Her greatest regret was that she'd never gone to see that baby--that was what she told him, last thing, there in the hospital bed. Greatest regret, as if there'd been a whole host of others a husband couldn't be told about. And now there were two babies, a boy and a girl, Garnett believed. Ellen never even knew about the second one. Garnett had come so close to asking the Widener girl about them, the other day when he went over there. He'd stood right there on that porch and had it in him to do it, the words in his mouth, but then he'd turned uncertain. Who was this gal with her goats, anyhow? She was nice enough for a city person, surprisingly nice, but how in tarnation had she wound up here in a man's long-tailed shirt in the middle of a field of thistles and nanny goats? Garnett had asked several polite questions but never had been able to work out exactly what business she had running that farm by herself. It was still the old family homeplace, but the people in it seemed to have shifted. Were those two children even still around? What if they and the mother had moved to Knoxville like everybody and his dog seemed to be doing these days? What if Garnett had been sitting twiddling his thumbs and in the meantime lost his chance to find out about those kids? People were just piling up their belongings and racing for Knoxville like it was the California gold rush, since day one after they put in that Toyota plant over there. Pretty soon there'd be no one left in this county but old folks waiting to die.
The hall window upstairs gave a good view of the side orchard and Nannie's backyard, and a little later on toward evening he was able to spot her from there, working in her garden. She was picking her tomatoes. She had more tomatoes than you could shake a stick at and sold them for a scandalous price at the Amish market. He squinted through the wavy, ancient glass of this window.
Well. There was somebody out there with her! That blue and white blotch at the edge of her garden was, now that he looked at it, a man in a hat leaning on the fence. It wasn't the Forest Service boy, it was somebody else, a heavier-set kind of fellow that Garnett didn't recognize as a neighbor. Could it be one of the pickers, arrived too early? Who else on earth could it be? Clivus Morton had been coming around lately to work on hammering up the new shingles for her, and even Oda Black's boy what's-his-name had come by once to visit her, for reasons unknown to Garnett. So! Was Nannie Rawley suddenly attracting men of all ages, from miles around? A seventy-five-year-old woman puts on a pair of short pants, and the fellows come swarming around her like bees to a flower, was that it? (Although Clivus Morton was no honeybee. Garnett had known honeydippers who smelled better, even after they'd pumped out your septic tank.) Was this Clivus? He squinted. Darn this window, he swore mildly, it was as hazy as his eyes. Dirty, too. He hadn't cleaned it since--well, he'd never cleaned it, period.
He moved to the other side of the window, but it didn't help much. He could see she was out there filling her bushel basket and evidently talking up a storm because that stranger, whoever he was (and no, it was not Clivus), just stood there leaning forward with his elbows on the top rail of her garden fence as if he had nothing in this world to do but stand there leaning on her fence. He didn't seem to have a speck of manners, either. He could have at least offered to carry the bushel basket while she picked. Garnett would have done that much. You didn't have to agree with everything a person said, or approve of the condition of her soul, to show some simple consideration.
Garnett felt his blood pressure going up. It began to agitate him so, he had to step away from the window. For goodness' sakes, whoever that man was out there, he had no business with her. Garnett felt a murky, un-Christian feeling clouding in his heart. He hated that man. He hated his whole bearing, leaning on that fence as if he had nothing better to do with his life than listen all day to Nannie Rawley and look at her picking tomatoes in short pants.
{27}
Moth Love
Thursday dawned cool again, and stayed cool all day. Lusa felt energized by the change in weather, which was lucky for her since the work never stopped. If she'd known how much work there would be in August, she would have considered July a vacation. The garden was like a baby bird in reverse, calling to her relentlessly, opening its maw and giving, giving. She spent the whole morning with the canner rumbling on the stove, processing quarts of cling peaches, while she cut up and blanched piles of carrots, peppers, okra, and summer squash for the freezer. She had put up thirty pints of kosher dills and still had so many cucumbers that she was having desperate thoughts. Here was one: She could put them in plastic grocery sacks and drive down the road hanging them on people's mailboxes like they did with the free samples of fabric softener. She tried the idea on Jewel when she came up to bring Lusa her mail.
Jewel asked, "Have you done any pickles yet?"
Lusa leaned forward on her stool until her forehead rested on the cutting board.
"I take it that means yes," Jewel said. "Lord, I can't believe what you've done here." Lusa sat up and caught Jewel's nostalgic admiration. The jars of golden peaches lined up on the counter looked like currency from another time. "Nobody's done this much putting up since Mommy died. You should be real proud of yourself. And you should quit. Don't kill yourself. Give it away."
"I have." Lusa gestured with her paring knife. "People down the road run the other way when they see me coming. I caught Mary Edna behind her house throwing the squash I'd given her on the compost pile."
"Don't feel bad. Some summers just overdo it like this and there's a little too much of everything. You can let some of it go."
"I can't, though. Look at those peaches, I should throw those away? That would be a sin." Lusa smiled, self-conscious but proud of herself. "The truth is, I like doing it. I won't have to spend money on food this year. And it seems like hard work is the only thing that stops my brain from running in circles."
"Isn't that the truth. I'd be up here helping you if I had the energy."
"I know you would. Remember that day you helped me with the cherries?"
"Lord, Lord." Jewel sat against the table. "A hundred and ten years ago."
"Seems like that to me, too," Lusa said, recalling her ravaged psyche that day when widowhood had still been new and fierce: her helplessness against life, her struggle to trust Jewel. Crys and Lowell had been strangers she was a little afraid of; Crystal, in fact, had been a boy. A hundred and ten years ago. "You can just throw the mail on the table. Looks like junk and bills--all I ever get."
"All anybody ever gets. Who'd think to write a letter anymore?"
Lusa swept her pile of sliced carrots into the colander for blanching. Thirty seconds of steam did something to their biochemistry that colored them as orange as daylilies (so why did the canning book call this step blanching?) and kept them perfect in the freezer. "How are you feeling today, Jewel?"
Jewel put a hand against her cheek. "Pretty good, I think. He's letting me take more of the painkillers now. It makes me stupid as a cow, but boy, I feel great." She sounded so sad, Lusa wanted to go sit down next to her and hold her hand.
"Anything I can do for you today? I'm going to bring down your mother's vacuum and do your rugs when I get a chance. That thing works miracles."
"No, honey, don't put yourself out. I need to get back to the house. I left Crys in charge of burning the trash, and you know where that could lead. I really just came up to show you something."
"What?" Lusa wiped her hands on her apron and crossed to the kitchen table, curious to see what Jewel was pulling out of an envelope.
"It's the papers from Shel. He signed them. I knew he would, but still, it's a load off my mind. It's good to be done with it. I wisht I'd done it a year ago." Jewel unfolded the sheaf of stiff-looking papers and handed them to Lusa for her inspection. She sat down and looked them over, her eyes skimming through words invented by lawyers that seemed to complicate something so pure and simple. These children belonged to their mother. Soon, probably sooner than anyone was prepared to believe, they would come to live with Lusa.
A signature was scrawled in blue ink at t
he bottom of two of the pages, in a hand that was masculine but childish, like a fifth-grade boy's, with the name typed underneath. Lusa stared, astonished, then read it aloud. "Garnett Sheldon Walker the Fourth?"
"I know," Jewel said with a dry little laugh. "It sounds like the name of a king or something, doesn't it? Anyways not a little old rat with a blond mustache."
"No, but..." Lusa struggled to put knowledge and words together. "I know that name. I'm friends with his, well, his grandfather, it must be. With that same name. He's this funny old man who lives over on Highway Six." Lusa looked from the signature to Jewel. "He's even been over here, to this house. He helps me with my goat problems."
"Oh, well, see, Mr. Walker, that's Shel's daddy. He was my in-laws, him and his wife, Ellen. He's come up here, when? Lately?"
"Yeah. Not ten days ago. He came up to diagnose my worm problem. He didn't act like he'd ever set foot on this place before. He wouldn't even step through the barn door till I'd invited him in, like it was a living room."
"Well, that's just like him. They were funny people, him and Ellen. Just kindly old-fashioned I guess. And old, period. I think Shel was a change-of-life baby that came after they'd given up, and they never got over the shock."
Lusa realized this was more or less what she'd been to her own parents. They'd never known what to do with her.
"She died of cancer," Jewel added.
"Who did, Mr. Walker's wife? When?"
"Right around when Shel ran off. No, a couple of years before. Lowell wasn't born yet. She never had a thing to do with Crystal, either, but I guess she was already right sick by that time." Jewel sighed, too familiar with the lapses caused by illness.
Lusa was amazed. She'd simply pegged the old man for a lifelong bachelor. "He's your father-in-law. I can't believe it. How come you never told me?"
"Because I had no earthly notion you even knew him, that's why. We haven't any of us spoken to the old man since her funeral, as far as I can think. I've got nothing against him. It's more like he was funny towards us."
"He's funny toward everybody," Lusa said. "That's my impression."
"What it is, I think, is they were embarrassed to death by Shel's drinking. Shel Walker has shortchanged about everybody in this county, one way or another. He used to paint houses and do odd jobs, and after we got married he got to where he'd take their money for a deposit, go drink it up, and then never come back and do the work. I felt like I couldn't hardly show my face in town. His daddy probably feels worse."
"I had no idea," Lusa said.
"Oh, yeah. Shel spent many a year running around wild. And see, I was part of the wild, to begin with, in high school. Then after Shel left me and ran off, that was just finally the last straw. I think old Mr. Walker decided to put that whole chapter on the shelf and pretend me and the kids never happened."
"But he's their grandfather, right?"
"That's sad, isn't it? They never really got to have any mammaw or pappaw. Daddy and Mommy died before they got the chance. And if Shel's got no legal tie to them anymore, Mr. Walker's not hardly obligated to start being a pappaw now, is he?"
"Not obligated, no. But would you care if I called him up? Maybe not right now, but sometime. The kids might like to go over there; he's got a beautiful farm, he grows trees. And there's an apple orchard right nearby, I saw. Wouldn't it be fun to take the kids over there to get cider in October?"
Jewel looked pained, and Lusa could have bitten her tongue off for taking a thing like "October" for granted. "You could call today, I don't care," she told Lusa, "but I wouldn't get my hopes up. He's a sour old pickle."
Lusa didn't say anything. She wasn't sure where Jewel's heart lay in all this. Jewel was looking out the window now, miles away. "They came to our wedding," she said. "It was here, in this house. But they left before the reception--that's how they were. They never approved, they said we were too young. We were too young. But just think." She looked back at Lusa, intense. "What if I'd been sensible and waited, instead of marrying Shel? There'd be no Crystal and Lowell."
"That's true," Lusa said.
Jewel narrowed her eyes. "Remember that. Don't wait around thinking you've got all the time in the world. Maybe you've just got this one summer. Will you remember that? Will you tell the kids for me?"
"I think so," Lusa said. "Except I'm not sure I understand what you mean."
"Just make sure they know that having them, and being their mother, I would not have traded for anything. Not for a hundred extra years of living."
"I will."
"Do," Jewel said urgently, as if she meant to leave the world this very afternoon. "Tell them I just got this one season to be down here on the green grass, and I praise heaven and earth that I did what I did."
In the early afternoon Lusa took a deep breath, picked up the heavy box of vaccine vials she'd bought from the vet, and went down to face her goats. After some weeks of worry over poor eating and lethargy, Lusa had figured out that she had worms in the herd--which according to Mr. Walker was no surprise, given their motley origins. His advice was to worm the whole herd at once with DSZ, which he vowed wouldn't hurt her pregnant mothers, and while she was at it, to stick every last one of them with a shot of seven-way vaccine. Lusa was daunted, but Little Rickie had promised to come up and help. He claimed there was no sense letting all those years of 4-H go to waste.
Lusa found the goats easy to manage most of the time, much easier to herd than cattle once she got the first ones going where she wanted them. She already had them corralled into the small calf pasture by the time Rickie showed up for the rodeo. The idea was to let them through the gate into the bigger field one at a time. Rickie could wrestle each victim down as it came through, then shove the worm pill down its gullet and sit on its head while Lusa sat on the rear end and gave the shot. Simple enough in theory, but it took her a full hour to do the first five animals. Lusa felt like a torturer. The poor things struggled and bleated so, it was hard for her to keep her eyes open and aim for muscle when she jabbed in the hypodermic. Once she accidentally hit bone and cried out as loudly as the goat did.
"I'm a scientist," she said aloud to slow down her fluttering heart. "I've dissected live frogs and sacrificed rabbits. I can do this."
She kept hoping Rickie would volunteer to take over the needle, but he seemed as scared of it as she was. And she didn't think she'd be any better at his task, forcing the huge worm pill down the hatch, which he seemed to manage comfortably.
"You should see what you have to do to get a cow to take a pill," he told her when she remarked on his skill. "Man. Slobber all the way up to your armpit." She watched him push the white tablet deep into the doe's mouth, then clamp her lips closed and wobble her head from side to side. He was gentle and competent with animals, as Cole had been. That'd been one of the first things she loved about Cole, beyond his physical person.
The second hour went better, and by the time they reached number forty or so Lusa was getting almost handy with the needle. Mr. Walker had showed her how to give the thigh muscle three or four stout punches with her fist before poking in the needle on the last one. When a shot was delivered this way, the animal tended to lie perfectly still.
Rickie was impressed with this technique, once she got it working. "He's a smarter old guy than he looks, I guess. Mr. Walker."
"Yeah, he's that," Lusa said, keeping her eyes on the brown pelt of this girl's flank. The hard part was getting the plunger pushed all the way down and then extracting the needle without getting poked if the goat began to kick. When she was out and clear, Lusa gave the nod, and she and Rick jumped off at the same time, allowing the doe to scramble to her feet. With an offended little toss of her triangular head, she ran with a slight limp toward the middle of the pasture, where her friends had already put the humiliation behind them and were munching thistles in vaccinated, amnesiac bliss.
"Did you know he was Jewel's father-in-law? Old Mr. Walker?"
Rickie thought about it.
"Ex-father-in-law. I don't think that's a real big thing on the family tree. I don't think he's said boo to Aunt Jewel since his outlaw son ran off. And he didn't say much before, from what I hear."
"No, I guess not," Lusa said, looking over her newly medicated herd with some satisfaction. She was about to turn back to her work when a quick, pale movement up at the top of the field snagged her eye.
"My God," she said. "Look at that."
They both watched as the animal froze, then lowered its body close to the ground and walked slowly along the fence back into the woods.
"That wasn't a fox, was it?" she asked.
"Nope."
"What was it, then?"
"Coyote."
"Are you sure? Have you ever seen one before?"
"Nope," Rickie said.
"Me either. But I could swear I heard some a couple of nights ago. It was amazing, like singing. Dog singing."
"That's what that bastard was, then. Got to be. You want me to go home and get my rifle? I could get up there after it right now."
"No." She put her hand on his forearm. "Do me a favor. Don't turn into your uncles."
He looked at her. "Do you know what those things eat?"
"Not really. I imagine it could kill a goat, or a kid, at least. But it didn't look that big. Don't you think it's more likely to kill a rabbit or something?"
"You're going to wait around and find out?"
She nodded. "I think I am. Yeah."
"You're crazy."
"Maybe. We'll see." She stood for a while longer, staring into the edge of the woods where it had vanished. Then she turned back to the goats in her paddock. "OK, let's get this over with. How many have we got to go?"
Rickie moved reluctantly to the gate, preparing to let in another goat. He counted heads. "A dozen, maybe. We're near 'bout done."
Prodigal Summer: A Novel Page 39
