A surprising fact occurred to Garnett then, for the first time in his nearly eighty years: the unfortunate fellow who'd chopped down that tree, miscalculating its size and then having to leave it, must have been his grandfather. How many times before had Garnett stood right here at the edge of his seedling field staring up at that mountainside, ruminating on the Indian Tunnel? But he'd never put the two facts together. That tree must have come down near a hundred years ago, when his grandfather owned the whole southern slope of Zebulon Mountain. It was his grandfather, the first Garnett Walker, who'd named it, modestly choosing Zebulon from the Bible, even though some still did call it Walker's Mountain. Who else could have felled that tree? He and his sons would have spent a whole day and more with their shoulders against the crosscut saw to bring down that giant for lumber. They'd have been mad as hornets, then, to find after all their work that the old chestnut was too huge to be dragged down off the mountain. Probably they took away tree-sized branches to be milled into barn siding, but that trunk was just too big of an old monster and had to be left where it lay. Left to hollow itself out from the inside till nothing was left of it but a game for the useless mischief of boys.
Mules, they had to use in those days for any kind of work that got done: mules or men. A tractor was a thing still yet undreamed of. A mule could be coaxed into many a steep and narrow place where a tractor would not go, it was true. But! Some things could be wrought with horsepower that were beyond the power of horseflesh. That was the lesson he was meant to draw here, God's purpose for these paired recollections of Grandfather Walker and the Indian Tunnel. If they'd had a logging sledge or a good John Deere, that tree would not have gone to waste as boy-tunnel and bear den. Yes, sometimes horsepower can do what horseflesh cannot.
That was just it, the very thing he had been trying to tell the Rawley woman for years. "Miss Rawley," he'd explained until he was blue in the face as she traipsed through her primitive shenanigans, "however fondly we might recall the simple times of old, they had their limits. People keep the customs of their own day and time for good reason."
Nannie Land Rawley was Garnett's nearest neighbor and the bane of his life.
Miss Rawley it was and ever would be, not Missus, even though she had once borne a child and it was well known in Zebulon County that she'd never married the father. And that had been some thirty years ago or more, a far cry before the days when young girls began to wear rings in their noses and bells on their toes as they did now, and turn out illegitimate children as a matter of course. In those days, a girl went away for a decent interval to visit a so-called relative and came back sadder but wiser. But not Miss Rawley. She never appeared the least bit sad, and the woman was unwise on principle. She'd carried the child right here in front of God and everybody, christened the poor thing with a ridiculous name, and acted like she had every right to parade a bastard child through a God-fearing community.
And every one of them has forgiven her by now, he reflected bitterly, peering up the rise through the trunks of her lower orchard toward her house, which sat much too close to his own on the crest of a small, flat knoll just before the land rose steeply up the mountainside. Of course there was the tragic business with the child to win them over, but even so, Nannie was the sort, she could get away with anything. Every one of them just as pleasant as the day is long when they meet her out here in the lane, Nannie all rosy-cheeked amongst her daisies with her long calico skirt and braids wrapped around her head like some storybook Gretel. They might gossip some, for how could such an odd bird fail to attract the occasional sharp arrow let loose from Oda Black down at the Black Store? But even the vociferous Oda would put a hand beside her mouth to cut short a remark about Nannie, letting the suggestion of it hang but packaging it with deep regret. Nannie bribed Oda with apple pies; that was one of her methods. People thought she was comical and intriguing but for the most part excessively kind. They didn't suspect her little figure of harboring the devil, as Garnett Walker did. He suspected Nannie Rawley had been put on this earth to try his soul and tempt his faith into doubt.
Why else, with all the good orchard land stretching north from here to the Adirondacks, would that woman have ended up as his neighbor?
Her sign alone was enough to give him hives. For two months now, ever since she'd first crept over on his side to put up that sign, he'd lain awake nearly every night, letting it get on his nerves: Heaven knows it's one thing when a Hereford jumps a fence and gets over onto a neighbor, that a body can forgive and forget, but a three-foot plywood sign does not get up and walk. Last night he'd fretted till nearly the crack of dawn, and after breakfast he'd made up his mind to walk out through his front seedling field to check the road frontage. Looking for "signs and wonders," as the Bible said, though Nannie's sign was known only for bad behavior.
He could see it now through the weeds, the back side of it, poking up out of the bank above Highway 6. He squinted to make sure; his eyesight had reached the point where it required some effort. Yes, the lettered side was facing the road, but he knew what it said, the whole hand-painted foolishness of it commanding the roadside--his roadside, two hundred feet over his property line--to be a "NO SPRAY ZONE." As if all a person had to do to rule the world was concoct a fool set of opinions and paint them on a three-by-three square of plywood. That in a nutshell was Nannie Rawley.
His plan for today was to hoist that sign with a mighty heave back over her fence into the ditch, where it would be consumed by the swamp of weeds that had sprung up in the wake of her ban on herbicide spraying; then justice would prevail in his small corner of God's green earth. He hoped she was watching.
Garnett waded carefully down the embankment through the tall weeds and yanked up the sign, with enough difficulty that he changed his mind and hoped she wasn't watching. He had to grasp it with both hands and wobble the stake for quite a long time to loosen it out of its hole. The woman must have swung a four-pound mallet to drive it in; he was lucky she hadn't dug a posthole with her antique tractor and set it in cement. He could picture it. She had no respect for property, for her elders in general, or for Garnett in particular. No use for men at all, he suspected darkly--and just as well. No love lost there on either side.
He began wading toward the property line, swishing and hacking a path through the weeds ahead of him with the sign. He felt like one of the knights of old, fighting his way through an army of foes with his wooden sword. The bank and road cut were in a hateful condition, just one long tangle of poke, cockleburs, and multiflora briars nearly as high as his chest. He had to stop every few yards to untangle his shirtsleeves from the stickerbushes. This was all Nannie's doing, his cross to bear. Everywhere else in Zebulon County--everywhere but here--the county road workers kept the road cuts mowed or, if the banks were too steep for mowing, like this one that fronted his farm, at least kept them sprayed. It took only one good dose of Two-Four-D herbicide every month to shrivel these leafy weeds to a nice, withered stand of rusty-brown stalks, easily raked down afterward to show the world a tidy frontage. But instead he had this, now--this tangle of briars harboring vermin of every kind known to man, breeding in here and getting set to invade his F1 chestnut seedling field. It would take him days to cut through all this with a weed-eater or a mowing scythe, and he wasn't sure his heart could take it. In three short months Garnett's farm--whose fields he kept as neat as pickle, once you got up past the road cut--had come to look like a disgrace to passersby. Probably it was all they talked about down at Black Store, that Garnett Walker was a lazy old man(!), when it was really none other than Nannie Land Rawley, their dear darling friend, working in her unseen ways to ruin him.
It had started back in April when he left this steep weed patch to the county's boys for spraying, since it was a county right-of-way. The first of May he'd done the same again. Both times she'd snuck out here in the middle of the night before road-spraying day, working in darkness like the witch she was, to move her sign over onto Garnett. Now it was the
second of June, and the spray truck must be due again soon. How could she always know when it was coming? Was that witchcraft, too? Most people around here couldn't even predict when their own cows were going to calve, let alone prophesy the work habits of a bunch of county-employed teenage hoodlums wearing earplugs, jewelry, and oversized trousers.
In previous years, he had talked to her. He'd had the patience of Job, informing her it was her duty to keep her NO SPRAY ZONE, if she insisted on having such a thing, inside of her own legal property boundaries. He had pointed dramatically at their line fence and stated (for Garnett was a reader), "Miss Rawley, as the poet said, 'Good fences make good neighbors.'"
She would reply, "Oh, people just adore fences, but Nature doesn't give a hoot." She claimed the wind caused the weed killer on his side to drift over into her orchards.
He'd explained it to her scientifically. "One application of herbicide on my bank will not cause your apple trees or anybody else's to drop off all their leaves."
"Not to drop their leaves, no," she'd admitted. "But what if some inspector came tomorrow to spot-check for chemicals on my apples? I'd lose my certification."
(Garnett paused, again, to untangle the sleeve of his work shirt from a briar. His heart was pounding from the effort of bushwhacking through this godforsaken mess.)
Her certification! Nannie Rawley was proud to tell the world she'd been the first organic grower to be certified in Zebulon County, and she was still the loudest one. Fifteen years ago he'd assumed it was a nonsense that would pass, along with rock music and hydroponic tobacco. But that was not to be. Nannie Rawley had declared war not only on the county's Two-Four-D but also on the Sevin dust and other insecticides Garnett was bound and obligated to put on his own seedling trees to keep them from being swallowed whole by the army of Japanese beetles camped out on Nannie Rawley's unsprayed pastures. There was no end to her ignorance or her zeal. She was the sworn friend and protector of all creatures great and small, right down to the ticks, fleas, and corn maggots, evidently. (All but goats, which she hated and feared due to a childhood "incident.") But could she really be such a fool as to fear the certification men, coming around to spot-check her apples? That would be along the lines of the Catholics coming to check up on the morals of their pope. The organic-certification men probably called up Nannie Rawley for advice.
He paused again to catch his breath. In spite of the cool day he felt dark sweat spreading down his shirt from the armpits like a pair of a fish's gills. His arms ached from thrashing the sign, and he felt a queer heaviness in his left leg. He couldn't see his feet but could feel that his trousers were soaked up to the knees from all the dampness down in the weeds. It was practically a swamp. The briars had become almost impossible to get through, and he still had twenty yards to go to reach the line fence. Garnett felt purely miserable and almost lost heart: well, he could backtrack, walk back up to his mowed field, and throw the sign over into her nicely mowed orchard. There was a gate in the fence put in by Garnett's father and Nannie Rawley's, who'd been the best of friends.
But no, he wanted to cross over down here below the fence line and throw the cursed sign into her weeds, where it belonged. He decided to push on, twenty more yards.
If only his poisons would drift over onto her trees. He knew very well, and had told her so, that without his constant spraying to keep them down, the Japanese beetles would overrun her orchards completely. She'd be standing out there in her calico skirt under leafless trees, wringing her hands, wondering what'd gone wrong in her little paradise. Success without chemicals was impossible. Nannie Rawley was a deluded old harpy in pigtails.
He could see the fence now--the posts, at least. (His eyesight had clouded to cataracts so slowly that his mind had learned how to fill in details like fence wire, tree leaves, and the more subtle features of a face.) But as he moved toward the property line, the sensation of heaviness in his left leg grew so unbearable, he could hardly drag it. He imagined what he looked like, thrashing and staggering forward like Frankenstein's monster, and embarrassment washed over him but then was replaced, suddenly, by a terrifying thought: he was having a stroke. Wasn't that a symptom? Heaviness in the left leg? He stopped to mop the sweat off his face. His skin felt clammy, and a sick ache gnawed at his stomach. Dear Lord! He could fall down into these weeds and who would find him here? After how many days, or weeks? His obituary would read, "The decayed body of Garnett Walker was discovered Wednesday after the first frost brought down the weeds along his frontage on Highway 6."
His chest felt constricted, like a bulging tree trunk wrapped too tightly in barbed wire. Oh, sweet Jesus! Through his ragged breathing he cried out in spite of himself:
"Help!"
And there she came, down the embankment. Of all God's creatures he had summoned to his aid Nannie Rawley, wearing a pair of dungarees and a red bandanna around her head like that woman on the syrup, Aunt Jemima. She came tearing out of nowhere, sliding down toward him, still carrying something in her hand from whatever home remedy she'd been out messing with--Nannie with her traps to catch codling moths, as if that would settle everything. It looked like a yellow paper box with the bottom cut out. Here I am, thought Garnett, at the end of my allotted days, staring at a yellow paper box with the bottom cut out. My last view of this earthly life: a bug trap.
Dear Lord my God, he prayed silently. I confess I may have sinned in my heart, but I obeyed thy fifth commandment. I didn't kill her.
She had already grabbed him under his soggy armpits and was struggling him up the bank toward the flat ground of her front orchard. He had never felt her touch or her grip before and was shocked by this little woman's strength. He tried to help with his useless legs, but he felt as if he were participating in the sport of alligator wrestling and knew, with a sinking heart, that he was the alligator.
Then at last he was lying on his back on the grass underneath her winesaps. She knelt over him, peering down with concern, and he gasped at the sight of her red-bandanna-crowned head reeling wildly through space. He quickly turned his head to the side; this wasn't the stroke--it always made him dizzy to lie flat on his back looking up.
"Miss Rawley," he said weakly once the spinning of the world had ceased, "I don't like to trouble you. You go on with your business, but maybe if you get a chance directly you could call up the ambulance. I think I've had a stroke." He closed his eyes.
When she didn't answer, he opened his eyes and saw that she was staring down at his left leg, in apparent horror. He felt confused--would there be blood, with a stroke? Or some kind of deformity? Surely not, but he couldn't make himself look.
"Mr. Walker," she said, "you haven't had any stroke."
"What?"
"You haven't gotten a stroke. You've gotten a turtle."
"What?" He struggled to sit up. Suddenly his chest felt better and his head was perfectly clear.
"Look! You've got a snapping turtle hanging on to the side of your boot. I'll bet that thing weighs fifteen pounds."
Garnett was embarrassed beyond speech. He stared down at the monster in its dark, humped shell, a slime-green creature that had sprung from some other part of God's mind, certainly, than most. It had gotten hold of the edge of his leather sole with the vise grip the snapping turtle is famous for, and true to its fame, it appeared to have no plans on letting go until Zebulon County got thunder. Although it did seem to Garnett that its dark little beady eyes were looking up at him fairly sheepishly. Poor thing, thought Garnett, to have to commit yourself so hard to one moment of poor judgment.
In a springtime as rainy as this one, snapping turtles strayed from their home ponds into wet ditches, looking for new places to find their hideous mates and breed their hideous children. Of course there would be one waiting for him in that weedy ditch under all those briars--that swamp that had been created by Nannie Rawley--and if he happened to have a turtle on his foot now, it was entirely her fault.
"Well I knew that," he said, waving offhandedly a
t the giant turtle. "I just wasn't feeling well, of a sudden. But I'm better now. I'll just go home by the road, I think."
She screwed up her face, shaking her head. "Not till I get that dinosaur off your heel. Let me go get a stick and whack it to make it turn loose of you."
"No, really. You don't have to."
"Oh, Mr. Walker, don't be ridiculous."
"Well, Miss Rawley," he snipped, "I can't feature it. Knowing what a soft spot you have in your heart for pests and vermin."
"You don't know the half of it. I've had a grudge against snapping turtles ever since that big monster in my pond ate the feet off one of my ducks. There's nothing I'd rather do than bang this old bastard's brains out." She peered down at Garnett, who winced, both at her foul language and at her manner. "But you'd better take off your boot," she added. "I couldn't be held responsible."
"No!" he cried, gaining control of the situation. Her hands had felt so strong, guiding him up the bank like the grip of destiny itself. Like the claws of a she-bear! Having those hands on him once was enough for today. He wasn't going to undress for her. "No, now," he told her sternly, "there isn't any call to take out your grudges on this old fellow. He and I will just head back home now."
"You will," she said.
"Yes. Thank you for your help."
Garnett got to his feet as gracefully as possible, considering, and limped down Nannie Rawley's gravel drive toward the road. The lopsided scrape of his walk sounded like a car with a flat tire. Now he would have to hike one hundred yards up the road to get to his own driveway, and pray to the Lord no one came driving along at that moment to see Garnett Walker transporting fifteen pounds of turtle up Highway 6 in a previously unheard-of fashion.
Prodigal Summer: A Novel Page 9