Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [61]
He gathered up his ring of keys, counted the cash in his wallet, and locked the kitchen door on his way out. He stole another glance over toward Nannie’s, noticing with surprise a large, roughly cow-shaped patch of darkness on her roof. He walked a bit closer and squinted through the tops of his bifocals. It was a patch of the green shingles missing; they must have blown off in the last storm. What a mess that must be, in all this rain, and what a nuisance to replace. Worse than a nuisance: those old, hand-cut shingles were impossible to find nowadays. She would have to redo the whole roof if she didn’t want it to look hodgepodge. He touched the corners of his mouth, trying not to harbor pleasure at a neighbor’s misfortune. She did not know that in Garnett’s own garage there was a stack of those green shingles, from the original lot that Garnett’s father and Old Man Rawley had ordered together and shared. Originally, before Garnett had modernized to asbestos in the 1960s, the two houses had borne the same style of clapboard and the same spade-shaped shingles. Garnett’s father had been on good enough terms with Old Man Rawley that he’d sold him the fifty-five acres of orchard land with only the one decent house site, which put the Rawleys near enough by to hit with a rock, as the saying went (though no one had ever felt that particular urge until Garnett and Nannie). The house was modest, neat and small, with its hipped roof and gables facing the road. Old Rawley was a good orchard man who’d planted excellent stock. But anyone could have foreseen that his daughter stood to inherit, since he had no sons. That was trouble that Garnett’s father should have smelled: a daughter away at school in the 1950s. Before you could say Jack Robinson she’d be back here parading around in loud clothes, having an illegitimate child with mental deficiencies, and making up her mind to grow apples with no chemicals whatsoever, in flat defiance of the laws of nature. Garnett sighed and forgave his father once again. It was not a premeditated crime, only a failure of foresight.
As successor to a lost fortune, Garnett had spent his life glancing away from visions of how things might have turned out differently. Nannie Rawley was the exception. How could he not dwell on her presence in his life and seek its meaning? Garnett had overlooked her as a child (she was a kid, maybe ten years younger); had hardly known her as a young woman since she was away for so many years; and had mainly ignored her as long as his wife was alive. (Ellen liked to have little chitchats with her, and then disapprove afterward.) But now, during these eight years alone, he’d been forced to bear her as a burgeoning plague on his old age. Why? What made Nannie do the things she did, before God and Man and sometimes on Garnett’s property? He suspected a connection between that long-ago birth of a deformed child and her terror of chemicals. The troubles had been evident at birth, the Mongol features and so forth, and Nannie had named it Rachel Carson Rawley, after that lady scientist who cried wolf about DDT. Everything in Nannie’s life since seemed to turn on the birth of that child, now that he looked back. The woman had probably been normal once. That child had launched her off the deep end.
Where would she be now, on a Friday? She never went out on Fridays. He ducked behind