Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [148]
He felt a small thrill to be included in her compliment. But he studied her face and couldn’t quite work out whether she meant him in particular or old people in general. And now she was headed off on her own tangent.
“You’d think young people would be more careful. They’re the ones that are going to be around in fifty years. Not us.”
“No, not us,” Garnett agreed mournfully. He tried not to think of his chestnut fields overgrown with weeds, waving their un-tended, carefully crossbred leaves like flags of surrender in a world that did not even remember what was at stake. Who would care about his project when he was gone? Nobody. That was the answer: not one living soul. He had kept this truth at a distance for so long, it nearly made him weep with relief to embrace the simple, honest grief of it. He rested his hands on his knees, breathed in and out. Let the cherry tree fall on him now, get it over. What did it matter?
They sat silent for a while, listening to the wood thrushes. Nannie pulled a handful of cockleburs from her skirt and then, without really appearing to give it much thought, reached over and plucked half a dozen from the knees of Garnett’s khaki trousers. He felt strangely moved by this fussy little bit of female care. He realized vaguely that as a mortal man, he was starved. He cleared his throat. “Did it ever cross your mind that God—or whatever you want to call him, with your balance of nature and so forth—that he got carried away with the cockleburs?”
“There’s too many of them. I’ll have to agree with you on that.”
Garnett felt faintly cheered: she agreed. “You can’t blame me for that one, now, can you? People’s spraying or meddling. For the cocklebur problem.”
“Oh, I probably could if I tried. But it’s a nice day, so I won’t.”
They sat awhile longer in silence. “Why did they call you?” he asked finally, thinking of the woman who had been phoning him up lately for livestock advice. A goat maven, she had called him. He glanced over at Nannie, but she seemed lost in her own thoughts. “The church ladies, with their bee problem?”
“Oh, why me and not somebody else? I guess I’m the only one around here that keeps them anymore. Isn’t that sad, that nobody in this county under the age of seventy knows how to work bees? Everybody used to. Now they’ve all let their hives go.”
Garnett did think this was sad. As a child he had enjoyed putting on the bee bonnet and helping his father with the honey chores, spring and fall. He honestly couldn’t say why he had let that go. “What did you tell them? About the honey on the floor?”
She grinned and looked at him sideways. “I’m afraid I wasn’t very nice. I told them that the Lord moves in mysterious ways, and that among all his creatures he loves honeybees just about the best. I told them it was in the Scripture. I expect they’re all leafing through their Bibles right now to see what it says about God’s sending down a plague on the killers of bees.”
“What does it say?”
“Oh, nothing. I just made that up.”
“Oh,” Garnett said, suppressing a smile in spite of himself. “Then they probably just called all the ladies to come down with mop buckets.”
Nannie Rawley snorted. “What a lot of sweetness wasted on a bunch of sourpusses.”
Garnett declined to comment.
“It was that Mary Edna Goins that called me. Mad as hops, like the whole idea of a honeybee was my fault.” She glanced over at him, then looked away. “Mr. Walker, I don’t like to say an unkind word about my fellow man, and I hope you won’t think I’m a gossip. But that woman has about the worst case of herself I’ve ever seen.”
Garnett laughed. He had known Mary Edna Goins since before she was a Goins. Once she had called up to tell him that having goat projects in 4-H was giving young people an undue opportunity to think about Satan.
He carefully kept an eye on the cherry tree. “We were going to discuss firewood,” he said. “You can have this one.”
“Thank you, it