Deanna was at a loss to invent any more work for herself today. Nothing she’d be able to keep her mind on, anyway. She’d finished this bridge. She’d also collected four wheelbarrow-loads of firewood from the pile here, where they’d cut up the trees, and pushed them all the way up to the cabin. She’d cleared weeds and retrenched the steepest part of the upper mountain trail. She had run into a pair of hikers up there on the ridge, a young, very dirty couple who seemed delighted with the world and each other. They’d wandered over here as a side trip from the Appalachian Trail. Hiking the whole A.T. this summer from Maine to Georgia was their plan, as they’d eagerly relayed it to her. They had gotten this far, worn out a pair of boots each, and were looking forward to picking up a care package from one of their mothers, including new boots, down where the trail came out in Damascus, before continuing on south. They thanked Deanna, impressed with the upkeep of the trails here in the Zebulon Forest—as if she’d done all the work just for them. Which answered one of the two questions she’d been asking herself all summer, anyway. As she watched the pair hike away in their baggy, colorful shorts, she wondered how that would feel, to have a mother leaving you care packages when you ran out of boot leather. Or to hike hundreds of miles beside another person, always knowing which way the trail ahead of you ran, and exactly how far.
He was sitting up there right now in the green porch chair, reading her thesis. She had not felt this nervous since the day of her final oral defense, when her committee made her go out in the hallway while it deliberated her case.
This humidity had to break. There was a storm in the air, which was probably making the hawks act up even more. She didn’t want to be down here when it hit. In her tenure on this mountain she’d been caught outside in a lightning storm exactly twice: once she’d made it into the shelter of the big chestnut log (back when it was still her own), and the other time she’d had to cower against the trunk of a hemlock in the lowest spot she could get to. Both times had been more awful than she liked to admit. He was right about her and thunder. She wasn’t afraid of snakes, but thunder paralyzed her. There wasn’t any reason, it just was. Even as a girl she’d dreaded loud noises, could not fire a gun without breaking a cold sweat, even just for target practice at a can on a fencepost. Her dad used to sit with her through storms. Eddie had done that, too, and almost the same way, though she didn’t tell him so: rubbing her back as she lay with the pillow pulled over her head, counting out loud with her the distance between flash and boom. One fifth of a mile per second.
If not for that, she thought, this would be easy. If not for those nights and early mornings and half minutes when he was suddenly kinder and truer than seemed possible, given everything. Given what he couldn’t understand. What did she really think he would do now, when he finished reading the book of her knowledge and beliefs? Change? No. Tear his hair for guilt? No. Stay, or walk out the door? Which did she want him to do?
That was the question. When a body wanted one thing wholly and a mind wanted the opposite, which of the two was she, Deanna?
She leaned far forward from the bridge so she could see her face in the water. Her braid swung over her shoulder and hung down, nearly touching the water, swaying like a bell rope. Pull me in, she said silently to the girl in the water. Make up my mind for me. Take from me this agitation, the likes of which I have never known in all my life.
This morning she had wept for no reason she could possibly name. The forest hadn’t seemed large enough for her grief. She’d startled up a white-spotted, flag-tailed fawn and sent it crashing downmountain from the bed of leaves where its mother had carefully hidden it. Deanna curled herself into the spot it’d fled, and sensed the small body’s warmth still there in the brown leaves. There was no loss here, she told herself; the fawn would bleat for its mother and be found. But she’d suddenly felt so despairing and tired, such an utterly lost cause, that she’d lain on the ground and put leaves in her mouth.
Bang! A thunder boom hit now like a hammer on the back of her spine, jerking her up onto her feet on the raw wooden planks of the bridge. She was grateful for that, at least—one decision made for her. By the time the second boom hit, rolling up the hollow like a wave and crashing over her head, her feet were already headed up the mountain. They would get her to the cabin before the lightning arrived. What do I want, what do I want? her feet on the trail demanded, the rhythm of her breathing demanded. If she couldn’t say what she wanted, she could say nothing—wouldn’t look at him, would have to go on feeling trapped with him in that place, like predator and prey closed tight in a box, waiting for word on which was to be which.
She was breathing hard by the time the cabin came into sight. Why had she been getting out of breath at the drop of a hat lately, was that age, too? Was she running faster than she used to? Through the trees she could just see the south face of her house, where the logs had been completely overgrown this summer by a single Virginia creeper vine. She’d pondered whether to rip the hairy little tendrils off the logs or just leave them there to protect the old wood from wind and rain, like a lively green skin.
She angled up the hill, coming up on the cabin from the back. Her mind was running ahead of her and off to the side, but it snapped back when she saw something odd at the place where the roof gable butted against the uppermost log in the cabin’s wall. The small hole there she’d noticed before, but now something was moving out of it, a dark loop. She approached slowly, catching her breath and keeping her eyes on the spot.
She could see now exactly what it was: the cabin’s summerlong resident guardian angel who kept down the mice, the devil who took the phoebes, the author of that slow sandpaper sound in the roof—her blacksnake. He was leaving. Deanna planted her feet and watched the entire, unbelievable length of him pour out the small hole in the side of the roof gable. He oozed down the log wall in an undulating, liquid flow like a line of molasses spilling over the edge of a pitcher. When most of his length had emerged, he suddenly dropped into the tall grass, which trembled and then went still. Then he was gone, for good. Just like that, today of all days, for reasons she would never be able to know. Whether she had loved or hated this snake was of absolutely no consequence to his departure. She considered this fact as she watched him go, and she felt something shift inside her body—relief, it felt like, enormous and settled, like a pile of stones on a steep slope suddenly shifting and tumbling slightly into the angle of repose.
The pounding of What do I want went still in her breast. It didn’t matter what she chose. The world was what it was, a place with its own rules of hunger and satisfaction. Creatures lived and mated and died, they came and went, as surely as summer did. They would go their own ways, of their own accord.
{23}
Old Chestnuts
Garnett had made up his mind. He was going to tell her about the shingles. Today, he would tell her.
Nothing was going to get him off the track this time: she could go ahead and be rude, shocking, or blasphemous, it wouldn’t matter, he was still going to give her those shingles. He was a Christian man hovering near eighty, and there was no telling when a fellow his age might just keel over. It had happened to younger men, Lord knew. It was not going to happen to Garnett Walker with those shingles moldering in his garage and the sin of spite staining his soul like an inkblot.
Maybe, while he was at it, he would remember to thank her for the pie.
As he walked across his yard toward the gate, he paused to take stock of a pokeberry weed that had shot up in the ditch beside his driveway, out of reach of the mower. He’d been meaning to get down here with the Weedwhacker, but somehow this poke plant had slipped past his good intentions and grown into a monster. It was a tree, practically, ten feet tall, dangling its big, slick leaves and bunches of green berries—all that growth accomplished in just four months, from the ground up, since poke was killed to the ground by frost. He stood with his hands on his hips, scrutinizing its purple trunk. He hated a weed on principle but cou
ld not help admiring this thing for its energy. His eye wandered up toward the row of trees that towered along the fencerow, giant leafy masses like tall green storm clouds, and he felt unexpectedly awestruck. A man could live under these things every day and forget to notice their magnitude. Garnett had gradually lost the ability to see individual leaves, but he could still recognize any one of these by its shape: the billowy columns of tulip poplars; the lateral spread of an oak; the stately, upright posture of a walnut; the translucent, effeminate tremble of a wild cherry. The small, lacy locusts were faintly brown this late in summer, and the catalpa at the corner post wore a pale-green color you could pick out on a hillside a mile away, or even farther when it was dangling all over with the long pods that made people call it a bean tree. The sourwood had its white flowers reaching out like skeleton hands in the spring. Trees. Every kind assumed a different slickness in the rain, its particular color in the fall, its own aspect—something you couldn’t describe in words but learned by heart when you lived in their midst. Garnett had a strange, sad thought about his own special way of seeing trees inside his mind, and how it would go dark, like a television set going off, at the moment of his death.
What in heaven’s name was he doing out here in his driveway looking at trees and thinking about death? He started to turn back toward his house, but from the corner of his sight he registered the rounded shapes of the regularly spaced apples beyond the fencerow and knew, of course, that was it. His mission was Nannie Rawley and the shingles. He thought of going to the garage to check on them first, just to make sure they were in a condition to be offered. But he suspected he might merely be postponing the inevitable. Just pull up your knickers and go, young man, he scolded himself, and obeyed.
He found her in back of the house, where he knew she would be. He’d been keeping an eye out this morning and had seen her carrying an old locust fence rail back there. He’d actually grown a little curious about what she was up to, though he knew curiosity had killed the cat, and that was probably even without the assistance of Nannie Rawley.
She waved merrily when she saw him coming. “Mr. Walker! How’s your BPV?”
His what? Was she asking him about underwear? “Fine,” he said, with reserved commitment.
“No more dizzy spells? That’s wonderful. I’m happy to hear it.”
“Oh, that,” he said, and the memory of her firm, tender hands cradling his head sent a shock of adrenaline through his old body. He’d had a dream about her, so real to him that he’d awakened plagued with the condition he hadn’t known for years. He blushed now to recall the whole business again. He nearly turned tail and ran.
“Are you all right?”
“Much better, yes,” he replied, getting his bearings. “I’m not used to it yet. I was so used to getting dizzy, it’s taking me a while to get used to not being dizzy.”
“That’s old age for you, isn’t it?” she asked. “If I got out of bed one morning and my knees didn’t hurt, I’m not sure how I’d know to walk.”
He stared at her, distracted. She wasn’t wearing much. He’d noticed that earlier, when he saw her dragging the locust rail up from the ditch. Just a little yellow sleeveless-blouse sort of thing, and short pants. Short pants, on a woman of her age. It was hot, but not so hot as to drive a person to indecent exposure.
“I prayed about that dizziness,” he confessed to her. “For several years, I did.”
“God moves in mysterious ways,” she replied breezily, probably without meaning it in the least. Next she’d be suggesting she was the answer to Garnett’s prayers.
“Personally, I’ve found that my prayers seldom go unanswered,” he said, a little more haughtily than he’d meant. “Last August, when it was so dry and so many people were about to lose their tobacco, I got down on my knees and prayed for rain, Miss Rawley. And I want you to know, the very next evening it rained.”
She looked at him strangely. “Right before you came over here I had a sneezing fit. I guess my sneezing caused you to come.”
“That’s a very peculiar thing to say, Miss Rawley.”
“Isn’t it, though,” she replied, turning around and taking up her hammer again.
“I take it you don’t put much stock in miracles.”
“I’m not in a position to believe in miracles,” she said without turning around. She sounded a little angry, or perhaps just a little sad. She was building something, all right, working on that locust rail he’d seen her dragging about. Now she had it propped up onto a sawhorse here in the doorway of her garage and was nailing a crossbar to it. Goodness, it looked like the cross the Romans used for crucifying Jesus Christ. He wasn’t going to ask—he made his mind up on that. His second vow of the day; he’d better get to the first.
He cleared his throat and then said, for no good reason, “Did you know there’s a pokeberry bush by my driveway that must be eleven feet tall? I’ve never seen the like.”
She paused her hammer and turned back around, eyeing him carefully. “Is that what you came over here to tell me?”
He thought about it. “No. It’s just an incidental piece of information.”
“Oh. Well, that’s something, an eleven-foot pokeberry. If they gave out an award for weeds at the county fair you’d have a contender there. Wouldn’t they all be surprised: Garnett Sheldon Walker the Third, first place in the weedy annual category.” The usual good cheer had returned to her voice, and he couldn’t keep from smiling a little himself. Poke was a half-hardy perennial, not an annual, he was pretty sure, but he refrained from correcting her.
“If I’d thought about it,” he said with mock seriousness, “I’d have given it a little ammonium nitrate. I think I could have gotten it up to fourteen feet.”
She put down her hammer and seemed to relax. Her trousers, he could plainly see, were a pair of old work pants cut off with scissors. What a thing to do. “You know what I really admire, this time of year?” she asked him.
“I wouldn’t dare to guess, Miss Rawley.”
“Blackberry canes,” she said. “Now you go ahead and laugh at me, because everybody else does; I know they’re an awful nuisance. But they’re amazing, too.”
“I expect they’re the fastest-growing plant this side of China,” he said.
“Yes, sir! They shoot up out of the ground and by mid-June they’re eight feet tall. Then the top starts to bend back down to the ground, and by August they’ve made an arch of a size to walk under, if you wanted to. Did you ever notice how they do that?”
“I’ve noticed, and noticed,” he said. “I’ve gone through about eight bush hogs in my lifetime, noticing how blackberries grow.”
“I know. I’m not defending them. They’d eat up my whole orchard if I didn’t keep them cut back to the fence. But sometimes in winter I just have to stand back and stare at those arches going down the road, up and down, like a giant quilter’s needle sewing its way across Zebulon County, one big arched loop per year. You can love them or hate them, either one, but there’s no stopping them.” She looked at him sideways, like a mother scolding. “And you have to admit, the berries make the best pie there is.”
He flushed. “Oh, I’ve been meaning for the longest time to mention that pie. I thank you for that pie.” Short pants, on a woman of her age. From what he could see, she had the legs of a much younger woman. Certainly not what he would have expected in the way of Unitarian legs.
“You’re welcome,” she said. “Better late than never. If recent trends continue, maybe I’ll bake you another one next year.”
He looked at her long and hard, wondering frankly if they would both be here next summer. After a certain point, you had to think that way. “Miss Rawley,” he declared, “I can’t say as I’ve ever seen short pants on a woman your age.”
She looked down at her knees—which were maybe a little pale and knobby, on second thought. If one were to pay attention. She looked back up at him with a girlish grin. “I got hot, Mr. Walker. I got inspired by the UPS
boy. He drives that truck in nothing but his swimming suit. I figured if that’s legal, then surely an old lady can take a pair of scissors to her old khakis once in a while.”
Garnett shook his head. “Dignity is the last responsibility of the aged, Miss Rawley.”
“Fiddlesticks. Death is the last responsibility of the aged.”
“Don’t get fresh with me,” he warned. “And don’t expect to see me running around in short pants, either.”
“I’d sooner expect to see a pig fly, Mr. Walker.”
“Well, good, then,” he said. But then asked, “Are you saying I’m a pig?”
She crossed her arms. “Are you saying I’m immodest?”
“If the shoe fits,” he replied curtly.
“Self-righteous, tedious,” she said. “There’s a couple of shoes you can try on.”
That was it, then. They had stooped to name-calling, like a pair of grammar school children. He took a deep breath. “I think I’m finished here.”
“No, you’re not,” she said firmly, looking at him with a menacing eye. “Tell me what’s wrong with me. Let’s just get it out. All these years you’ve been picking at me like a scab. What have you really got against me?”
She stood there fearless, daring him to tell the truth, exciting him toward actually doing it. Garnett turned the thought over in his mind and sighed. With profound sadness, he understood that he could never tell her the answer because he didn’t know it himself.
Prodigal Summer Page 37
