Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [147]
“Goodness, no,” he said huffily. “That’s fine, you might as well take that tree down. It’s a danger and a nuisance.”
She looked relieved. “Oh, I wouldn’t go that far. It’s just a tree.” Her eyes twinkled. “Now of course you’ll agree that if Jarondell gets it to fall on my side of the creek, the firewood is all mine.”
How that woman loved to aggravate him! She was like a little banty hen just spoiling for a fight. Garnett forced a smile, or the nearest thing to it. “That sounds fair.”
She gave him a second look before turning back to Oda’s boy (already he’d forgotten the name). The boy stood with his muscular arms crossed and his shaved head gleaming like that Mr. Clean-Up man on Ellen’s ammonia bottles, so tall and strapping that Nannie had to shade her eyes from the sun when she looked up at him, though of course that didn’t slow her down any. She talked nonstop, pointing this way and that and up into the trees as they chatted (did she not realize they were paying this boy by the hour?). She seemed very interested in the process of felling trees. But of course, that was Nannie Rawley. She was interested in what your dog ate for dinner. Garnett shook his head dramatically—for no audience, it turned out, since she and the boy had already forgotten he was there. He might as well be a tree himself. When the chain saw roared up again, he had to raise his voice considerably to get her attention. “If you get the cherry,” he called, “then this one is going to be mine, I gather.”
She held her hands over her ears and motioned that they should go down the path. He followed her around a bend where the roar receded to a whine, but she kept walking, all the way down to the log where he had rested earlier. The damselflies were still hovering, a great many of them now, collecting as if for a social event.
“Not here,” he said with alarm, pointing up. “We really mustn’t tarry here.”
“Good night,” she cried. “Don’t tell me you think that cherry’s going to fall on you! You think you’re that special?” She sat down on the log beside the creek, fluffing her yellow print skirt modestly down over her calves. She looked up at him expectantly. “Well, come on, take a load off.”
He hesitated.
“It would sure make the paper, wouldn’t it? ‘Two Old Fogies Felled by a Single Tree.’”
“All right,” Garnett said, sitting down grumpily a yard away from her on the log. The woman could make you feel a fool just for minding your own business.
“Don’t mind me,” she said. “I’m in a tizzy today.”
Today, he thought. “Over what, now?” He tried to sound like a father indulging a child, but the effect was lost on her. She launched eagerly onto her soapbox, leaning forward and clasping her hands on her knees and looking him straight in the face.
“It’s bees,” she said. “Down at the Full Gospel church they’ve got themselves in a pickle from killing their bees. Killing them—they fumigated! Why didn’t they call me first? I’d have smoked them and got the queen out so they’d all come out of the walls in time. I could use another hive on my place. Goodness me, I could use twenty more hives—the way people are using insecticide around here, I can use every bee I can get to pollinate my apples. But no, now they call me. After they’ve got a mess on their hands that any child could have predicted.”
Garnett worried over her phrasing. What mess was caused by killing bees that any child could predict? He was evasive. “Well. That must be a bother for them at the worship services.” He cast a nervous eye up toward the leaning tree.
But Nannie was heedless of their peril. “Honey two inches deep on the floor of the whole church, oozing out of the walls, and they’re blaming the poor dead bees.”
Oh, goodness, what a picture. Garnett could just see the women in their church shoes. “Well,” he contended, “it was the bees that made the honey in the wall.”
“And it’s the bees that need to vibrate their wings over it night and day to keep it cool in July. Without workers in there to cool the hive, that comb’s going to melt, and all the honey will