Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [95]
He went over to take a closer look. It was a pie, all right—fresh. Even if his eyes could trick him, his nose never did. Stuck underneath it, wafting a little in the breeze, was a small collection of papers. He slipped the thin squares of paper out from under the pie, along with a sealed envelope, and scowled at the whole mess. The squares of paper were receipts. Good grief, was someone charging him for this pie? No, they were his receipts, one from Little Brothers’ and one from Southern States, probably taken out of the small metal box just inside the front door where he always emptied his pockets and tended to let his receipts pile up until tax time. But there were words on the back of these, written in an extremely small, tidy hand. A note, attached to a letter in a sealed envelope.
He looked around the empty porch. Someone had brought him this pie, stood there banging on his door for fifteen minutes while that Widener woman rattled on endlessly about goats, and then finally given up and written him a note and left the pie. Who would do such a thing? As if he didn’t know. With a sinking feeling he carried the note inside, pie and all, catching the door with his elbow. He set the pie inside a cupboard where he wouldn’t be looking at it while he read the note, and then he fetched his reading glasses and sat down at his kitchen table to read. First, the note on the scraps of receipt:
Mr. Walker,
Well, you needn’t to waste a stamp and two hours of Poke Sanford’s time—think of that poor fellow having to carry a letter from your box down to the P.O. and back out the same road again to mine! I’m right next door. You could knock. That’s what I meant to do today. I had a letter written up to give you in case I couldn’t think of everything […and here the note continued onto the second receipt] or if you weren’t in the mood to chat, but really I hoped to say most of this in person. But now you aren’t home. Oh, fiddle. Your truck is here. Where are you? I’ll just leave you the pie and the letter. Cheer up, Mr. Walker. I hope you enjoy them both.
Your neighbor, Nannie Rawley
Next Garnett tore open the long white envelope and slid out the handwritten letter folded inside. He noticed that his hands were shaking when he did it. Cheer up indeed.
Dear Mr. Walker,
Since you asked, yes, I do believe humankind holds a special place in the world. It’s the same place held by a mockingbird, in his opinion, and a salamander in whatever he has that resembles a mind of his own. Every creature alive believes this: The center of everything is me. Every life has its own kind of worship, I think, but do you think a salamander is worshiping some God that looks like a big two-legged man? Go on! To him, a man’s a shadowy nuisance (if anything) compared to the sacred business of finding food and a mate and making progeny to rule the mud for all times. To themselves and one another, those muddly little salamander lives mean everything.
Of all things, I’d never expect you, Garnett Walker III, to ask, “Who cares if one species is lost?” The extinction of one kind of tree wreaked pure havoc on the folks all through these mountains—your own family more than any other. Suppose some city Yank said to you, “Well, sir, the American chestnut was just one tree—why, the woods are full of trees!” You’d get so mad you’d spit. It would take you a day and a night to try and explain why the chestnut was a tree unlike any other, that held a purpose in our world that nothing else can replace. Well sir, the loss of one kind of salamander would be a tragedy on the same order to some other creature that was depending on it. It wouldn’t be you this time, but I assume you care about all tragedies, not just the ones that affect the Walker fortunes. Do you recall how they mentioned