{20}
Old Chestnuts
Garnett paused halfway up the hill to take a rest. His heart was beating harder than seemed entirely necessary. He could hear the grumble and whine of the boy’s chain saw already at work up there. She would be there, too, by now. They’d agreed to meet at noon to work out dividing the firewood and so on, and it was fourteen after, if his watch could be trusted. Well, she could wait. He was her elder; she could have a little respect. He sat down on a log next to the creek, just for a minute.
A damselfly lit on the tip of a horsetail reed very close to his head, near enough for him to see it well. He couldn’t remember looking at one of these since he was a boy—they’d called them snake doctors—and yet, after all those years, here one was. Probably they’d been flittering around this creek all along, whether he paid them any notice or not. He leaned closer to inspect it: it was just about like a dragonfly, except that its wings folded back when it sat still instead of sticking out to the sides. This one’s wings were black, not quite opaque but sheer like lace, with a pearly white dot at each wingtip. It reminded Garnett somehow of the underthings of women he’d known long ago, back when women wore garter belts and other contrivances that took some time and trouble to remove. Maybe women still did wear such things. How would he know? Ellen had been dead eight years, and for decades before that he certainly had had no occasion to learn about women’s undergarments. He was a faithful man, a good Christian, and Ellen had been, too. She’d believed in the kind of sturdy cotton you could hang on the line without shame.
Now, why on earth was he sitting here in the woods thinking about women’s underthings? He felt deeply embarrassed and prayed hastily to the Lord to forgive the unpredictable frailties of an old man’s mind. He found his feet and headed on up the hill.
She was there, all right, having some kind of jolly conversation with the boy, who had put down the chain saw and fallen into her thrall as people always did. Like lambs to the slaughter, Garnett thought, but he found himself unexpectedly amused by the sight of this immense young hoodlum nodding courteously to the tiniest gray-haired woman ever to stalk the woods in a long skirt and hiking boots. They both turned to greet him.
“Mr. Walker! Now, you remember Oda’s son Jarondell, don’t you?”
“Of course. My regards to your mother.” Remember Jarondell, he thought. That was a name for you. He was more likely to remember the expiration date on his can of Sevin dust.
“We were discussing maybe taking down a few more of these leaners,” she told Garnett. “As long as we’ve got Jarondell up here. That cherry down the path, for one. It’s over so far, I’d be surprised if it made it to the end of summer.”
Oh, dear Lord, that cherry! Garnett had forgotten all about it, had sat right under it five minutes ago when he paused to rest by the creek. He’d forgotten to worry about the tree falling on him! The thought set him nearly into a panic, so that he was much too aware of the beating of his heart. He laid a hand on his chest.
“What’s wrong? Are you attached to that cherry?” She watched him with a worried look, causing him a strong and unwelcome recollection of the day she’d bent over him in the grass and declared that he hadn’t had a stroke, he had a turtle.
“Goodness, no,” he said huffily. “That’s fine, you might as well take that tree down. It’s a danger and a nuisance.”
She looked relieved. “Oh, I wouldn’t go that far. It’s just a tree.” Her eyes twinkled. “Now of course you’ll agree that if Jarondell gets it to fall on my side of the creek, the firewood is all mine.”
How that woman loved to aggravate him! She was like a little banty hen just spoiling for a fight. Garnett forced a smile, or the nearest thing to it. “That sounds fair.”
She gave him a second look before turning back to Oda’s boy (already he’d forgotten the name). The boy stood with his muscular arms crossed and his shaved head gleaming like that Mr. Clean-Up man on Ellen’s ammonia bottles, so tall and strapping that Nannie had to shade her eyes from the sun when she looked up at him, though of course that didn’t slow her down any. She talked nonstop, pointing this way and that and up into the trees as they chatted (did she not realize they were paying this boy by the hour?). She seemed very interested in the process of felling trees. But of course, that was Nannie Rawley. She was interested in what your dog ate for dinner. Garnett shook his head dramatically—for no audience, it turned out, since she and the boy had already forgotten he was there. He might as well be a tree himself. When the chain saw roared up again, he had to raise his voice considerably to get her attention. “If you get the cherry,” he called, “then this one is going to be mine, I gather.”
She held her hands over her ears and motioned that they should go down the path. He followed her around a bend where the roar receded to a whine, but she kept walking, all the way down to the log where he had rested earlier. The damselflies were still hovering, a great many of them now, collecting as if for a social event.
“Not here,” he said with alarm, pointing up. “We really mustn’t tarry here.”
“Good night,” she cried. “Don’t tell me you think that cherry’s going to fall on you! You think you’re that special?” She sat down on the log beside the creek, fluffing her yellow print skirt modestly down over her calves. She looked up at him expectantly. “Well, come on, take a load off.”
He hesitated.
“It would sure make the paper, wouldn’t it? ‘Two Old Fogies Felled by a Single Tree.’”
“All right,” Garnett said, sitting down grumpily a yard away from her on the log. The woman could make you feel a fool just for minding your own business.
“Don’t mind me,” she said. “I’m in a tizzy today.”
Today, he thought. “Over what, now?” He tried to sound like a father indulging a child, but the effect was lost on her. She launched eagerly onto her soapbox, leaning forward and clasping her hands on her knees and looking him straight in the face.
“It’s bees,” she said. “Down at the Full Gospel church they’ve got themselves in a pickle from killing their bees. Killing them—they fumigated! Why didn’t they call me first? I’d have smoked them and got the queen out so they’d all come out of the walls in time. I could use another hive on my place. Goodness me, I could use twenty more hives—the way people are using insecticide around here, I can use every bee I can get to pollinate my apples. But no, now they call me. After they’ve got a mess on their hands that any child could have predicted.”
Garnett worried over her phrasing. What mess was caused by killing bees that any child could predict? He was evasive. “Well. That must be a bother for them at the worship services.” He cast a nervous eye up toward the leaning tree.
But Nannie was heedless of their peril. “Honey two inches deep on the floor of the whole church, oozing out of the walls, and they’re blaming the poor dead bees.”
Oh, goodness, what a picture. Garnett could just see the women in their church shoes. “Well,” he contended, “it was the bees that made the honey in the wall.”
“And it’s the bees that need to vibrate their wings over it night and day to keep it cool in July. Without workers in there to cool the hive, that comb’s going to melt, and all the honey will come pouring out.” She shook her head sadly. “Don’t people know these things? Are we old folks the only ones left that think twice about the future?”
He felt a small thrill to be included in her compliment. But he studied her face and couldn’t quite work out whether she meant him in particular or old people in general. And now she was headed off on her own tangent.
“You’d think young people would be more careful. They’re the ones that are going to be around in fifty years. Not us.”
“No, not us,” Garnett agreed mournfully. He tried not to think of his chestnut fields overgrown with weeds, waving their un-tended, carefully crossbred leaves like flags of surrender in a world that did not even remember what was at stake. Who would care about his projec
t when he was gone? Nobody. That was the answer: not one living soul. He had kept this truth at a distance for so long, it nearly made him weep with relief to embrace the simple, honest grief of it. He rested his hands on his knees, breathed in and out. Let the cherry tree fall on him now, get it over. What did it matter?
They sat silent for a while, listening to the wood thrushes. Nannie pulled a handful of cockleburs from her skirt and then, without really appearing to give it much thought, reached over and plucked half a dozen from the knees of Garnett’s khaki trousers. He felt strangely moved by this fussy little bit of female care. He realized vaguely that as a mortal man, he was starved. He cleared his throat. “Did it ever cross your mind that God—or whatever you want to call him, with your balance of nature and so forth—that he got carried away with the cockleburs?”
“There’s too many of them. I’ll have to agree with you on that.”
Garnett felt faintly cheered: she agreed. “You can’t blame me for that one, now, can you? People’s spraying or meddling. For the cocklebur problem.”
“Oh, I probably could if I tried. But it’s a nice day, so I won’t.”
They sat awhile longer in silence. “Why did they call you?” he asked finally, thinking of the woman who had been phoning him up lately for livestock advice. A goat maven, she had called him. He glanced over at Nannie, but she seemed lost in her own thoughts. “The church ladies, with their bee problem?”
“Oh, why me and not somebody else? I guess I’m the only one around here that keeps them anymore. Isn’t that sad, that nobody in this county under the age of seventy knows how to work bees? Everybody used to. Now they’ve all let their hives go.”
Garnett did think this was sad. As a child he had enjoyed putting on the bee bonnet and helping his father with the honey chores, spring and fall. He honestly couldn’t say why he had let that go. “What did you tell them? About the honey on the floor?”
She grinned and looked at him sideways. “I’m afraid I wasn’t very nice. I told them that the Lord moves in mysterious ways, and that among all his creatures he loves honeybees just about the best. I told them it was in the Scripture. I expect they’re all leafing through their Bibles right now to see what it says about God’s sending down a plague on the killers of bees.”
“What does it say?”
“Oh, nothing. I just made that up.”
“Oh,” Garnett said, suppressing a smile in spite of himself. “Then they probably just called all the ladies to come down with mop buckets.”
Nannie Rawley snorted. “What a lot of sweetness wasted on a bunch of sourpusses.”
Garnett declined to comment.
“It was that Mary Edna Goins that called me. Mad as hops, like the whole idea of a honeybee was my fault.” She glanced over at him, then looked away. “Mr. Walker, I don’t like to say an unkind word about my fellow man, and I hope you won’t think I’m a gossip. But that woman has about the worst case of herself I’ve ever seen.”
Garnett laughed. He had known Mary Edna Goins since before she was a Goins. Once she had called up to tell him that having goat projects in 4-H was giving young people an undue opportunity to think about Satan.
He carefully kept an eye on the cherry tree. “We were going to discuss firewood,” he said. “You can have this one.”
“Thank you, it’s mine already,” she said primly. “Are you going to give me my house and land, too?”
“All right, no need to get huffy,” he said.
“I agree. I don’t need that much firewood anyway. I’ll take the wood from this one, you take the oak, and we’ll split whatever Jarondell charges us to cut up both.”
He knew better than to accept her offer without thinking it over first. He gazed up into the dimness of her woods and was surprised to notice a sapling waggling its leaves in the breeze, uphill from the creek. “Why, look, that’s a chestnut, isn’t it?” He pointed.
“It is. A young one,” she said.
“My eyes aren’t good, but I can spy a chestnut from a hundred paces.”
“That one’s come up from an old stump where a big one was cut down years ago,” she said. “I’ve noticed they always do that. As long as the roots keep living, the sprouts will keep coming out around the stump. But before they get big enough to flower, they always die. Why is that?”
“The blight chancre has to get up a head of steam before it sets off other little chancres and kills the tree. It takes eight or nine years out in the open, or longer in the woods, where a tree grows slower. The fungus inside there is more or less proportional to the size of the trunk. But you’re right, they’re just about sure to die before they get up enough size to set any seeds. So biologically speaking, the species is dead.”
“Biologically dead. Like us,” she said with no particular emotion.
“That’s right,” he said uncomfortably. “If we consider ourselves as having no offspring.”
“And unlikely to produce any more at this point.” She let out an odd little laugh.
He didn’t need to comment on that.
“Now, tell me something,” she said. “I’ve always wondered this. Your hybrids are American chestnut stock crossed with Chinese chestnut, right?”
“That’s right. And backcrossed with American again. If I can keep at it long enough I’ll get a cross that has all the genes of an American chestnut except for the one that makes it susceptible to blight.”
“And the gene for the resistance comes from the Chinese side?”
“That’s right.”
“But where did you get the American chestnut seed stock to begin with?”
“That’s a good question. I had to look high and low,” Garnett said, pleased as punch. No one had asked him a question about his project in many a year. Once Ellen had talked her niece into bringing her third-grade class out to see it, but those children had acted like it was a sporting event.
“Well, such as where?” she asked, truly interested.
“I wrote letters and made calls to Forest Service men and what all. Finally I located two standing American chestnuts that were still flowering, about as sick and old as a tree can get but not dead yet. I paid a boy to climb up and cut me down some flowers, and I put them in a bag and brought them back here and pollinated a Chinese tree I had in my yard, and from the nuts I grew out my first field of seedlings. That gave me my first generation, the half-Americans.”
“Where were the old trees? I’m just curious.”
“One was in Hardcastle County, and one was over in West Virginia. Lonely old things, flowering but not setting any seeds because they had no neighbors to cross with. There are still a few around. Not many, but a few.”
“Oh, I know it.”
“There were probably plenty, back in the forties,” Garnett went on. “Do you remember when the CCC was telling us to cut every last one down? We thought they were all going anyway. But now, if you think about it, that wasn’t so good. Some of them could have made it through. Enough to make a comeback.”
“Oh, they would have,” she agreed. “Daddy was adamant about that. Those two up here in our woodlot, he was determined not to let anybody get. One night he stopped a man that was up here aiming to cut them down and haul them off with a mule before the sun came up!”
“You had chestnut trees in your woodlot?” Garnett asked.
She cocked her head. “Don’t you know the ones I mean? There’s the one about a quarter mile up this hill, just awful-looking because of all the dead limbs it’s dropped. But it still sets a few seeds every year, which the squirrels eat up. And the other one is way on top of the ridge, in about the same shape.”
“You have two reproductive American chestnuts in your woodlot?”
“Are you fooling with me? You didn’t know?”
“How would I have known that?”
She started to speak, then paused, touched her lip, then spoke. “I never really think of the woods as belonging to us, exactly. I walk all over your hills when I fe
el like it. I just assumed you did the same with mine.”
“I haven’t trespassed on your land since the day your father bought it from mine.”
“Well,” she said cheerfully. “You should have.”
He wondered if this was really possible, what she was telling him. Certainly she knew apples, but did she honestly know a chestnut from a cherry? He glanced up at the offending cherry tree again and became convinced it was leaning farther than it had been this morning. A squirrel bounded carelessly up its trunk, which was just too much for Garnett. The sound of a loud crack overhead caused him to look straight up, even though he knew better and had long been in the habit of avoiding that movement. Oh, oh, oh! The curse of his dizziness came crashing down. He held his head and moaned aloud as the woods spun around him crazily. He leaned over and put his head between his knees, knowing it would do no good for him to close his eyes—that would only make him want to throw up.
“Mr. Walker?” She leaned down and looked into his terror-stricken face.
“Nothing. It will pass. A few minutes. Don’t mind me. Nothing you can help.”
But she was still peering into his face. “Nystagmus,” she pronounced.
“What?” He felt annoyed and foolish and weak and fiercely wished she would go away. But she kept looking right at his eyes.
“Your eyes are jerking to the left, over and over—it’s called nystagmus. You must be having a doozy of a dizzy spell.”
He didn’t answer. The spinning tree trunks were slowing up now, like a merry-go-round winding down. It would pass in a few more minutes.
“Do you get it in bed, too, lying on your back?”
He nodded. “That’s the darnedest. It wakes me up if I roll over in my sleep.”
“You poor thing. That’s a misery. You know how to fix it, don’t you?”
He moved his head very carefully to face her. “There’s a cure?”
“How long have you had this?”
Prodigal Summer Page 34