She touched her breast and took up the mirror again to look closely at the deep auburn color of her aureole. It seemed like a miracle that skin could change like this in color and texture in such a short time, like caterpillar skin taking on the color and texture of moth. Briefly, as if testing the temperature of water, she touched her abdomen just under her navel, where the top button of her jeans no longer conceded to meet its buttonhole. Deanna wondered briefly just how much of a fool she had been, for how long. Ten weeks at the most, probably less, but still. She'd known bodies, her own especially, and she hadn't known this. Was it something a girl learned from a mother, that secret church of female knowledge that had never let her in? All the things she'd heard women say did not seem right. She had not been sick, had not craved to eat anything strange. (Except for a turkey. Was that strange?) She'd only felt like a bomb had exploded in the part of her mind that kept her on an even keel. She'd mistaken that feeling for love or lust or perimenopause or an acute invasion of privacy, and as it turned out it was all of those, and none. The explosion had frightened her for the way it loosened her grip on the person she'd always presumed herself to be. But maybe that was what this was going to be: a long, long process of coming undone from one's self.
Deanna tried to imagine the night of her own conception, something she'd never before had the courage to consider. The rumpled Ray Dean Wolfe making love to the mother she'd never known. That woman had been flesh and blood--a person who'd moved like Deanna, maybe, who'd walked too fast, or dreaded thunder, or bitten the ends of her hair when she was too happy or too sad. A woman who'd gripped life in naked embrace and gone on living past any hope of survival.
Deanna had not been a fool, she decided. She'd just lacked guidance in matters of love. Lacking a mother of her own, she'd missed all the signs.
Nannie had done her best, and that wasn't bad--just a broader education, by far, than most daughters were prepared for. Nannie Rawley, as reliable and generous as her apple trees, standing in her calico skirt in the backyard calling Deanna and Rachel down out of a tree, not for fear of their climbing but because she could occasionally offer them something better, like cider or a pie. Only then. They'd lived in trees, Rachel low to the ground on a branch where Deanna put her for safekeeping while she herself climbed enough for the both of them, mounting the scaffold limbs like the girl on the flying trapeze. If she looked down, there was Rachel, peering up through the leaves with her sweet, sleepy eyes and her lips parted in eternal wonder, permanently in awe of her airborne sister.
"What made Rachel that way?" she'd asked Nannie, only once. The two of them were up on the hill behind the orchard.
Nannie answered, "Her genes. You know about genes."
Deanna was an adolescent girl who loved science and read more books than anyone she knew, so she said yes, she did.
"I know," Nannie said quietly, "you want a better answer than that, and so do I. For a long time I blamed the world. The chemicals and stuff in our food. I was reading about that when I was carrying her, and it scared me to death. But there's other ways of looking at Rachel."
"I love her how she is," Deanna said. "I'm not saying I don't."
"I know. But we all wish she didn't have so many things wrong with her, besides her mind."
Deanna waited until Nannie decided to speak again. They were walking uphill through an old, weedy hayfield. Deanna was taller than Nannie now, had passed her around her twelfth birthday, but by walking ahead of her on this steep hill Nannie had regained the advantage.
"Here's how I think about it," Nannie said. "You know there's two different ways to make life: crossing and cloning. You know about that from grafting trees, right?"
Deanna nodded tentatively. "You can make a cutting of scionwood from a tree you like and grow it out into a new one."
"That's right," Nannie said. "You call that a scion, or a clone. It's just the same as the parent it came from. And the other way is if two animals mate, or if two plants cross their pollen with each other; that's a cross. What comes of that will be different from either one of the parents, and a little different from all the other crosses made by those same parents. It's like rolling two dice together: you can get a lot more numbers than just the six you started with. And that's called sex."
Deanna nodded again, even more tentatively. But she understood. She followed the path through the tall grass that Nannie was tramping down in front of her.
"Sexual reproduction is a little bit riskier. When the genes of one parent combine with the genes of the other, there's more chances for something to go wrong. Sometimes a whole piece can drop out by mistake, or get doubled up. That's what happened with Rachel." Nannie stopped walking and turned around to face Deanna. "But just think what this world would be if we didn't have the crossing type of reproduction."
Deanna found she couldn't picture the difference, and said so.
"Well," Nannie said, pondering this, "probably for just millions of years there were little blobs of things in the sea, all just alike, splitting in two and making more of themselves. Same, same, same. Nothing much cooking. And then, some way, they got to where they'd cross their genes with one another and turn out a little variety, from mutations and such. Then starts the hullabaloo."
"Then there'd start to be different kinds of things?" Deanna guessed.
"More and more, that's right. Some of the kids turned out a little nicer than the parents, and some, not so hot. But the better ones could make even a little better. Things could change. They could branch out."
"And that was good, right?"
Nannie put her hands on her knees and looked Deanna earnestly in the eye. "That was the world, honey. That's what we live in. That is God Almighty. There's nothing so important as having variety. That's how life can still go on when the world changes. But variety means strong and not so strong, and that's just how it is. You throw the dice. There's Deannas and there's Rachels, that's what comes of sex, that's the miracle of it. It's the greatest invention life ever made."
And that was it, the nearest thing to a birds-and-bees lecture she'd ever gotten from Nannie, the nearest thing to a mother she had. It was a cool fall day--September, probably--and they were making their way through the hillside field that had gone derelict since Nannie took over running the farm. It was full of sapling apple trees sprouted from seeds left here in the droppings of the deer and foxes that stole apples from the orchard down below. Nannie claimed that these wild trees were her legacy. The orchard trees planted by her father were all good strains, true to type, carefully grown out from cuttings so they'd be identical to their parent tree. All the winesaps in the world were just alike. But Nannie's field saplings were outlaws from seeds never meant to be sown, the progeny of different apple varieties cross-pollinated by bees. Up here stood the illegitimate children of a Transparent crossed with a Stayman's winesap, or a Gravenstein crossed with who knew what, a neighbor's wild apple or maybe a pear. Nannie had stopped mowing this field and let these offspring raise up their heads until they were a silent throng. "Like Luther Burbank's laboratory," was how she'd explained it to an adolescent girl who wanted to understand, but Deanna could think of them only as Nannie's children. On many an autumn Saturday, the two of them had beat their way through the grass of this overgrown field from one tree to the next, tasting apples from these wild trees, the renegade products of bee sex and fox thievery. They were looking for something new: Nannie's Finest.
Deanna knew what to do; she had a plan. This was the first week of August, which meant Jerry would be coming up soon with her groceries and mail. She could send a letter back to town with him. Instead of putting on a stamp, which she wasn't even sure she had, she'd draw a map of Egg Fork Creek and Highway 6 on the back of the envelope so Jerry could find the orchard and deliver it straight. Deanna smiled to think of Nannie's opening the envelope with the map on the back. Maybe she would pause first to study that line of blue ink connecting Deanna's cabin to her own orchard, like a maze in a child's
puzzle book painstakingly completed. Maybe, just from that, Nannie would be able to guess the contents of the message inside.
Deanna already knew how the letter would begin:
Dear Nannie,
I have some news. I'm coming down from the mountain this fall, in September, I think, when it starts to get cold. It looks like I'll be bringing somebody else with me. I wonder if we could stay with you.
{26}
Old Chestnuts
Garnett was on his way home from a trip to town, thinking about the fish at Pinkie's Diner and whether it had been as good as usual, and just arriving at the place where Egg Fork joined up with Black Creek and the road dipped into a little piece of woods, when he was stopped by an animal in the road. There it stood in broad daylight, causing Garnett to brake hard and stop completely. It was a dog, but not a dog. Garnett had never seen the like of it. It was a wild, fawn-colored thing with its golden tail arched high and its hackles standing up and its eyes directly on Garnett. It appeared to be ready to take on a half-ton Ford pickup truck with no fear of the outcome.
"Well, then," Garnett said aloud, quietly. His heart was pumping heartily, not from fear but from astonishment. The creature was looking into his eyes as if it meant to speak.
It turned its head back toward the side of the road it had come from, and out of the weeds crept a second one, walking slowly. Its tail was held lower, but its color and size were about the same. It hesitated out in the open, then picked up its pace and crossed the road quickly at a neat trot. The first one turned into line behind it and followed, and they both disappeared into the chickory at the edge of the road without so much as a glance back at Garnett. The blue-flowered weeds parted and then closed like curtains in a movie house, and Garnett had the strangest feeling that what he'd witnessed was just that kind of magic. This was no pair of stray dogs dumped off bewildered beside the road and now trying to find their way back to the world of men. They were wildness, and this was where they lived.
He sat for a long moment gazing at the ghosts of what he had seen on the empty road ahead of him. Then, because life had to go on and his prostate wasn't what it used to be, he put the truck into gear and pressed on, minding his own business and keeping fairly well to his own side of the road. He had nearly closed in on the safety of his own driveway when a young man flagged him down. Garnett was still thinking about the dogs, so much so that he went right on past the Forest Service jeep and on down the road a piece before it registered that the boy in the jeep had meant for him to stop.
He pulled over slowly until he heard the chickory weeds in the ditch brush the side of his truck, which told him he was well off the road. Then he shut off the ignition and sat peering nervously into the rearview mirror. The Forest Service people weren't the police. They couldn't make you stop. This wasn't like Timmy Boyer's pulling a fellow over and giving him a lecture on old age and bad eyesight and threatening to take away his driving license. Goodness, maybe those animals he'd just seen were something the Forest Service had lost and was looking for? But no, of course not, that was a ridiculous idea. This was just a little, green, open-sided army jeep, not a circus train. If anything, this boy had likely been signaling to Garnett to get back over the center line. He'd been so preoccupied with what he'd just seen back at the fork that he wasn't paying a lot of attention to anything else. Garnett knew he strayed; he would admit to that, if asked.
He was still stewing over whether to try to back up and speak to the young man or just go on down the road and forget about it when the fellow hopped out of his jeep and came walking toward him at a brisk pace. He had some kind of a paper in his hand.
"Oh, for pity's sake," Garnett muttered to himself. "Now they're letting children from the Forest Service hand out driving tickets."
But that wasn't it. Goodness, this boy seemed too young to be operating a vehicle, much less claiming any authority whatsoever over other drivers. He stood next to Garnett's open window studying some kind of scribbling on the paper he had there, and then he asked, "Excuse me, sir, would this be Highway Six?"
"It would be," Garnett replied, "if the fools that run the nine-one-one emergency-ambulance business hadn't decided to put up a road sign calling it Meadow Brook Lane."
The young man looked at him, a little startled. "Well, that's exactly what the sign back there said. Meadow Brook Lane. But I've got this map here that says I'm supposed to be on Highway Six, and it seems like that's where I'm at."
"Well," said Garnett. "There isn't any meadow, and there isn't any brook. What we've got here is just a lot of cow pastures and a creek. So most of us go right on ahead and call it number Six, since that's what it's been ever since God was a child, as far as I know. Just showing up here one day and banging up a green metal sign doesn't make a country road through a cow pasture into something it isn't. I've always had the impression the nine-one-one emergency-ambulance people must be from Roanoke."
The young man looked even more surprised. "I'm from Roanoke."
"Well, then," Garnett said. "There you have it."
"But," he said, seeming to waver between confusion and irritation, "is this Highway Six, then, or isn't it?"
"Who wants to know, and who would he be looking for?" Garnett asked.
The fellow flipped over his paper, which looked like an envelope, and read, "Miss Nannie Rawley. Fourteen hundred twelve, Old Highway Six."
Garnett shook his head. "Son, is there some reason why you can't do your business with Miss Rawley through the United States Mail, like everybody else? You've got to go bothering her yourself? Do you have any idea how busy that woman is this time of year, with an orchard to run? Has the Forest Service got such a shortage of forests to service nowadays, that it needs to be getting into the postal-delivery business?"
The young man had his head cocked and his mouth partly open, but he seemed to have run out of questions and answers both. Whatever business he had with Nannie, he wasn't going to speak of it to Garnett.
"All right, go on, then," Garnett finally said. "That's it right up there. That mailbox sticking out of the bank at a funny angle with all the butterfly weeds around it."
"That's Nannie Rawley?" the boy asked, practically jumping out of his skin.
"No," Garnett said patiently, shaking his head as he started up the ignition in his truck. "That's her mailbox."
It was only reasonable to be curious, Garnett told himself, taking his cup and saucer from this morning off the drainboard and putting them away. Strangers didn't come up this way much, and that boy was young. People of that age were liable to do anything--if you read the newspaper at all, you knew they scared elderly ladies just for sport. And she was busy. In another month apples would be falling from the sky like hail over there, and she had just such a short while to get them all in. Half her crop she sold to some company in Atlanta Georgia with a silly name, for apple juice without any pesticides in it. She got the price of gold for her apples, he'd give her that much, even if she did let the bugs have free run of her property. But it always worried Garnett when those pickers came in to work for her during the peak harvest. Last year half her pickers had been those young Mexican banditos who came up here for the tobacco cutting and hanging and stayed on until stripping time. Which right there, to begin with, was a sure sign of things gone out of whack: farmers had so little family to count on anymore that they had to turn to a foreign land to get help with their tobacco cutting and stripping. You could hear those boys in town, summer or fall, making themselves right at home and speaking in tongues. Apparently they meant to settle in. The Kroger's in Egg Fork had started selling those flat-looking Mexican pancakes, just to lure them into staying here year-round, it seemed. That was how you really knew what the world had stooped to: foreign food in the Kroger's.
Garnett held aside the curtain in his kitchen window and angled for a better view, though it was fairly hopeless at this distance. Dr. Gibben had been pestering him for years to get the surgery for the cataracts, and up until right
about now Garnett hadn't even considered it. His thinking was, the less he could see of this world of woe, the better. But now he realized it might be the gentlemanly thing to do, to let those doctors take a knife to his eyes. For the sake of others. With so many bandits running loose, you never knew when a neighbor might need you to come to her aid.
Well, the boy had left, he'd seen to that. Garnett had stood his ground right here by his kitchen window and watched while that boy gave her the envelope and then high-tailed that little green jeep back to Roanoke, where people had nothing better to do than think up ridiculous new names for old roads.
But Nannie was acting strange. That was what worried Garnett. She was still standing out on the grass in front of her house as if that boy had said something awful enough to glue her to the spot. He'd driven away five minutes ago, and she was still standing there with the letter in her hand, looking up at the mountains. The look of her wasn't right. She seemed to be crying or praying, and neither one of those was a thing you reasonably expected from Nannie Rawley. It weighed on Garnett's mind, wondering what the young man had said or done to upset her this much. Because, really, you never knew who might be next.
When Garnett positively couldn't wait any longer he went to the bathroom, and when he came back to the window she was gone. She must have gone into the house. He tried to putter around his kitchen and get his mind on something else, but there weren't any dishes to wash (he'd just had dinner at Pinkie's). And there was no point even thinking about what to cook for supper (Pinkie's was all-you-can-eat!). And he didn't dare go outside. It wasn't that he meant to spy on Nannie outright. Whatever was going on over there, it really didn't matter to him one way or the other. He had plenty of other things to do, and people who were counting on him to do them. That girl over at the Widener place with her goat troubles, for one. Poor little thing, a Lexington girl! Petunia in the onion patch. He would go upstairs right now and get down his veterinary manual and look up about the vaccine, check whether those goats would need seven-way or eight-way. He hadn't been sure when he told her. They didn't get red-water disease in goats around here, but there might be some other reason to go with the eight-way. Now he couldn't even remember which one he'd told her to use. It had felt so strange going over there to that house again. It had put his head in a peculiar twist, as if Ellen could be alive again, just for the time being.
Prodigal Summer: A Novel Page 38