"Hello! I have some news," he called. "One of your trees came down on me."
Her dirty white tennis shoes descended two rungs on the ladder, and her face peered down at him through the branches. "Well, you don't look that much the worse for it, Mr. Walker."
He shook his head. "There's no need to behave like a child."
"It wouldn't hurt you, though," she said. "Now and then." She climbed back up into the boughs of her apple, a June Transparent--he could tell from the yellow fruits lying on the ground. She was picking June apples in the middle of July. It figured.
"I have a piece of business to discuss with you," he said sternly. "I would appreciate talking with you down here on solid ground."
She climbed down her ladder with a full apple basket over her arm, muttering about having to work for a living instead of collecting a retirement pension. She set her basket on the ground and put her hands on her hips. "All right. If you're going to be sanctimonious about it, I have a piece of business to discuss with you!"
He felt his heart stutter a little. It aggravated him no end that she could scare him this way. He stood still, breathed slowly, and told himself that what he beheld was nothing to be afraid of. This was no more daunting than a piece of ground that needed plowing--a small, female terrain. "What is it, then?"
"That god-awful Sevin you've been spraying on your trees every blooming day of the week! You think you've got troubles, a tree came over on you? Well your poison has been coming down on me, and I don't just mean my property, my apples, I mean me. I have to breathe it. If I get lung cancer, it will be on your conscience."
Her hail of words stopped; their gazes briefly met and then fell to the grass around each other's feet. Ellen had died of lung cancer, metastasized to the brain. People always remarked on the fact that she never had smoked.
"I'm sorry, you're thinking about Ellen," Nannie said. "I'm not saying your poisons caused her to get sick."
She had thought it, though, Garnett realized with a shock. Thought it and put it about so other people were thinking it, too. It dawned on him with a deeper dread that it might possibly be true. He'd never read the fine print on the Sevin dust package, but he knew it got into your lungs like something evil. Oh, Ellen. He raised his eyes to the sky and suddenly felt so dizzy he was afraid he might have to sit down on the grass. He put a hand to his temple and with the other reached for the trunk of a June Transparent.
"This isn't going well," Nannie observed. "I didn't mean to start off hateful, right off the bat. I thought I'd give us some room to work up to it." She hesitated. "Could you maybe use a glass of water?"
"I'm fine," he said, recovering his balance. She turned over a pair of bushel baskets and motioned for him to sit.
"I've just been festering about it too long," she said. "Just now I was up there stewing over a whole slew of things at once: your poison, the bills I need to pay, the shingles off my roof I can't replace. Dink Little claims they don't make that kind anymore, can you imagine? It's just been one darn thing after another this week, and when you came hollering at me all of a sudden, I let the dam burst." She reached between her knees and scooted her bushel forward so they faced each other directly, within spitting distance. "What we need is to have a good, levelheaded talk about this pesticide business, farmer to farmer."
Garnett felt a pang of guilt about the shingles but let it pass. "It's the middle of July," he said. "The caterpillars are on my seedlings like the plague. If I didn't spray I'd lose all this year's new crosses."
"See, but you're killing all my beneficials. You're killing my pollinators. You're killing the songbirds that eat the bugs. You're just a regular death angel, Mr. Walker."
"I have to take care of my chestnuts," he replied firmly.
She gave him a hard look. "Mr. Walker, is it my imagination, or do you really think your chestnuts are more important than my apples? Just because you're a man and I'm a woman? You seem to forget, my apple crop is my living. Your trees are a hobby."
Now, that was low. Garnett should have called on the phone. Talking to a brainless machine would beat this. "I never said a thing about your apples. I'm helping you out by spraying. The caterpillars would be over here next."
"They are over here. I can keep them under control my own way, normally. But your spraying always causes a caterpillar boom."
He shook his head. "How many times do I have to listen to that nonsense?"
She leaned forward, her eyes growing wide. "Until you've heard it!"
"I've heard it. Too many times."
"No, now, I haven't explained it to you right. I always had a hunch, but I couldn't put it in words. And, see, last month they had a piece on it in the Orchardman's Journal. It's a whole scientific thing, a principle. Do you want me to get you the magazine, or just explain it in my own words?"
"I don't think I have any choice," he said. "I'll listen for the flaw in your reasoning. Then you'll have to hush up about this for good."
"Good," she said, shifting her bottom on the basket. "All right, now. Goodness, I feel a little bit nervous. Like I'm back in college, taking an exam." The anxious way she looked up at him reminded Garnett of all the years of boys who'd feared him in his vo-ag classes. He wasn't a mean teacher; he'd just insisted that they get things right. Yet they'd dreaded him for it. They were never his chums, as they were with Con Ricketts in shop, for instance. It made for a long, lonely life, this business of getting things right.
"OK, here we go," she said finally, clasping her hands together. "There are two main kinds of bugs, your plant eaters and your bug eaters."
"That's right," he said patiently. "Aphids, Japanese beetles, and caterpillars all eat plants. To name just a few. Ladybugs eat other small bugs."
"Ladybugs do," she agreed. "Also spiders, hornets, cicada killers, and a bunch of other wasps, plus your sawflies and parasitic hymenoptera, and lots more. So out in your field you have predators and herbivores. You with me so far?"
He waved a hand in the air. "I taught vocational agriculture for half as long as you've been alive. You have to get up early in the morning to surprise an old man like me." Although, truth to tell, Garnett had never heard of parasitic hymenoptera.
"Well, all right. Your herbivores have certain characteristics."
"They eat plants."
"Yes. You'd call them pests. And they reproduce fast."
"Don't I know it!" Garnett declared.
"Predator bugs don't reproduce so fast, as a rule. But see, that works out right in nature because one predator eats a world of pest bugs in its life. The plant eaters have to go faster just to hold their ground. They're in balance with each other. So far, so good?"
Garnett nodded. He found himself listening more carefully than he'd expected.
"All right. When you spray a field with a broad-spectrum insecticide like Sevin, you kill the pest bugs and the predator bugs, bang. If the predators and prey are balanced out to start with, and they both get knocked back the same amount, then the pests that survive will increase after the spraying, fast, because most of their enemies have just disappeared. And the predators will decrease because they've lost most of their food supply. So in the lag between sprayings, you end up boosting the numbers of the bugs you don't want and wiping out the ones you need. And every time you spray, it gets worse."
"And then?" Garnett asked, concentrating on this.
She looked at him. "And that's it, I'm done. The Volterra principle."
Garnett felt hoodwinked. How could she do this every time? In another day and age they'd have burned her for a witch. "I didn't find the fault in your thinking," he admitted.
"Because it's not there!" she cried. "Because I'm right!" The little woman was practically crowing.
"The agricultural chemical industry would be surprised to hear your theory."
"Oh, fiddle, they know all about it. They just hope you don't. The more money you spend on that stuff, the more you need. It's like getting hooked on hooch."
&nbs
p; "Pssht," he scolded. "Let's don't get carried away."
She leaned forward, elbows on her knees, and looked at him very earnestly with eyes that had the color and deep shine of a polished chestnut. He'd never noticed her eyes before.
"If you don't believe those fellows are bad eggs, then you're a dupe, Mr. Walker. Have you been getting those fliers from the Extension? Now all the companies are pushing that grain with its genes turned out of whack, and fools are growing it!"
"Modern farmers try new things," he said. "Even in Zebulon County."
"Half the world won't eat that grain; there's a boycott on it. Any farmer that plants it will go bankrupt in a year or two. That's modern farming for you."
"That's taking a dim view."
She slapped her hands on her knees. "Look around you, old man! In your father's day all the farmers around here were doing fine. Now they have to work night shifts at the Kmart to keep up their mortgages. Why is that? They work just as hard as their parents did, and they're on the same land, so what's wrong?"
Garnett could feel the sun's insistent heat on the back of his neck. Nannie, facing him, was forced to squint. They'd started this conversation in the shade, but now the sun had moved out from behind a tree--that was how long they'd been sitting here on bushel baskets speaking of nonsense. "Times change," Garnett said. "That's all."
"Time doesn't change; ideas change. Prices and markets and laws. Chemical companies change, and turn your head along with them, looks like. If that's what you mean by 'time,' then yes, sir, we have lived to see things get worse."
Garnett laughed, thinking for some reason of the boy who drove the UPS truck. "I won't argue with that," he said.
She shaded her eyes and looked right straight at him. "Then why do you make fun of my way of farming for being old-fashioned, right to my face?"
Garnett stood up, brushing invisible dirt off the knees of his trousers. There was a high, steady buzz that he'd thought was his hearing aid, but now he decided it was coming from the trees and the air itself. It made him feel jumpy. This whole place was giving him the all-overs.
She stayed seated but followed him around the glade with her eyes, waiting for an answer he couldn't assemble. Why did Nannie Rawley bother him so? Dear Lord, if he had world enough and time, he still couldn't answer. He stopped pacing and looked down at her sitting there wide-eyed, waiting for judgment. She didn't look old-fashioned, exactly, but like a visitor to this day from an earlier time--like a girl, with her wide, dark eyes and her crown of braided hair. Even the way she was dressed, in denim dungarees and a sleeveless white shirt, gave her the carefree air of a child out of school for summer, Garnett thought. Just a girl. And he felt tongue-tied and humiliated, like a boy.
"Why does everything make you so mad?" she asked finally. "I only wish you could see the beauty in it."
"In what?" he asked. A cloud passed briefly over the sun, causing everything to seem to shift a little.
"Everything." She flung out an arm. "This world! A field of plants and bugs working out a balance in their own way."
"That's a happy view of it. They're killing each other, is what they're doing."
"Yes, sir, eating others and reproducing their own, that's true. Eating and reproducing, that's the most of what God's creation is all about."
"I'm going to have to take exception to that."
"Oh? Are you thinking you got here some way different than the rest of us?"
"No," he said irritably. "I just don't choose to wallow in it."
"It's not mud, Mr. Walker. It's glory, to be part of a bigger something. The glory of an evolving world."
"Oh, now," he cried. "Don't even get started on your evolution. I already put you straight on that." He paced in a circle like a dog preparing to lie down, and then stopped. "Didn't you get my letter?"
"Your thank-you note for the blackberry pie I baked you? No, I don't believe I got any such a thing. I got some evil words about bra-burning Unitarian women and casting my soul to the jaws of Satan like the snapper that ate my duckling. I think some crazy man must have addressed that letter to me by mistake. I threw it in the trash."
He had never seen her get quite this agitated before. Garnett said nothing. She got up and picked up an apple from the grass, then tossed it from hand to hand. "That was mean, about my duckling," she added. "And the Unitarian position on underwear is none of your business, if there even was one, which there isn't. Nobody's seen my underwear since Ray Dean Wolfe died, so you can keep your thoughts about my body to yourself."
"Your body!" he said, mortified. "That letter was not how you're telling it. It was about your mistaken belief in a flawed theory of the earth's creation, answered clear and plain beyond a shadow of a doubt."
"You live your whole darn life beyond a shadow of a doubt, don't you?"
"I have convictions," he said.
She tilted her head, looking up at him. He could never tell if she was coy or just a little hard of hearing. "You want to make everything so simple," she said. "You say only an intelligent, beautiful creator could create beauty and intelligence? I'll tell you what. See that basket of June Transparents there? You know what I put on my trees to make those delicious apples? Poop, mister. Horse poop and cow poop."
"Are you likening the Creator to manure?"
"I'm saying your logic is weak."
"I'm a man of science."
"Well, then, you're a poor one! Don't tell me I can't understand the laws of thermodynamics. I went to college once upon a time, and it was after they discovered the world was round. I'm not scared of big words."
"I didn't say you were."
"You did, too! 'I realize you're no scientist, Miss Rawley,'" she mocked, in an unnecessarily prissy version of his voice.
"No, now, I just meant to set you straight on a few points."
"You self-righteous old man. Do you ever wonder why you don't have a friend in the world since Ellen died?"
He blinked. He may have even allowed his jaw to go a little slack.
"Well, I'm sorry to be the one to break it to you. But just listen to yourself talk!" she cried. "'How could random chance--i.e. evolution--create complex life-forms?' How can you be so self-satisfied and so ignorant at the same time?"
"Goodness. Did you memorize my letter before you threw it in the trash?"
"Oh, phooey, I didn't have to, I've heard it all before. You get your arguments straight out of those dumb little pamphlets. Whoever writes those things should get some new material."
"Well, then," he said, crossing his arms, "how does random chance create complex life-forms?"
"This just seems ridiculous, a man who does what you do claiming not to believe in the very thing he's doing."
"What I do has nothing to do with apes' turning helter-skelter into thinking men."
"Evolution isn't helter-skelter! It's a business of choosing things out, just like how you do with your chestnuts." She nodded toward his seedling field and then frowned, looking at it more thoughtfully. "In every generation, all the trees are a little different, right? And which ones do you choose to save out for crossing?"
"The ones that survive the blight best, obviously. I inoculate the trees with blight fungus and then measure the size of the chancres. Some of them hardly get sick at all."
"All right. So you pick out the best survivors, you cross their flowers with one another and plant their seeds, and then you do it all over again with the next generation. Over time you're, what, making a whole new kind of chestnut plant?"
"That's right. One that can resist the blight."
"A whole new species, really."
"No, now, only God can do that. I can't make a chestnut into an oak."
"You could if you had as much time as God does."
Oh, if only I did, Garnett thought with the deep despair of a man running out of time. Just enough years to make a good chestnut, that was all he wanted, but in his heart he knew he couldn't expect them. He had thought sometimes of praying for t
his but trembled to think what God would make of his request. Ellen had not been granted time enough even to make peace with her own son.
But he was drifting. "I don't know what you're talking about," he said irritably.
"What you're doing is artificial selection," she replied calmly. "Nature does the same thing, just slower. This 'evolution' business is just a name scientists put on the most obvious truth in the world, that every kind of living thing adjusts to changes in the place where it lives. Not during its own life, but you know, down through the generations. Whether you believe in it or not, it's going on right under your nose over there in your chestnuts."
"You're saying that what I do with chestnut trees, God does with the world."
"It's a way to look at it. Except you have a goal, you know what you want. In nature it's predators, I guess, a bad snap of weather, things like that, that cull out the weaker genes and leave the strong ones to pass on. It's not so organized as you are, but it's just as dependable. It's just the thing that always happens."
"I'm sorry, but I can't liken God's will to a thing that just happens."
"All right, then, don't. I don't care." She sounded upset. She sat back down on her bushel, tossed the apple away, and put her face in her hands.
"Well, I can't." He tried to hold still instead of pacing around, but his knees hurt. "That's just a godless darkness, to think there's no divine goal. Mankind can't be expected to function in a world like that. The Lord God is good and just."
When she looked up at him, there were tears in her eyes. "Mankind functions with whatever it has to. When you've had a child born with her chromosomes mixed up and spent fifteen years watching her die, you come back and tell me what's good and just."
Prodigal Summer: A Novel Page 27
