Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [173]
He was still stewing over whether to try to back up and speak to the young man or just go on down the road and forget about it when the fellow hopped out of his jeep and came walking toward him at a brisk pace. He had some kind of a paper in his hand.
“Oh, for pity’s sake,” Garnett muttered to himself. “Now they’re letting children from the Forest Service hand out driving tickets.”
But that wasn’t it. Goodness, this boy seemed too young to be operating a vehicle, much less claiming any authority whatsoever over other drivers. He stood next to Garnett’s open window studying some kind of scribbling on the paper he had there, and then he asked, “Excuse me, sir, would this be Highway Six?”
“It would be,” Garnett replied, “if the fools that run the nine-one-one emergency-ambulance business hadn’t decided to put up a road sign calling it Meadow Brook Lane.”
The young man looked at him, a little startled. “Well, that’s exactly what the sign back there said. Meadow Brook Lane. But I’ve got this map here that says I’m supposed to be on Highway Six, and it seems like that’s where I’m at.”
“Well,” said Garnett. “There isn’t any meadow, and there isn’t any brook. What we’ve got here is just a lot of cow pastures and a creek. So most of us go right on ahead and call it number Six, since that’s what it’s been ever since God was a child, as far as I know. Just showing up here one day and banging up a green metal sign doesn’t make a country road through a cow pasture into something it isn’t. I’ve always had the impression the nine-one-one emergency-ambulance people must be from Roanoke.”
The young man looked even more surprised. “I’m from Roanoke.”
“Well, then,” Garnett said. “There you have it.”
“But,” he said, seeming to waver between confusion and irritation, “is this Highway Six, then, or isn’t it?”
“Who wants to know, and who would he be looking for?” Garnett asked.
The fellow flipped over his paper, which looked like an envelope, and read, “Miss Nannie Rawley. Fourteen hundred twelve, Old Highway Six.”
Garnett shook his head. “Son, is there some reason why you can’t do your business with Miss Rawley through the United States Mail, like everybody else? You’ve got to go bothering her yourself? Do you have any idea how busy that woman is this time of year, with an orchard to run? Has the Forest Service got such a shortage of forests to service nowadays, that it needs to be getting into the postal-delivery business?”
The young man had his head cocked and his mouth partly open, but he seemed to have run out of questions and answers both. Whatever business he had with Nannie, he wasn’t going to speak of it to Garnett.
“All right, go on, then,” Garnett finally said. “That’s it right up there. That mailbox sticking out of the bank at a funny angle with all the butterfly weeds around it.”
“That’s Nannie Rawley?” the boy asked, practically jumping out of his skin.
“No,” Garnett said patiently, shaking his head as he started up the ignition in his truck. “That’s her mailbox.”
It was only reasonable to be curious, Garnett told himself, taking his cup and saucer from this morning off the drainboard and putting them away. Strangers didn’t come up this way much, and that boy was young. People of that age were liable to do anything—if you read the newspaper at all, you knew they scared elderly ladies just for sport. And she was busy. In another month apples would be falling from the sky like hail over there, and she had just such a short while to get them all in. Half her crop she sold to some company in Atlanta Georgia with a silly name, for apple juice without any pesticides in it. She got the price of gold for her apples, he’d give her that much, even if she did let the bugs have free run of her property. But it always worried