Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [162]
“Are you all right?”
“Much better, yes,” he replied, getting his bearings. “I’m not used to it yet. I was so used to getting dizzy, it’s taking me a while to get used to not being dizzy.”
“That’s old age for you, isn’t it?” she asked. “If I got out of bed one morning and my knees didn’t hurt, I’m not sure how I’d know to walk.”
He stared at her, distracted. She wasn’t wearing much. He’d noticed that earlier, when he saw her dragging the locust rail up from the ditch. Just a little yellow sleeveless-blouse sort of thing, and short pants. Short pants, on a woman of her age. It was hot, but not so hot as to drive a person to indecent exposure.
“I prayed about that dizziness,” he confessed to her. “For several years, I did.”
“God moves in mysterious ways,” she replied breezily, probably without meaning it in the least. Next she’d be suggesting she was the answer to Garnett’s prayers.
“Personally, I’ve found that my prayers seldom go unanswered,” he said, a little more haughtily than he’d meant. “Last August, when it was so dry and so many people were about to lose their tobacco, I got down on my knees and prayed for rain, Miss Rawley. And I want you to know, the very next evening it rained.”
She looked at him strangely. “Right before you came over here I had a sneezing fit. I guess my sneezing caused you to come.”
“That’s a very peculiar thing to say, Miss Rawley.”
“Isn’t it, though,” she replied, turning around and taking up her hammer again.
“I take it you don’t put much stock in miracles.”
“I’m not in a position to believe in miracles,” she said without turning around. She sounded a little angry, or perhaps just a little sad. She was building something, all right, working on that locust rail he’d seen her dragging about. Now she had it propped up onto a sawhorse here in the doorway of her garage and was nailing a crossbar to it. Goodness, it looked like the cross the Romans used for crucifying Jesus Christ. He wasn’t going to ask—he made his mind up on that. His second vow of the day; he’d better get to the first.
He cleared his throat and then said, for no good reason, “Did you know there’s a pokeberry bush by my driveway that must be eleven feet tall? I’ve never seen the like.”
She paused her hammer and turned back around, eyeing him carefully. “Is that what you came over here to tell me?”
He thought about it. “No. It’s just an incidental piece of information.”
“Oh. Well, that’s something, an eleven-foot pokeberry. If they gave out an award for weeds at the county fair you’d have a contender there. Wouldn’t they all be surprised: Garnett Sheldon Walker the Third, first place in the weedy annual category.” The usual good cheer had returned to her voice, and he couldn’t keep from smiling a little himself. Poke was a half-hardy perennial, not an annual, he was pretty sure, but he refrained from correcting her.
“If I’d thought about it,” he said with mock seriousness, “I’d have given it a little ammonium nitrate. I think I could have gotten it up to fourteen feet.”
She put down her hammer and seemed to relax. Her trousers, he could plainly see, were a pair of old work pants cut off with scissors. What a thing to do. “You know what I really admire, this time of year?” she asked him.
“I wouldn’t dare to guess, Miss Rawley.”
“Blackberry canes,” she said. “Now you go ahead and laugh at me, because everybody else does; I know they’re an awful nuisance. But they’re amazing, too.”
“I expect they’re the fastest-growing plant this side of China,” he said.
“Yes, sir! They shoot up out of the ground and by mid-June they’re eight feet tall. Then the top starts to bend back down to the ground, and by August they’ve made an arch of a size to walk under, if you wanted to. Did you ever notice how they do that?”
“I’ve noticed, and noticed,” he said. “I’ve gone through about eight bush hogs in my lifetime, noticing how blackberries grow.”
“I know. I’m not defending them. They’d eat up my whole orchard if I didn’t keep them cut back to the fence. But sometimes in winter