Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [172]
Deanna knew what to do; she had a plan. This was the first week of August, which meant Jerry would be coming up soon with her groceries and mail. She could send a letter back to town with him. Instead of putting on a stamp, which she wasn’t even sure she had, she’d draw a map of Egg Fork Creek and Highway 6 on the back of the envelope so Jerry could find the orchard and deliver it straight. Deanna smiled to think of Nannie’s opening the envelope with the map on the back. Maybe she would pause first to study that line of blue ink connecting Deanna’s cabin to her own orchard, like a maze in a child’s puzzle book painstakingly completed. Maybe, just from that, Nannie would be able to guess the contents of the message inside.
Deanna already knew how the letter would begin:
Dear Nannie,
I have some news. I’m coming down from the mountain this fall, in September, I think, when it starts to get cold. It looks like I’ll be bringing somebody else with me. I wonder if we could stay with you.
{26}
Old Chestnuts
Garnett was on his way home from a trip to town, thinking about the fish at Pinkie’s Diner and whether it had been as good as usual, and just arriving at the place where Egg Fork joined up with Black Creek and the road dipped into a little piece of woods, when he was stopped by an animal in the road. There it stood in broad daylight, causing Garnett to brake hard and stop completely. It was a dog, but not a dog. Garnett had never seen the like of it. It was a wild, fawn-colored thing with its golden tail arched high and its hackles standing up and its eyes directly on Garnett. It appeared to be ready to take on a half-ton Ford pickup truck with no fear of the outcome.
“Well, then,” Garnett said aloud, quietly. His heart was pumping heartily, not from fear but from astonishment. The creature was looking into his eyes as if it meant to speak.
It turned its head back toward the side of the road it had come from, and out of the weeds crept a second one, walking slowly. Its tail was held lower, but its color and size were about the same. It hesitated out in the open, then picked up its pace and crossed the road quickly at a neat trot. The first one turned into line behind it and followed, and they both disappeared into the chickory at the edge of the road without so much as a glance back at Garnett. The blue-flowered weeds parted and then closed like curtains in a movie house, and Garnett had the strangest feeling that what he’d witnessed was just that kind of magic. This was no pair of stray dogs dumped off bewildered beside the road and now trying to find their way back to the world of men. They were wildness, and this was where they lived.
He sat for a long moment gazing at the ghosts of what he had seen on the empty road ahead of him. Then, because life had to go on and his prostate wasn’t what it used to be, he put the truck into gear and pressed on, minding his own business and keeping fairly well to his own side of the road. He had nearly closed in on the safety of his own driveway when a young man flagged him down. Garnett was still thinking about the dogs, so much so that he went right on past the Forest Service jeep and on down the road a piece before it registered that the boy in the jeep had meant for him to stop.
He pulled over slowly until he heard the chickory weeds in the ditch brush the side of his truck, which told him he was well off the road. Then he shut off the ignition and sat peering nervously into the rearview mirror. The Forest Service people weren’t the police. They couldn’t make you stop. This wasn’t like Timmy Boyer’s pulling a fellow over and giving him a lecture on old age and bad eyesight and threatening to take away his driving license. Goodness, maybe those animals he’d just seen were something the Forest Service had lost and was looking for? But no, of course not, that was a ridiculous idea. This was just a little, green, open-sided