Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [146]
{20}
Old Chestnuts
Garnett paused halfway up the hill to take a rest. His heart was beating harder than seemed entirely necessary. He could hear the grumble and whine of the boy’s chain saw already at work up there. She would be there, too, by now. They’d agreed to meet at noon to work out dividing the firewood and so on, and it was fourteen after, if his watch could be trusted. Well, she could wait. He was her elder; she could have a little respect. He sat down on a log next to the creek, just for a minute.
A damselfly lit on the tip of a horsetail reed very close to his head, near enough for him to see it well. He couldn’t remember looking at one of these since he was a boy—they’d called them snake doctors—and yet, after all those years, here one was. Probably they’d been flittering around this creek all along, whether he paid them any notice or not. He leaned closer to inspect it: it was just about like a dragonfly, except that its wings folded back when it sat still instead of sticking out to the sides. This one’s wings were black, not quite opaque but sheer like lace, with a pearly white dot at each wingtip. It reminded Garnett somehow of the underthings of women he’d known long ago, back when women wore garter belts and other contrivances that took some time and trouble to remove. Maybe women still did wear such things. How would he know? Ellen had been dead eight years, and for decades before that he certainly had had no occasion to learn about women’s undergarments. He was a faithful man, a good Christian, and Ellen had been, too. She’d believed in the kind of sturdy cotton you could hang on the line without shame.
Now, why on earth was he sitting here in the woods thinking about women’s underthings? He felt deeply embarrassed and prayed hastily to the Lord to forgive the unpredictable frailties of an old man’s mind. He found his feet and headed on up the hill.
She was there, all right, having some kind of jolly conversation with the boy, who had put down the chain saw and fallen into her thrall as people always did. Like lambs to the slaughter, Garnett thought, but he found himself unexpectedly amused by the sight of this immense young hoodlum nodding courteously to the tiniest gray-haired woman ever to stalk the woods in a long skirt and hiking boots. They both turned to greet him.
“Mr. Walker! Now, you remember Oda’s son Jarondell, don’t you?”
“Of course. My regards to your mother.” Remember Jarondell, he thought. That was a name for you. He was more likely to remember the expiration date on his can of Sevin dust.
“We were discussing maybe taking down a few more of these leaners,” she told Garnett. “As long as we’ve got Jarondell up here. That cherry down the path, for one. It’s over so far, I’d be surprised if it made it to the end of summer.”
Oh, dear Lord, that cherry! Garnett had forgotten all about it, had sat right under it five minutes ago when he paused to rest by the creek. He’d forgotten to worry about the tree falling on him! The thought set him nearly into a panic, so that he was much too aware of the beating of his heart. He laid a hand on his chest.
“What’s wrong? Are you attached to that cherry?” She watched him with a worried look, causing him a strong and unwelcome recollection of the day she’d bent over him in the grass and declared that he