Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [62]
He climbed into his own truck, a 1986 Ford pickup, which started right up (he had cleaned and gapped the spark plugs last week), and steered carefully out onto number 6, purposefully ignoring his disgraceful frontage. Soon enough, soon enough! He needed more Two-Four-D and Roundup both, for the seedling fields, and had neglected to order them wholesale from the company as he had in previous years. He drove very slowly, taking his time with the curves. Garnett did realize his eyesight wasn’t what it could have been; this was not something he refused to admit. But there was very little traffic on 6 anymore since they’d made the interstate down King Valley. Anyone who had any business on this road would recognize Garnett’s truck. They’d know to give him a wide berth. It wasn’t as if he were blind, for heaven’s sake. He just had some trouble judging distance. There had been a few mishaps.
He would go to Little Brothers’ first, then circle around to the filling station to top off the tank of his truck and use the air hose to clean his air filter, two things he did each and every Friday. Today he would also need to buy five gallons of diesel for his tractor, since he would soon have cultivating to do. After his dinner at Pinkie’s he would stop at Black Store on the way home. That was it, Black Store should be the last thing, lest the milk curdle in his truck on this warm day, and the eggs incubate and hatch.
He passed by Black Store just then, at the intersection of 6 and Egg Creek Road, though he didn’t see Oda wave at him through the window. Images from Garnett’s past always lurked and rose up from the ditches as he drove this road, pictures more real to him than the things in plain view. A wild grapevine that had climbed into his mother’s arborvitae, covering its rounded top like a shiny green-leather hunting cap. A sport groundhog, blond as wheat, with a black tail and cap, that lived under their barn for a season. All of the children had seen it before their father did, for what do children have to do in their lives but look for sport groundhogs? Father did not believe in its existence until nearly the end of the summer, when he finally saw it, too. Then it was real. He told neighbors about it then. The children felt proud when he did, as if they, too, had become more real. As Garnett navigated Highway 6 he breathed the air of that other time—a clearer time, it seemed, when colors and sound were more distinct and things tended to remain where they belonged. When the bobwhite quail could be counted on to cry his name pensively from the fields of an afternoon. Whatever happened to the bobwhite? You never heard him anymore. Garnett had read something from the Extension about fescue’s being the cause, the ordinary fescue grass people planted for hay. It grew too densely for the bobwhite chicks to find their way through. Garnett could remember when fescue hay was the latest thing and the government was paying farmers to convert their fields from their native grasses to this new kind from Europe or somewhere fancy. (They’d thought kudzu was a great idea back then, too—Lordy!) Now fescue was everywhere, and probably no one but Garnett even remembered the bunchgrasses that used to grow here naturally, the bluestem and such. It must seem strange to the animals to have a new world entire sprouting all around them, replacing what they’d known. What a sadness, the baby quails lost in that jungle with nowhere to go. But you had to have hay.
Now here was Grandy’s bait store, not a memory but a fact, with its hand-lettered sign: LIZARDS, 10 FOR A $. It perturbed him slightly that people in Zebulon County could not learn to call a salamander what it was. But it perturbed him more that Nannie Rawley stopped in there at least once a month,