Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [37]
{6}
Old Chestnuts
Garnett could still remember, from when he was a boy, a giant hollow log way back up in the woods on Zebulon Mountain. It was of such a size that he and the other youngsters could run through it single-file without even bending their heads. The thought made him smile. They had reckoned it to be theirs, for a ten-year-old boy will happily presume ownership of a miracle of nature, and then carve on it with his knife. They’d called it by some kind of name—what was it? Something Indian. The Indian Tunnel.
A surprising fact occurred to Garnett then, for the first time in his nearly eighty years: the unfortunate fellow who’d chopped down that tree, miscalculating its size and then having to leave it, must have been his grandfather. How many times before had Garnett stood right here at the edge of his seedling field staring up at that mountainside, ruminating on the Indian Tunnel? But he’d never put the two facts together. That tree must have come down near a hundred years ago, when his grandfather owned the whole southern slope of Zebulon Mountain. It was his grandfather, the first Garnett Walker, who’d named it, modestly choosing Zebulon from the Bible, even though some still did call it Walker’s Mountain. Who else could have felled that tree? He and his sons would have spent a whole day and more with their shoulders against the crosscut saw to bring down that giant for lumber. They’d have been mad as hornets, then, to find after all their work that the old chestnut was too huge to be dragged down off the mountain. Probably they took away tree-sized branches to be milled into barn siding, but that trunk was just too big of an old monster and had to be left where it lay. Left to hollow itself out from the inside till nothing was left of it but a game for the useless mischief of boys.
Mules, they had to use in those days for any kind of work that got done: mules or men. A tractor was a thing still yet undreamed of. A mule could be coaxed into many a steep and narrow place where a tractor would not go, it was true. But! Some things could be wrought with horsepower that were beyond the power of horseflesh. That was the lesson he was meant to draw here, God’s purpose for these paired recollections of Grandfather Walker and the Indian Tunnel. If they’d had a logging sledge or a good John Deere, that tree would not have gone to waste as boy-tunnel and bear den. Yes, sometimes horsepower can do what horseflesh cannot.
That was just it, the very thing he had been trying to tell the Rawley woman for years. “Miss Rawley,” he’d explained until he was blue in the face as she traipsed through her primitive shenanigans, “however fondly we might recall the simple times of old, they had their limits. People keep the customs of their own day and time for good reason.”
Nannie Land Rawley was Garnett’s nearest neighbor and the bane of his life.
Miss Rawley it was and ever would be, not Missus, even though she had once borne a child and it was well known in Zebulon County that she’d never married the father. And that had been some thirty years ago or more, a far cry before the days when young girls began to wear rings in their noses and bells on their toes as they did now, and turn out illegitimate children as a matter of course. In those days, a girl went away for a decent interval to visit a so-called relative and came back sadder but wiser. But not Miss Rawley. She never appeared the least bit sad, and the woman was unwise on principle. She’d carried the child right here in front of God and everybody, christened the poor thing with a ridiculous name, and acted like she had every right to parade a bastard child through a God-fearing community.
And every one of them has forgiven her by now, he reflected bitterly, peering up the rise through the trunks of her lower orchard toward her house, which sat much too close to his own on the crest of a small, flat knoll just before the land rose steeply up the mountainside. Of course there was the tragic business