Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [66]
Garnett stood tall and marched toward the door, holding his spray bottle of malathion in front of him to clear the path. They turned to stare as he stalked wordlessly and with great dignity past the counter.
“Why, Mr. Walker!” she cried.
Well howdy-do to you, he thought. There you are, caught in your tracks, you old biddy, you and your gossipmongering friends. Let your sins keep you awake at night. He nearly knocked his head a second time on the June Mower Sale sign but remembered to duck—praise Jesus!—in the nick of time.
He found his truck and was two blocks down the street past the Amish market before his heart stopped pounding in his ears. And he was beyond Black Store, halfway up Route 6 to his house, somewhere in front of Nannie Rawley’s farm frontage, when it occurred to him that her lawn mower was a Snapper. Her mower that he knew had been giving her trouble, which she’d purchased at Little Brothers’. A Snapper.
He was parked in his own driveway before he realized he had shoplifted a bottle of malathion.
{10}
Moth Love
Swallows looped and dived inside the barn, swooping from their nests in the rafters overhead toward the doorway and out into the bright-purple evening, where the low sun glinted off their streamlined, back-curved wings. They were like little fighter planes, angry at any intrusion, expressing their ire in motion like bullets. Every evening Lusa came into the barn to milk, and every evening the swallows responded this way. Like some people, she thought: short on sense, long on ambition. Sunset canceled all previous gains, and the world was good for a fresh fight every day.
Her thoughts trailed off into a kind of trance as she milked and watched the barn swallows make their repetitious oval flights out over the flat surface of the pond, which the sunset had laminated with gold leaf. Suddenly she jumped, startling the cow. Little Rickie was standing in the doorway, all six and a half feet of him.
“Hey, Rickie. How’s it going?” He ambled toward the stanchion where she sat on a stool working the udder to its end. Down here in the cellar of the barn where the stalls were, the roof was low. Little Rickie’s head nearly touched the rafters.
“Good, I reckon.”
“Well, good. How’s your family?”
Rickie cleared his throat. “Fine, I guess. Dad sent me up to tell you we won’t be setting tobacco on Saturday. Tomorrow, I guess he means.”
“No?” She looked up at him. “Why not? The ground is drying out. I walked out there on the tobacco bottom this afternoon, and it’s not that bad. In fact I called down there to tell him everything looked good for tomorrow, but nobody was home. I think the rain’s really stopped, finally.”
Rickie looked as if he’d rather be anywhere in the county, pretty much, than in this barn talking with Lusa. A family trait. “Well, Uncle Herb said he’s got real busy with his calves. And Dad said you wasn’t all that interested in us setting your tobacco anyways, is what they said.”
“Oh, I see. I’m supposed to go down there and apologize for my rash attempt at self-rule and beg them on bended knee to come set my tobacco.” She saw she was being punished: the tobacco had been their idea, and now they were using it against her. Lusa put her shaking hands on her knees to force some calm onto herself. Her sudden anger had upset the cow enough to stop her milk for the moment. There was nothing doing until she let down again. Cows were a lesson in patience.
Rickie shrugged his shoulders inside his jean jacket, that particular movement owned by teenaged boys trying to fit their adult bodies. She shouldn’t speak her mind to this kid, she realized; he must already consider her a hysteric. A redhead, Cole used to say. The boy kept a nervous eye on Lusa while he shook a cigarette out of his pack and lit it. As an afterthought he held out the pack to her, but she shook her head.
“No