Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [151]
She helped lift him back to a sitting position and guided his head forward. He waited, feeling a strange sensation of reassembly in his head. When it passed he relaxed his shoulders, raised his head, and looked around at a world that seemed to have been made new. She watched him intently. “OK,” she said. “You’re done.”
“Done with what?”
“You’re fixed. Try looking up.”
He was skeptical, but he did it, cautiously. He felt a feint of movement, but it was small. Compared with the usual, it was hardly anything. No real dizziness. He looked at her, astonished. “Are you a witch? What did you just do to me?”
“It’s the Something maneuver—Epley, maybe?” She smiled. “Rachel and I discovered it by accident. I used to roll her around and tickle her to distract her from her dizzy spells. Then a long time later Dr. Gibben told me there was an easier way to do it, and a name for it. You’ll have to do it again, every so often. Maybe every day at first.”
“What did you fix?”
“It’s caused by these little tiny crystals—”
“Ohhh! Don’t even tell me. If it’s your hocus-pocus theory of everything.”
“No, now, listen. It’s little hard crystals like rocks that form in the balance-what’s it thingamabob inside your ear. That’s a scientific fact.”
“Well, how did they get there?”
“Some people just get them, that’s all I can tell you. What do you want me to say, that they’re caused by orneriness? Listen here, old man, did I fix you up, or not?”
Garnett felt chastened. “Did.”
“All right, then, listen to me for a change. You’ve got you some little rocks in there that float around and make trouble if you tilt your head the wrong way. The trick is to roll them up into a dead-end corner where they can’t get out and bother you.”
“Are you sure? Is this real, what you’re telling me?”
“Real as rain, Mr. Walker.”
“All these years?”
“All these years, that’s been your trouble. You’ve had rocks in your head.”
They sat without speaking for a long while, listening to the gasoline-powered sounds of an oak turning into a cord of wood. At length she asked, “Would you like to walk up on the hill with me and see those two chestnuts? Would it do you any good to have two more seed sources for your breeding program?”
“Do you have any idea?” he asked, amazed and excited once again. He’d momentarily forgotten the chestnuts. “It would double the amount of genetic variation I have now. I would have a faster, healthier project by a mile, Miss Rawley. If I had flowers from those two trees.”
“Consider them yours, Mr. Walker. Anytime.”
“Thank you,” he said. “That’s very kind of you.”
“Not at all.” She folded her hands on her lap.
Garnett could picture the two old chestnuts up there, anomalous survivors of their century, gnarled with age and disease but still standing, solitary and persistent for all these years. Just a stone’s throw from his property. It was almost too much to believe. He dared to hope they still had a few flowers clinging on, this late in the summer. What that infusion of fresh genetic material would do for his program! It was a miracle. In fact, now that he thought about it, if those trees had been shedding pollen all along they might already have helped him out, infusing his fields with a little bit of extra diversity. He thought he’d been working alone. You just never knew.
He turned his head to the side and received an unbidden picture of the rocks in his head, stashed out of harm’s way for the moment but poised, surely, to roll back out and make trouble. Without meaning to, he also remembered the stack of green shingles in his garage, hiding there, burning a hole in his conscience like a cigarette dropped on a couch.
{21}
Moth Love
One of the skills of grief that Lusa had learned was to hold on tight to the last moments between sleep and waking. Sometimes, then, in the early morning, taking care not to open her eyes or rouse her mind through its warm drowse to the surface where pain