“There are probably a hundred families in this county keeping a handful of goats in their backyard. And people don’t generally like billies that close to the house—they have quite a stout odor. Have you ever smelled a billy goat, Mrs. Widener?”
“Not that I recall,” she confessed.
“Well, if you had, you would remember it. It’s an odor that appeals to a nanny goat, evidently, but not to human beings. Most people only want to keep the does around.”
“All right. Good.”
“So what you’ll want is does—three-and four-year-olds are the best, nothing a whole lot older. Get as many does as you think you can handle, but watch out for bucks. You’ll only want one, with your does. Mrs. Widener, can you tell a buck from a doe?”
She laughed. “Mr. Walker, I’m ignorant, but I’m not stupid.”
“Well, of course not. I just meant…you are from Lexington.”
He heard her breathe in sharply as if to speak, but then she paused. “OK, just one buck,” she said finally. “Got it.”
“Well, but you might as well get a spare or two. Once in a while you’ll get a buck that doesn’t perform, so you may as well have a few on reserve. You’ll have to keep them in a separate pasture, out of sight.”
“Gentlemen-in-waiting,” she said.
Was that a bawdy joke? He didn’t know what was what anymore; kids laughed at you even when you said a simple word like queer. But she didn’t seem to be laughing. She sounded more earnest than most of the boys he’d had in 4-H.
“Now, if your does really haven’t been pastured with a buck since before last fall, they’ll come into season right away, just a day or two after you put the buck in the field. Some people think it helps to rub down the buck with a rag and then walk around waving it in the she-goats’ noses. But I never thought that was really necessary.”
“So that’s the first thing I’ll ask people when they call: ‘Have you got does? And are they now or have they ever been pastured with a buck?’ Right?”
“That’s right,” he said.
“If they are, I should just pass?”
“That’s up to you. If you want kids by the end of the year, you should.”
There was a pause. She seemed to be writing something down. “OK. And the next question?”
“What kind of goats are they? You’ll want Spanish, or Spanish crossed with what they call brush goats, which is what most people have around here. Meat goats, just ask if they’re meat goats. Your Saanens, your Swiss dairy goats, anything somebody’s milking, that’s probably an animal you don’t want.”
“OK. What else, you said the age was important?”
“Nothing over five years, nor less than one hundred pounds.”
Again, she was taking notes. “What else?”
“Well, of course, you want them healthy. You don’t want parasites. Look them over when you go to pick them up. If you’re not one hundred percent satisfied with the looks of them, don’t take them.”
“That’s going to be hard,” she said. “To turn up my nose at somebody’s offer of free animals? Beggars can’t be choosers.”
“That’s why you have your truck. You go to them. They’re the beggars, they’re hoping you’ll take the useless beasts off their hands. You’ll decide.”
“Oh, you’re right. That’s a very good way to look at it. Thank you, Mr. Walker, you’ve been extremely helpful. Do you mind if I call you back if I have more questions? I’m kind of learning as I go here.”
“Not at all, Mrs. Widener. Good luck to you, now.”
“Thanks.”
“Bye-bye.”
He hung up the phone and cocked an ear toward the front hallway downstairs. Still clutching the towel around his waist with one hand, he tiptoed over to the window and peered out, though he didn’t expect to see anything new in back of the house. Who could have been at his door? He dressed very quickly in the doorway to the landing, a place in his house where he seldom tarried, and it gave him pause when he glanced up and caught his reflection inside the chestnut frame of the antique mirror that hung there. He felt he had seen a ghost, but not of himself: it was the mirror frame that provoked him, his surviving face circumscribed by the remains of that extinct tree.
He padded down the stairs in his leather slippers, since he’d left his muddy boots outside the door to clean later, feeling too tired and fed up to do it when he came in from the field. His trousers, covered with green cockleburs, he’d folded over a kitchen chair, dreading the chore of picking them. The sharp burrs would prick his fingertips and leave them with a dull, poisoned ache. Garnett believed that if the Almighty Father had made one mistake in Creation, it was to give us too darn many cockleburs.
At the front door he opened the screen and poked out his head, then looked to the left and the right. Nobody. There were his boots side by side, still waiting muddily by the door. No car in the driveway, no delivery truck or any sign that one had been here. Usually the big UPS truck backed up on the grass and left an awful, curved scar of mud there. That boy they’d hired to drive it had more earring holes than brains in his head.
Garnett stepped out on the porch and squinted through his cloudy corneas at the heavy afternoon air, as if he might be able to decipher traces left in it. He didn’t get unexpected visitors very often. Never, in fact—nor unexpected phone calls, for that matter, but mercy, when it rained it poured. Someone had been here, and he’d missed him. It wasn’t an easy thing for him to let go of.
Then he saw the pie on his porch swing. A berry pie, just sitting there, taking in the day. It had the pretty little slits in the top from which a berry pie bleeds its purple fluids—oh, what heavenly mysteries were created by female hands. Blackberry pie was his favorite. Ellen had always made one with the first fruits harvested from the fencerows, after ceremoniously sending him out with a pail on the third Saturday of June. Garnett glanced at the sky briefly, asking God what kind of a trick this was.
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 in the paper last year about all the mussel shells in our river going extinct? Well, Mr. Walker, now the mailman tells me he saw on a nature show that every kind of mussel has to live part of its little life as a parasite on the gills of a different kind of minnow. If the right minnow isn’t there at the right time, well, sir, that’s the end of the story! Everything alive is connected to every other by fine, invisible threads. Things you don’t see can help you plenty, and things you try to control will often rear back and bite you, and that’s the moral of the story. There’s even a thing called the Volterra principle that I read about in my orcharding journal, which is all about how insecticide spraying actually drives up the numbers of the bugs you’re trying to kill. Oh, it’s an aggravation and a marvel. The world is a grand sight more complicated than we like to let on.
Just think: if someone had shown you a little old seedling tree potted in a handful of dirt coming in on a ship from Asia all those years ago, asked you to peek into it, and remarked, “These piddly little strands of fungus will knock down a million majestic chestnut trees, starve out thousands of righteous mountain folk, and leave Garnett Walker a bitter old man,” would you have laughed?
If God gave Man all the creatures of this earth to use for his own ends, he also counseled that gluttony is a sin—and he did say, flat out, “Thou shalt not kill.” He didn’t tell us to go ahead and murder every beetle or caterpillar that wants to eat what we eat (and, by the way, other insects that pollinate what we eat). He did not mean for us to satisfy our every whim for any food, in every season, by tearing down forest to make way for field, ripping up field to make way for beast, and transporting everything we can think of to places it doesn’t belong. To our dominion over the earth, Mr. Walker, we owe our thanks for the chestnut blight. Our thanks for kudzu, honeysuckle, and the Japanese beetle also. I think that’s all God’s little joke on us for getting too big for our britches. We love to declare that God made us in his image, but even so, he’s three billion years old and we’re just babies. I know your opinion of teenagers, Mr. Walker; just bear in mind that to God, you and I are much younger, even, than that. We’re that foolish, to think we know how to rule the world.
I’m partial to the passage from Genesis you quoted, but I wonder if you really understand it. God gave us every herb-bearing seed, it says, and every tree in which is the fruit of a tree-yielding seed. He gave us the mystery of a world that can re-create itself again and again. To you the fruit shall be food, he’s saying, but just remember, to the tree it’s a child. “And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat.” He’s looking out for the salamanders there, you see? Reminding us that there’s life in them, too, and that even weeds and pond algae are sacred because they’re salamander food. You’re a religious man, Mr. Walker. Seems to me you’d think twice about spraying Roundup all over God’s hard work.
Never mind. We all have our peeves. Myself, I hate goats (as you well know), and I sorely despise snapping turtles. I’m sure God loves them as much as he loves you or me, but I’ve got new baby ducklings on my pond, and an evil old turtle in there is gobbling them down like the troll under the bridge. I can’t stand it. There was one duckling I loved best, white with a brown wing (I named him Saddle Shoe), and yesterday while I stood and watched, that turtle came up right underneath and yanked down poor Shoe as he flapped and wailed for Mama. I bawled like a baby. I’d shoot that old S-O-B in the head if I had a gun and the heart to use it, so help me! But I have neither, and God knows that is surely for the best.
Yours very sincerely,
Nannie Land Rawley
P.S. I had to rack my brain, but yes, I recall my conversation in the hardware. I was telling a tale on myself: I’m not used to the get-up-and-go hydrostat transmission they put in the new Snappers, compared to the old geared ones. Marshall claims he sold me a small, polite little mower, but I say it’s a monster with a death wish. I left it running in the front yard one day while I went in to get a drink of water, and when I came back it was gone! I called Timmy Boyer to report it stolen! The poor man had to walk up to my porch with hat in hand and explain to me as how he’d found my mower in a compromising position a hundred yards downhill from where I left it. Evidently while I was inside, my Snapper took a wild hair and decided to fling itself headfirst into Egg Creek.
Mr. Walker, I’ve always found people love you best if you can laugh at your own foolish misfortunes and keep mum about everyone else’s.
Well, thought Garnett. For goodness’ sakes. It was a lot to take in at once. He felt a moment’s relief about the whole snapper incident and an iota of sympathy for the woman’s poor ducklings (oh, Saddle Shoe!), but only an iota, before his blood pressure started to rise. The longer he stared at the letter, flipping backward through its several pages, the more its true meaning began to reveal itself to him among the flimflam phrases of her mock friendliness. Bitter old man indeed!
He forgot the pie completely—would not remember it, in fact, until a day and a half later (at which time he would sample it tentatively and find it still edible). That pie was the furthest thing from his mind as he stomped to his desk and tore a blank sheet from one of his chestnut notebooks. Without a second thought to appearances, for this was no time to stand on ceremony, he plucked a black ballpoint pen out of his pen-and-pencil cup and applied it so hard to the page that its line wavered and skipped like a terrified heart. “Dear Miss Rawley,” he scrawled,
I am weary of your grabbing every opportunity as a pulpit for your absurd views on modern agriculture!! If you can prove to me your so-called Voltaire principal, i.e. spraying pesticide is good for the health of insects, then by all means I will drink a quart of malathion, pronto!!
Furthermore, what is this business about God being three billion years old? God is ageless; the earth and its inhabitants were created in 4300 B.C., as can be proved by extrapolating backward from present population to the time of the first two people, Adam and Eve. You were unaware of this scientific formulation, probably, or were perhaps making a veiled reference to Evolutionary Theory. Because if the latter, your words fall on ears too wise for that old scam. I am a scholar of Creation Science, and suggest you think about a thing or two, i.e. who but an Intelligent, Beautiful Creator could have created a world filled with beauty and intelligence? How could Random Chance (i.e. “evolution”) have created life-forms so vastly comple
x as those that fill our world? I realize you’re no scientist, Miss Rawley, but I could explain to you the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states that all natural things move from order to chaos, quite the opposite of what the evolutionists claim. I could go much further than this, though I am fighting the inclination to wash my hands of you altogether and let you cast your own soul on the brimstone as you seem determined to do, and let you face in the jaws of Satan the same fate suffered by your precious duckling.
Hah! thought Garnett, rather proud of his dramatic twist of the knife and thinking he ought to end right there.
“But no,” he wrote, unable to stop himself,
I shall be a good neighbor and send you these thoughts which should be enough for you and your bra-burning Unitarian friends to ponder, I dare say, for many days to come.
Truly, Garnett S. Walker III
P.S. I am not a bitter old man.
Garnett carefully affixed not one but two stamps to the envelope to prove his point (he wasn’t sure exactly what point, but he trusted his instincts) and licked its seal shut before he could give himself a chance at failed nerve or courage. Politeness be hanged. This was no longer simply a matter of pride. Garnett Walker was now a Soldier of God on the way to his mailbox, marching as to war.
{15}
Moth Love
From where Lusa stood at her upstairs window, the front lawn looked like a bolt of deep-green velvet with just a few moth-eaten patches where the reddish ground showed through. Jewel and Emaline were setting up the lawn chairs while Emaline’s husband, Frank, and Mary Edna’s Herb carried the big walnut dining table outside. Lusa had invited the whole family for the Fourth of July, claiming she needed to make ice cream out of a month’s worth of leftover cream sitting in her icebox. Maybe it was just pity, but they’d all agreed to come—even Mary Edna’s son and his wife from Leesport, whom she’d met only at the funeral.
Prodigal Summer Page 22
