Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [59]
He glanced over toward Rawley’s, whence came the plague. She had started several new brush piles along the line fence just to gall him. She called them “compost” and claimed they heated up on the inside to a temperature that would kill beetle larvae and weed seeds, but he doubted it. Any decent farmer who’d spent his life in Zebulon County learning thrifty and effective farming methods would know to set fire to his orchard trimmings, but she was too busy with her bug traps and voodoo to get rid of her tree-trash the normal way. Compost piles. “Laziness lots” would be a better name for them. “Stacks of sloth.”
Earlier in the week he had attempted to speak to her over the fence: “The source of Japanese beetles seems to be your brush piles, Miss Rawley.”
To which she’d replied, “Mr. Walker, the source of Japanese beetles is Japan.”
There was no talking to her. Why even try?
He noted that her pitiful old foreign truck was gone from its usual spot between the lilac hedge and her white clapboard house. He wondered where she might have gone on a Friday morning. Saturday mornings she always went out with her produce to the Amish market, and Mondays to Kroger’s (the Black Store wasn’t adequate to her needs, according to Oda Black, who had spied Nannie in Kroger’s purchasing soya sauce), and lately she went out on Tuesday afternoons also, for a purpose he hadn’t yet discerned. Sundays she went to the Unitarian place; Garnett was not about to call it a church. That was just her cup of tea, he imagined: a den of coffee-drinking women in slacks making high-toned conversation along godless lines. Evolution, transcendentalism, things of that nature. Thank goodness it was over the county line, at least, in Franklin, where they had the college. They had more of that kind over there, and as Garnett understood it, the debauchery in this state just increased at a steady pace along an eastward line that wound itself up in Washington, D.C. It was Oda Black’s opinion that the Unitarian women refused to wear proper foundation garments and dabbled in witchcraft. Oda was quick to point out that she was not one to stand in judgment (though she was wide enough to stand anywhere she pleased, and no one would argue, save for the floorboards). She’d heard it from somebody firsthand, and furthermore two girls from the college had once wandered into her store talking right out loud to each other about witchcraft, not caring who heard them, while they reached into the cooler for their sodas. Oda reported that their flesh had jiggled under their T-shirts like jelly turned out of its jar.
That was Franklin County for you. That college was asking for it when they let in women.
Garnett stepped up onto his porch and pulled a folded square of paper from his shirt pocket. He had put a good day’s work behind him, five hours already this morning hand-pollinating and bagging chestnut flowers. June was his busiest month, and this morning when the sun finally came out after its long confinement, Garnett had risen early and got out into his hybrid seedling fields to make up for lost time. There was still so much to be done: the grass in his yard was high, and weeds were springing up along the creek bank, but he could postpone the mowing and weed killing until later this afternoon. Now it was past eleven o’clock, and he had earned the pleasure of a trip to town. Not that he had any kind of a joyride planned. It was mostly errands: Black Store, Tick’s Garage, and Little Brothers’ Hardware.