Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [38]
Why else, with all the good orchard land stretching north from here to the Adirondacks, would that woman have ended up as his neighbor?
Her sign alone was enough to give him hives. For two months now, ever since she’d first crept over on his side to put up that sign, he’d lain awake nearly every night, letting it get on his nerves: Heaven knows it’s one thing when a Hereford jumps a fence and gets over onto a neighbor, that a body can forgive and forget, but a three-foot plywood sign does not get up and walk. Last night he’d fretted till nearly the crack of dawn, and after breakfast he’d made up his mind to walk out through his front seedling field to check the road frontage. Looking for “signs and wonders,” as the Bible said, though Nannie’s sign was known only for bad behavior.
He could see it now through the weeds, the back side of it, poking up out of the bank above Highway 6. He squinted to make sure; his eyesight had reached the point where it required some effort. Yes, the lettered side was facing the road, but he knew what it said, the whole hand-painted foolishness of it commanding the roadside—his roadside, two hundred feet over his property line—to be a “NO SPRAY ZONE.” As if all a person had to do to rule the world was concoct a fool set of opinions and paint them on a three-by-three square of plywood. That in a nutshell was Nannie Rawley.
His plan for today was to hoist that sign with a mighty heave back over her fence into the ditch, where it would be consumed by the swamp of weeds that had sprung up in the wake of her ban on herbicide spraying; then justice would prevail in his small corner of God’s green earth. He hoped she was watching.
Garnett waded carefully down the embankment through the tall weeds and yanked up the sign, with enough difficulty that he changed his mind and hoped she wasn’t watching. He had to grasp it with both hands and wobble the stake for quite a long time to loosen it out of its hole. The woman must have swung a four-pound mallet to drive it in; he was lucky she hadn’t dug a posthole with her antique tractor and set it in cement. He could picture it. She had no respect for property, for her elders in general, or for Garnett in particular. No use for men at all, he suspected darkly—and just as well. No love lost there on either side.
He began wading toward the property line, swishing and hacking a path through the weeds ahead of him with the sign. He felt like one of the knights of old, fighting his way through an army of foes with his wooden sword. The bank and road cut were in a hateful condition, just one long tangle of poke, cockleburs, and multiflora briars nearly as high as his chest. He had to stop every few yards to untangle his shirtsleeves from the stickerbushes. This was all Nannie’s doing, his cross to bear. Everywhere else in Zebulon County—everywhere but here—the county road workers kept the road cuts mowed or, if the banks were too steep for mowing, like this one that fronted his farm, at least kept them sprayed. It took only one good dose of Two-Four-D herbicide every month to shrivel these leafy