, there were tears in her eyes. “Mankind functions with whatever it has to. When you’ve had a child born with her chromosomes mixed up and spent fifteen years watching her die, you come back and tell me what’s good and just.”
“Oh, goodness,” Garnett said nervously. The sight of a woman’s tears in broad daylight should be against the law.
She fished in her pocket for a handkerchief and blew her nose loudly. “I’m all right,” she said after a minute. “I didn’t say what I meant to, there.” She blew her nose again, like nobody’s business. It was a little shocking. She rubbed her eyes and stuffed the red bandanna back in her pocket. “I’m not a godless woman,” she said. “I see things my own way, and most of it makes me want to get up in the morning and praise glory. I don’t see you doing that, Mr. Walker. So I don’t appreciate your getting all high and mighty about the darkness in my soul.”
He turned his back on her and looked out over his own land. The narrow, bronze-tipped leaves of the young chestnuts waved like so many flags, each tree its own small nation of genetic promise. He said, “You called me a bitter old man. That wasn’t nice.”
“Any man who’d cut off his own son like a limb off a tree is bitter. That’s the word for it.”
“That’s none of your business.”
“He needs help.”
“That’s not your business, either.”
“Maybe not. But put yourself in my shoes. I’d give up the rest of my life in one second if it could help Rachel, and I’ve lost that chance. If I could have gotten the doctors to cut out my heart and put it into her, I would have. So how do you think it feels to watch other people throw away their living children?”
“I have no children.”
“You did have one for twenty years. And he’s still alive, last I heard.”
Garnett could feel her eyes on the back of his shirt like the noonday sun, but he couldn’t turn around. He just let her go on hitting him with her words, blunt as rocks. “He’s walking around somewhere carrying your genes and Ellen’s.” She paused, but he still didn’t turn around. “Even your same name, for heaven’s sakes. And you won’t help him, or claim him? Looks to me like you’ve given up on the world and everything in it, including yourself.”
Garnett wanted nothing but to walk away from there. But he couldn’t let her be right about this, too. He turned to face his neighbor. “I can’t help that boy. He has to help himself. There comes a time.”
“You think he’s still a boy? He must be in his thirties by now.”
“And still a boy. He’ll be a man when he decides to act like one. It’s not just me that thinks that. Ellen went to those meetings for years, and that’s what they told her. With the drinking and all that, they have to decide for themselves to