Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [40]
But no, he wanted to cross over down here below the fence line and throw the cursed sign into her weeds, where it belonged. He decided to push on, twenty more yards.
If only his poisons would drift over onto her trees. He knew very well, and had told her so, that without his constant spraying to keep them down, the Japanese beetles would overrun her orchards completely. She’d be standing out there in her calico skirt under leafless trees, wringing her hands, wondering what’d gone wrong in her little paradise. Success without chemicals was impossible. Nannie Rawley was a deluded old harpy in pigtails.
He could see the fence now—the posts, at least. (His eyesight had clouded to cataracts so slowly that his mind had learned how to fill in details like fence wire, tree leaves, and the more subtle features of a face.) But as he moved toward the property line, the sensation of heaviness in his left leg grew so unbearable, he could hardly drag it. He imagined what he looked like, thrashing and staggering forward like Frankenstein’s monster, and embarrassment washed over him but then was replaced, suddenly, by a terrifying thought: he was having a stroke. Wasn’t that a symptom? Heaviness in the left leg? He stopped to mop the sweat off his face. His skin felt clammy, and a sick ache gnawed at his stomach. Dear Lord! He could fall down into these weeds and who would find him here? After how many days, or weeks? His obituary would read, “The decayed body of Garnett Walker was discovered Wednesday after the first frost brought down the weeds along his frontage on Highway 6.”
His chest felt constricted, like a bulging tree trunk wrapped too tightly in barbed wire. Oh, sweet Jesus! Through his ragged breathing he cried out in spite of himself:
“Help!”
And there she came, down the embankment. Of all God’s creatures he had summoned to his aid Nannie Rawley, wearing a pair of dungarees and a red bandanna around her head like that woman on the syrup, Aunt Jemima. She came tearing out of nowhere, sliding down toward him, still carrying something in her hand from whatever home remedy she’d been out messing with—Nannie with her traps to catch codling moths, as if that would settle everything. It looked like a yellow paper box with the bottom cut out. Here I am, thought Garnett, at the end of my allotted days, staring at a yellow paper box with the bottom cut out. My last view of this earthly life: a bug trap.
Dear Lord my God, he prayed silently. I confess I may have sinned in my heart, but I obeyed thy fifth commandment. I didn’t kill her.
She had already grabbed him under his soggy armpits and was struggling him up the bank toward the flat ground of her front orchard. He had never felt her touch or her grip before and was shocked by this little woman’s strength. He tried to help with his useless legs, but he felt as if he were participating in the sport of alligator wrestling and knew, with a sinking heart, that he was the alligator.
Then at last he was lying on his back on the grass underneath her winesaps. She knelt over him, peering down with concern, and he gasped at the sight of her red-bandanna-crowned head reeling wildly through space. He quickly turned his head to the side; this wasn’t the stroke—it always made him dizzy to lie flat on his back looking up.
“Miss Rawley,” he said weakly once the spinning of the world had ceased, “I don’t like to trouble you. You go on with your business, but maybe if you get a chance directly you could call up the ambulance. I think I’ve had a stroke.” He closed his eyes.
When she didn’t answer, he opened his eyes and saw that she was staring down at his left leg, in apparent horror. He felt confused—would there be