Prodigal Summer: A Novel

by Barbara Kingsolver

  6. Weed killer, one gallon concentrate!!

  The resentment attached to this final purchase was boundless and only feebly expressed by his underlining and exclamation points. But he couldn't delay it any longer. He had to face Oda Black every time he needed bread, Miracle Whip, and bologna, and he knew how they must be tarring and feathering him down there at the store behind his back. "Here comes the county's worst road frontage," Oda probably cried when his truck pulled up out front, chuckling as she shoved herself up from her armchair by the front window and slid her swollen feet toward the register. "Shhh, everybody! It's Mr. Pokeweed." All right, then, he would spray his front bank himself. Bring that forest of briars crashing down around the ears of the snapping turtles. Garnett still turned red to think about it. At least Oda didn't seem to have heard about the turtle.

  He added malathion (for Japanese beetles!!) to his list, refolded the paper, replaced it in his shirt pocket, and went into the house, comforting himself with thoughts of Pinkie's Diner. In the front hallway he paused to sort through a stack of mail he had brought in yesterday but forgotten to look at: advertisement circulars, nonsense, not even a bill. He slid the whole lot into the trash and closed the west-facing window in the kitchen against the heat that would arrive this afternoon in his absence. After his errands he would go to Pinkie's for the fish-dinner special that was offered every Friday afternoon: all the fried catfish you could eat with hush puppies and slaw, $5.99. Garnett suspected that since Pinkie's had it on Fridays, it was probably meant for the Catholics, but the diner was a place of business, after all, not a church. Catholics in Zebulon County were few and far between, and anyhow Pinkie Prater would accept $5.99 from a dog or a horse if it came in, and put it in his cash register with no questions asked. Pinkie's on Fridays was a settled matter in Garnett's mind. In fact, on the rare Friday when he failed to keep his appointment with the fish-dinner special, rumors about Garnett Walker's health circulated so fast that when he turned up next at Black Store or the filling station, people were amazed to see him alive.

  No matter. A predictable mare beats a wild hare, his father used to say. Pinkie's was Garnett's only extravagance, and he liked to look forward to it. He did not tend to eat well since his wife had died. It had been enough years now that he had gotten used to cold meat sandwiches for dinner and a single place mat on the table, but he had never learned to cook. Certainly not something like a hush puppy. How would you even begin to make a hush puppy, what in the world was in one? Nothing to do with a puppy, surely. Garnett had long known, though he didn't much like to admit it, that God's world and the better part of daily life were full of mysteries known only to women.

  He would have to change his shirt before starting out. He had broken a sweat out there in the field, to say the least. He closed the bathroom door (though he lived alone and never had guests) and took off his shirt without looking in the bathroom mirror. After he had washed himself with a cloth, he went to his bedroom bureau to retrieve his last clean undershirt (tomorrow was laundry day) and to the armoire to take down his town shirt from its hanger. (It smelled slightly of Pinkie's fish-dinner specials; he would remember to wash it tomorrow, even though this would also mean fussing with the iron. He had never learned to make it hiss out steam the way Ellen could.) Only after he had buttoned the collar and tucked in the tails did he allow himself a glance in Ellen's dressing mirror. There was nothing wrong with his bare chest, beyond an old man's slightly sunken ribs and an odd nest of white hair in the middle, but modesty was Garnett's habit. He had been a widower for eight years; he kept company with his God. His body was no longer to be looked upon. If the thought caused him sadness--that he would never again know the comfort of human touch--he sensed it was merely a tributary to the lake of grief through which an old man must swim at the end of his days.

  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 his rose of Sharon and peered around the back of her house to make sure the truck wasn't parked back there. Sometimes she parked in back if she had something to unload. Last week she had parked inside her barn with a load of apple crates piled high in the truck bed. But today there was no sign of her.

  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 Lit
tle 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, bought every "lizard" in the tank, and set them all free behind her orchard, in Egg Creek. Everyone knew she did it. Boys seined them and sold them to Dennis Grandy for a penny apiece, laughing all the way, knowing full well that most would be set free again by Nannie Rawley. Why did everyone suffer her so merrily? She claimed there were ten or fifteen kinds of salamanders in Zebulon that were endangered species, and said she was doing her part to save the environment. Implying what, then--that anyone who went bass fishing with salamanders was an enemy of God's plan?

  Garnett would like to tell her a thing or two about God's plan. That the creatures of this earth came to pass and sometimes passed on. That these matters were not ours to control if we were, as she claimed, merely one more species among our brethren, the animals. And if we were not the equal of animals, if we were meant instead to be masters and keepers of Eden, as the Bible said, then "lizards" were put here for a man to go bass fishing with, and that was that. She couldn't have it both ways. It was all quite clear to Garnett. Yet his logic always cowered before her curt and snappy replies. He had actually thought, once or twice, of writing her a letter.

  He drove past the Pentecostal church, which had a spindly clump of joe-pye weed sprouting up in its parking lot. Oho! Too busy speaking in tongues and throwing babies to get out and weed their parking lot. Garnett smiled, feeling secure in his understanding of what God's word did and did not mean to suggest. He felt a slight press of guilt, then, as he steered his truck onto Maple. He ought to tell Miss Rawley about those shingles in his garage. If only she were the least bit reasonable.

  There was the bank, there was the Esso. He was in town now. There was Les Pratt, who'd taught math at the high school when Garnett taught vocational agriculture. He waved, but Les was on the wrong side of the street. There was Dennis Grandy's wife with all those children, who weren't exactly dirty but never seemed quite clean.

  And there was Nannie Rawley! Her truck, anyway. Dear merciful heavens, could he not get away from her for at least one pleasant trip into town? That woman was stubborn as cockleburs and a rash of poison ivy.

  He slowed down to get a better look. It was her truck, parked in the Baptist church lot, where they let the Amish set up their farmers' market on Saturdays. This was Friday, though. Yet it was them, all right, the Amish children in their sober black dresses and trousers, politely selling their produce. He didn't see Nannie. He would maneuver his truck around the block and come back for a second look.

  Were there so many Amish now that they had to have markets on Saturdays and Fridays? They were a burgeoning people, that much he knew. They'd taken over a long row of farms on the other side of the river, he'd noticed last year. How were they managing so nicely, when every other farmer in the county was selling off his hayfields for house lots and looking for factory work? Well, the Amish weren't in debt up to their ears on chemicals and equipment--which gave them an unfair advantage, Garnett supposed. Oh! He missed a stop sign, then slammed on the brakes a hair too late, but it was all right: the car got around him. For quite a while he'd wondered about those farms along the river, which were unreachable by car and accessible only by swinging bridges--long, narrow ones made of planks with just cables for handrails. It would take some courage to cross that gorge every day. He'd wondered how on earth a man would get his television or his wife's refrigerator over there, or even a tractor, to a farm like that. Then Les Pratt had told him the answer in a single word: Amish.

  He rounded the corner and took another look at the Amish market. It was tempting to stop. He used to go nearly every Saturday before Nannie started showing up there with her apples or, in the early season, like now, her apple-blossom honey and basil-dasil and whatnot for sale. Evidently you didn't have to be Amish; they shared the space with Nannie and a handful of other farmers from the upper end of the county. The only rule was that everything had to be organic. The Amish didn't use any poisons, which seemed all right to Garnett if it was a religious matter. But Nannie's presence among them had settled it: he couldn't set foot in the place once she became a part of it, for now it was Organic, capital O, with its placid, irritating sense of holier-than-thou. So! No more stopping by on Saturday mornings to buy a delicious fresh pie and stand among these innocent youngsters with their neat stacks of vegetables, preserves, and rabbits. He missed them, he realized sadly, recognizing the same small ache that came when he thought of his boy's face in innocent childhood--his own son barefoot with a fishing pole, the terrible mistakes all lying ahead of him still. Garnett missed hearing the Amish children count out his change in an accent that seemed vaguely foreign while he covertly looked at their feet, which were thickly callused, for they wore no shoes all summer long. He knew the Amish didn't send their children to school, and technically he disapproved of what they called godly simplicity (actually simple backwardness). Yet he had a soft spot for those boys and girls. He wondered why the adults sent the children to town to do their selling. Were the adults elsewhere in town on other business, making the small, spare purchases they must surely need to make? (A rake, some kerosene, something like that, he imagined.) Did they feel the children would make better emissaries for representing their kind? Was it a play for sympathy? It seemed to run against their habit of isolation, Garnett thought. Letting these children come into town to watch other families pile out of station wagons, to see other children play with radios or the electronic thingamajigs they al
l carried in their pockets now while their mothers idly handled the melons--what were those Amish children learning to want, that they could never have?

  Half a block up from the market he slowed and pulled his truck into a parking spot on the side of the street. He sat for a while, considering his alternatives. He could go and buy a pie. They had the most wonderful pies. Apple, cherry, and something they called shoofly. But where in heaven's name was Nannie Rawley? Her truck was there, and in front of it was a table with her kinds of things, the frills she'd gotten into when apples were out of season: lemon basil, lavender sachets, dried flowers--the sorts of things he considered so unnecessary that it embarrassed him to look at them. Where was she?

  He would walk down to the end of the block and do his errands at Little Brothers', he decided. On the walk back, if the coast was clear, he would buy a pie. He would try to find one particular boy he remembered, with the stiff Dutch-boy haircut and the rabbits in a cage. He'd chatted with that young fellow and given him some advice about poultry. Ezra, that boy was. Or Ezekiel? Garnett mounted the concrete steps to Little Brothers' with a light and steady heart, but things did not go well from that point on. Right on the threshold where Dink Little greeted him by name, he realized he'd forgotten his list. He patted his shirt pocket, ready to whip it out with a flourish in answer to Dink's predictable "What' challneed deday?" Then he patted his other pocket. But he'd changed his shirt, of course.

  "I just need to look around a minute, Dink," Garnett replied, feeling sure he could quickly reconstruct his list as soon as he saw one of the items on the shelf. But he saw nothing he needed here. The musty, high-ceilinged store suddenly seemed more like an attic than a place of commerce: tall stacks of galvanized buckets leaned this way and that, mops leaned lazily against shelves full of floor polish. Stacks of green work gloves reached out toward him like a host of dismembered hands. He staggered sideways around a display of lawn mowers on sale and bumped his head on the sign above them that was so large and colorful it gave him a headache even without his reading it ( JUNE MOWER SALE 10 OFF ALL BRANDS! TORO! GREEN MACHINE! SNAPPER! JOHN DEERE!). Garnett felt so rattled he could hardly stand up. He set his sights on a wheelbarrow down at the end of an aisle and headed for it just to get himself away from the door and the register, out of sight, where he could think.