That was not Garnett’s to question, the fall of his family fortunes. He didn’t begrudge the sales of land that by the year 1950, when the last chestnuts were gone, had whittled his grandfather’s huge holdings down to a piece of bottomland too small to support anything but a schoolteacher. Garnett hadn’t minded being a teacher; Ellen certainly hadn’t minded being married to one. He hadn’t needed to own an empire and did not resent the necessity of close neighbors (save for one). But neither did he ever doubt that his own dream—to restore the chestnut tree to the American landscape—was also a part of God’s plan, which would lend to his family’s history a beautiful symmetry. On his retirement from the Zebulon County school system a dozen years ago, Garnett had found himself blessed with these things: a farm with three level fields and no livestock; a good knowledge of plant breeding; a handful of seed sources for American chestnuts; and access to any number of mature Chinese chestnuts that people had planted in their yards in the wake of the blight. They had found the nuts far less satisfactory, and of course the tree itself had none of the American chestnut’s graceful stature or its lumber qualities, but the Chinese chestnut had proven entirely resistant to blight. This lesser tree had been spared for a divine purpose, like some of the inferior animals on Noah’s ark. Garnett understood that on his slow march toward his heavenly reward, he would spend as many years as possible crossing and backcrossing the American with the Chinese chestnut. He worked like a driven man, haunted by his arboreal ghosts, and had been at it for nearly a decade now. If he lived long enough he would produce a tree with all the genetic properties of the original American chestnut, except one: it would retain from its Chinese parentage the ability to stand tall before the blight. It would be called the Walker American chestnut. He would propagate this seedling and sell it by mail order that it might go forth and multiply in the mountains and forests of Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, and all points north to the Adirondacks and west to the Mississippi. The landscape of his father’s manhood would be restored.
A loud buzz near his ear made Garnett turn his head and look up too fast, causing him to experience such a bout of dizziness that he nearly had to sit down on the grass. The Japanese beetles were thick as pea soup already, and it was only June. He noticed that his Concord grapevines, which he loved to see climbing lazy and lush up the slatted side of the old grain house with their leaves drooping like ladies’ hands, were showing a rusty brown aura. From this distance it looked as if they’d been dusted with brown powder, but he knew it was really the brown skeleton of the leaf showing through. It was something he had pointed out to his vo-ag students time and again, the characteristic sign of Japanese-beetle damage. Something to add to his list for the hardware today: malathion. The Sevin dust wasn’t killing them dead enough. Or it was washing off in all this rain.
He glanced over toward Rawley’s, whence came the plague. She had started several new brush piles along the line fence just to gall him. She called them “compost” and claimed they heated up on the inside to a temperature that would kill beetle larvae and weed seeds, but he doubted it. Any decent farmer who’d spent his life in Zebulon County learning thrifty and effective farming methods would know to set fire to his orchard trimmings, but she was too busy with her bug traps and voodoo to get rid of her tree-trash the normal way. Compost piles. “Laziness lots” would be a better name for them. “Stacks of sloth.”
Earlier in the week he had attempted to speak to her over the fence: “The source of Japanese beetles seems to be your brush piles, Miss Rawley.”
To which she’d replied, “Mr. Walker, the source of Japanese beetles is Japan.”
There was no talking to her. Why even try?
He noted that her pitiful old foreign truck was gone from its usual spot between the lilac hedge and her white clapboard house. He wondered where she might have gone on a Friday morning. Saturday mornings she always went out with her produce to the Amish market, and Mondays to Kroger’s (the Black Store wasn’t adequate to her needs, according to Oda Black, who had spied Nannie in Kroger’s purchasing soya sauce), and lately she went out on Tuesday afternoons also, for a purpose he hadn’t yet discerned. Sundays she went to the Unitarian place; Garnett was not about to call it a church. That was just her cup of tea, he imagined: a den of coffee-drinking women in slacks making high-toned conversation along godless lines. Evolution, transcendentalism, things of that nature. Thank goodness it was over the county line, at least, in Franklin, where they had the college. They had more of that kind over there, and as Garnett understood it, the debauchery in this state just increased at a steady pace along an eastward line that wound itself up in Washington, D.C. It was Oda Black’s opinion that the Unitarian women refused to wear proper foundation garments and dabbled in witchcraft. Oda was quick to point out that she was not one to stand in judgment (though she was wide enough to stand anywhere she pleased, and no one would argue, save for the floorboards). She’d heard it from somebody firsthand, and furthermore two girls from the college had once wandered into her store talking right out loud to each other about witchcraft, not caring who heard them, while they reached into the cooler for their sodas. Oda reported that their flesh had jiggled under their T-shirts like jelly turned out of its jar.
That was Franklin County for you. That college was asking for it when they let in women.
Garnett stepped up onto his porch and pulled a folded square of paper from his shirt pocket. He had put a good day’s work behind him, five hours already this morning hand-pollinating and bagging chestnut flowers. June was his busiest month, and this morning when the sun finally came out after its long confinement, Garnett had risen early and got out into his hybrid seedling fields to make up for lost time. There was still so much to be done: the grass in his yard was high, and weeds were springing up along the creek bank, but he could postpone the mowing and weed killing until later this afternoon. Now it was past eleven o’clock, and he had earned the pleasure of a trip to town. Not that he had any kind of a joyride planned. It was mostly errands: Black Store, Tick’s Garage, and Little Brothers’ Hardware. He unfolded the square of paper on which he’d made his list for the hardware:
Hacksaw blade
(The last time he’d used the saw on a stripped bolt, he’d noted it was dull.)
2. Black plastic for mulching between the tree rows
3. AA flashlight batteries (four)
4. 3 PVC pipe fittings, L-shape, ½ inch (broken irrigation line)
5. Paint markers for the hybrid trees
(He resented this item, since he knew he still had some markers down in the barn, but he’d wasted nearly an hour yesterday looking for them and suspected they’d been taken. Maybe by a neighbor child. Maybe by a groundhog.)
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 Little 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 neighbor
s 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?
Prodigal Summer Page 14
