Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [161]
{23}
Old Chestnuts
Garnett had made up his mind. He was going to tell her about the shingles. Today, he would tell her.
Nothing was going to get him off the track this time: she could go ahead and be rude, shocking, or blasphemous, it wouldn’t matter, he was still going to give her those shingles. He was a Christian man hovering near eighty, and there was no telling when a fellow his age might just keel over. It had happened to younger men, Lord knew. It was not going to happen to Garnett Walker with those shingles moldering in his garage and the sin of spite staining his soul like an inkblot.
Maybe, while he was at it, he would remember to thank her for the pie.
As he walked across his yard toward the gate, he paused to take stock of a pokeberry weed that had shot up in the ditch beside his driveway, out of reach of the mower. He’d been meaning to get down here with the Weedwhacker, but somehow this poke plant had slipped past his good intentions and grown into a monster. It was a tree, practically, ten feet tall, dangling its big, slick leaves and bunches of green berries—all that growth accomplished in just four months, from the ground up, since poke was killed to the ground by frost. He stood with his hands on his hips, scrutinizing its purple trunk. He hated a weed on principle but could not help admiring this thing for its energy. His eye wandered up toward the row of trees that towered along the fencerow, giant leafy masses like tall green storm clouds, and he felt unexpectedly awestruck. A man could live under these things every day and forget to notice their magnitude. Garnett had gradually lost the ability to see individual leaves, but he could still recognize any one of these by its shape: the billowy columns of tulip poplars; the lateral spread of an oak; the stately, upright posture of a walnut; the translucent, effeminate tremble of a wild cherry. The small, lacy locusts were faintly brown this late in summer, and the catalpa at the corner post wore a pale-green color you could pick out on a hillside a mile away, or even farther when it was dangling all over with the long pods that made people call it a bean tree. The sourwood had its white flowers reaching out like skeleton hands in the spring. Trees. Every kind assumed a different slickness in the rain, its particular color in the fall, its own aspect—something you couldn’t describe in words but learned by heart when you lived in their midst. Garnett had a strange, sad thought about his own special way of seeing trees inside his mind, and how it would go dark, like a television set going off, at the moment of his death.
What in heaven’s name was he doing out here in his driveway looking at trees and thinking about death? He started to turn back toward his house, but from the corner of his sight he registered the rounded shapes of the regularly spaced apples beyond the fencerow and knew, of course, that was it. His mission was Nannie Rawley and the shingles. He thought of going to the garage to check on them first, just to make sure they were in a condition to be offered. But he suspected he might merely be postponing the inevitable. Just pull up your knickers and go, young man, he scolded himself, and obeyed.
He found her in back of the house, where he knew she would be. He’d been keeping an eye out this morning and had seen her carrying an old locust fence rail back there. He’d actually grown a little curious about what she was up to, though he knew curiosity had killed the cat, and that was probably even without the assistance of Nannie Rawley.
She waved merrily when she saw him coming. “Mr. Walker! How’s your BPV?”
His what? Was she asking him about underwear? “Fine,” he said, with reserved commitment.
“No more dizzy spells? That’s wonderful. I’m happy to hear it.”
“Oh, that,” he said, and the memory of her firm, tender hands cradling his head sent a shock of adrenaline through his old body. He’d had a dream about her, so real to him that he’d awakened plagued with the condition he hadn’t known for years. He blushed now to recall the