Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [91]
Well, of course he hadn’t told them anything, and they’d buy. They had that strenuously foolish look of city people; the woman was dressed more like a man than the man. Soon they’d be finding out what Garnett knew by heart: on an old farm, every time you sink a spade to plant a tree, you’re going to hit some old piece of a broken dish, a length of leather harness, some rusted metal, maybe even a cannonball! When Garnett was a schoolboy his father used to bring cannonballs home from somewhere and the boys would play with them till they ended up forgotten in the orchard or buried in their mama’s flower patch, lying in wait to wreak havoc fifty years later on a tiller, a mower blade, or some other piece of equipment costing a day’s work and too much money to repair.
This morning his plan had been modest: to finish clearing out the edge of the back field along the fencerow to make room for a single new row of trees. He thought the worst of it would be clearing the weeds, but no. He’d wrecked his bush hog and then his tiller blade. Half buried in that slim patch of ground he’d found six old fenceposts all wrapped up in barbed wire, evidently just thrown down there after they pulled them out to put in the new fence, back in the forties. Once he’d wrestled all that out, he’d discovered underneath it enough nails and carriage bolts scattered around to fill a bucket three times (and three times had carried it to his trash pile in the garage, now growing monstrous). Then, beneath all that, the entire metal chassis of an old wagon—and the worst was still yet to come! All in a mess at the end of the fencerow he’d uncovered a huge roll of black plastic with something heavy inside, which Garnett began to fear would turn out to be a body (he’d already found everything else there was today, so why not?). But no, it was clumps of white powder, possibly rock salt, though he wasn’t sure. Something his father had meant to throw away when Garnett was still a boy. That was the trouble with their thinking back in those days: “away” simply meant “out of sight somewhere,” for someone else to run into further down the road. Garnett was fed up to the teeth with it all, and he still hadn’t cleared the ground he’d meant to have laid open by midmorning, and now what? Good grief, that was his telephone ringing.
He turned off the shower and listened. Yes, there it was, the telephone on the little hall table just outside the bathroom door, ringing off the hook.
“Hold your horses!” he cried, not very pleased to have to cut his shower short and scurry around drying his head and wrapping himself in a towel. He stepped gingerly out onto the floorboards in the cool hallway and yanked up the receiver.
“Hello,” he said, as pleasantly as he could manage while patting down his wet hair. He didn’t feel right to be chatting with anyone, even a wrong number, looking like this.
“Hello, Mr. Walker?”
It was a woman. Not from around here, either; she had a townish sound to her, that way they have of hurrying up every single word.
“Speaking,” he said.
She seemed uncertain for a moment, and he prayed she’d hang up, but then she launched into it: “I was wondering if I could ask you some questions about goats. I’m interested in getting started on kind of a semi-large-scale meat-goat operation, but I don’t really have much capital, and some people directed me to you. They said you were the man to talk to, the regional goat maven, and you might even know how to get me started with some…I don’t know how to put this.” She breathed. “OK, plain talk? I’m wondering if you know anybody who’d give me goats for free. To get me started.”
Garnett collected himself: the Regional Goat Maven, caught with a towel