Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [150]
“You have two reproductive American chestnuts in your woodlot?”
“Are you fooling with me? You didn’t know?”
“How would I have known that?”
She started to speak, then paused, touched her lip, then spoke. “I never really think of the woods as belonging to us, exactly. I walk all over your hills when I feel like it. I just assumed you did the same with mine.”
“I haven’t trespassed on your land since the day your father bought it from mine.”
“Well,” she said cheerfully. “You should have.”
He wondered if this was really possible, what she was telling him. Certainly she knew apples, but did she honestly know a chestnut from a cherry? He glanced up at the offending cherry tree again and became convinced it was leaning farther than it had been this morning. A squirrel bounded carelessly up its trunk, which was just too much for Garnett. The sound of a loud crack overhead caused him to look straight up, even though he knew better and had long been in the habit of avoiding that movement. Oh, oh, oh! The curse of his dizziness came crashing down. He held his head and moaned aloud as the woods spun around him crazily. He leaned over and put his head between his knees, knowing it would do no good for him to close his eyes—that would only make him want to throw up.
“Mr. Walker?” She leaned down and looked into his terror-stricken face.
“Nothing. It will pass. A few minutes. Don’t mind me. Nothing you can help.”
But she was still peering into his face. “Nystagmus,” she pronounced.
“What?” He felt annoyed and foolish and weak and fiercely wished she would go away. But she kept looking right at his eyes.
“Your eyes are jerking to the left, over and over—it’s called nystagmus. You must be having a doozy of a dizzy spell.”
He didn’t answer. The spinning tree trunks were slowing up now, like a merry-go-round winding down. It would pass in a few more minutes.
“Do you get it in bed, too, lying on your back?”
He nodded. “That’s the darnedest. It wakes me up if I roll over in my sleep.”
“You poor thing. That’s a misery. You know how to fix it, don’t you?”
He moved his head very carefully to face her. “There’s a cure?”
“How long have you had this?”
He didn’t like to say. Forever. “Twenty years, maybe.”
“You never saw a doctor for it?” she asked.
“At first I thought it must be something awful gone wrong inside my head,” he confessed. “I didn’t want to know. Then the years went by, and it didn’t kill me.”
“It won’t; it’s just a nuisance. BPV is what they call it. ‘Benign positional vertigo,’ or something close to that. I can’t remember. Rachel had it bad. Usually old people get it, but you know, everything on Rachel that could fall apart, did. Look here, here’s what you do. It’s simple. Lie down here on this log.”
He protested, but she already had him by the shoulders and was guiding him down onto his back. “Turn your head to the side, as far as it will go. Let it drop backward a little, down off to the side. That’s right.” He gasped and clutched at her hands like a baby when the dizziness descended again, worse than ever. No matter how he braced for it, that feeling of careening through space never failed to terrify him.
“It’s OK, that’s good,” she crooned, holding on to his hand with one of hers while she cupped her other palm behind his head, steadying him. “Stay there if you can stand it, just hold right still till it stops.” He did as he was told. It was a minute, maybe two, before the world slowed and arrested its dance.
“Now,” she said, “roll your head straight back till it starts up again. Don’t be scared. Go slow, and freeze when it hits you.”
He became so terribly aware of her hands. She was holding his head in her competent, tender grip like a mother, pressing his face against her skirt. It was all he could think about as he passed through one more bout of dizziness, then turned his head and endured another. He wondered if he would ever be able to look Nannie Rawley in the eye after this.
“You’re almost done,