Prodigal Summer

by Barbara Kingsolver

  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.

  Her greatest regret was that she’d never gone to see that baby—that was what she told him, last thing, there in the hospital bed. Greatest regret, as if there’d been a whole host of others a husband couldn’t be told about. And now there were two babies, a boy and a girl, Garnett believed. Ellen never even knew about the second one. Garnett had come so close to asking the Widener girl about them, the other day when he went over there. He’d stood right there on that porch and had it in him to do it, the words in his mouth, but then he’d turned uncertain. Who was this gal with her goats, anyhow? She was nice enough for a city person, surprisingly nice, but how in tarnation had she wound up here in a man’s long-tailed shirt in the middle of a field of thistles and nanny goats? Garnett had asked several polite questions but never had been able to work out exactly what business she had running that farm by herself. It was still the old family homeplace, but the people in it seemed to have shifted. Were those two children even still around? What if they and the mother had moved to Knoxville like everybody and his dog seemed to be doing these days? What if Garnett had been sitting twiddling his thumbs and in the meantime lost his chance to find out about those kids? People were just piling up their belongings and racing for Knoxville like it was the California gold rush, since day one after they put in that Toyota plant over there. Pretty soon there’d be no one left in this county but old folks waiting to die.

  The hall window upstairs gave a good view of the side orchard and Nannie’s backyard, and a little later on toward evening he was able to spot her from there, working in her garden. She was picking her tomatoes. She had more tomatoes than you could shake a stick at and sold them for a scandalous price at the Amish market. He squinted through the wavy, ancient glass of this window.

  Well. There was somebody out there with her! That blue and white blotch at the edge of her garden was, now that he looked at it, a man in a hat leaning on the fence. It wasn’t the Forest Service boy, it was somebody else, a heavier-set kind of fellow that Garnett didn’t recognize as a neighbor. Could it be one of the pickers, arrived too early? Who else on earth could it be? Clivus Morton had been coming around lately to work on hammering up the new shingles for her, and even Oda Black’s boy what’s-his-name had come by once to visit her, for reasons unknown to Garnett. So! Was Nannie Rawley suddenly attracting men of all ages, from miles around? A seventy-five-year-old woman puts on a pair of short pants, and the fellows come swarming around her like bees to a flower, was that it? (Although Clivus Morton was no honeybee. Garnett had known honeydippers who smelled better, even after they’d pumped out your septic tank.) Was this Clivus? He squinted. Darn this window, he swore mildly, it was as hazy as his eyes. Dirty, too. He hadn’t cleaned it since—well, he’d never cleaned it, period.

  He moved to the other side of the window, but it didn’t help much. He could see she was out there filling her bushel basket and evidently talking up a storm because that stranger, whoever he was (and no, it was not Clivus), just stood there leaning forward with his elbows on the top rail of her garden fence as if he had nothing in this world to do but stand there leaning on her fence. He didn’t seem to have a speck of manners, either. He could have at least offered to carry the bushel basket while she picked. Garnett would have done that much. You didn’t have to agree with everything a person said, or approve of the condition of her soul, to show some simple consideration.

  Garnett felt his blood pressure going up. It began to agitate him so, he had to step away from the window. For goodness’ sakes, whoever that man was out there, he had no business with her. Garnett felt a murky, un-Christian feeling clouding in his heart. He hated that man. He hated his whole bearing, leaning on that fence as if he had nothing better to do with his life than listen all day to Nannie Rawley and look at her picking tomatoes in short pants.

  {27}

  Moth Love

  Thursday dawned cool again, and stayed cool all day. Lusa felt energized by the change in weather, which was lucky for her since the work never stopped. If she’d known how much work there would be in August, she would have considered July a vacation. The garden was like a baby bird in reverse, calling to her relentlessly, opening its maw and giving, giving. She spent the whole morning with the canner rumbling on the stove, processing quarts of cling peaches, while she cut up and blanched piles of carrots, peppers, okra, and summer squash for the freezer. She had put up thirty pints of kosher dills and still had so many cucumbers that she was having desperate thoughts. Here was one: She could put them in plastic grocery sacks and drive down the road hanging them on people’s mailboxes like they did with the free samples of fabric softener. She tried the idea on Jewel when she came up to bring Lusa her mail.

  Jewel asked, “Have you done any pickles yet?”

  Lusa leaned forward on her stool until her forehead rested on the cutting board.

  “I take it that means yes,” Jewel said. “Lord, I can’t believe what you’ve done here.” Lusa sat up and caught Jewel’s nostalgic admiration. The jars of golden peaches lined up on the counter looked like currency from another time. “Nobody’s done this much putting up since Mommy died. You should be real proud of yourself. And you should quit. Don’t kill yourself. Give it away.”

  “I have.” Lusa gestured with her paring knife. “People down the road run the other way when they see me coming. I caught Mary Edna behind her house throwing the squash I’d given her on the compost pile.”

  “Don’t feel bad. Some summers just overdo it like this and there’s a little too much of everything. You can let some of it go.”

  “I can’t, though. Look at those peaches, I should throw those away? That would be a sin.” Lusa smiled, self-conscious but proud of herself. “The truth is, I like doing it. I won’t have to spend money on food this year. And it seems like hard work is the only thing that stops my brain from running in circles.”

  “Isn’t that the truth. I’d be up here helping you if I had the energy.”

  “I know you would. Remember that day you helped me with the cherries?”

  “Lord, Lord.” Jewel sat against the table. “A hundred and ten years ago.”

  “Seems like that to me, too,” Lusa said, recalling her ravaged psyche that day when widowhood had still been new and fierce: her helplessness against life, her struggle to trust Jewel. Crys and Lowell had been strangers she was a little afraid of; Crystal, in fact, had been a boy. A hundred and ten years ago. “You can just throw the mail on the table. Looks like junk and bills—all I ever get.”

  “All anybody ever gets. Who’d think to write a letter anymore?”

  Lusa swept her pile of sliced carrots into the colander for blanching. Thirty seconds of steam did something to their biochemistry that colored them as orange as daylilies (so why did the canning book call this step blanching?) and kept them perfect in the freezer. “How are you feeling today, Jewel?”

  Jewel put a hand against her cheek. “Pretty good, I think. He’s letting me take more of the painkillers now. It makes me stupid as a cow, but boy, I feel great.” She sounded so sad, Lusa wanted to go sit down next to her and hold her hand.

  “Anything I can do for you today? I’m going to bring down your mother’s vacuum and do your rugs when I get a chance. That thing works miracles.”

  “No, honey, don’t put yourself out. I need to get back to the house. I left Crys in charge of burning the trash, and you know where that could lead. I really just came
up to show you something.”

  “What?” Lusa wiped her hands on her apron and crossed to the kitchen table, curious to see what Jewel was pulling out of an envelope.

  “It’s the papers from Shel. He signed them. I knew he would, but still, it’s a load off my mind. It’s good to be done with it. I wisht I’d done it a year ago.” Jewel unfolded the sheaf of stiff-looking papers and handed them to Lusa for her inspection. She sat down and looked them over, her eyes skimming through words invented by lawyers that seemed to complicate something so pure and simple. These children belonged to their mother. Soon, probably sooner than anyone was prepared to believe, they would come to live with Lusa.

  A signature was scrawled in blue ink at the bottom of two of the pages, in a hand that was masculine but childish, like a fifth-grade boy’s, with the name typed underneath. Lusa stared, astonished, then read it aloud. “Garnett Sheldon Walker the Fourth?”

  “I know,” Jewel said with a dry little laugh. “It sounds like the name of a king or something, doesn’t it? Anyways not a little old rat with a blond mustache.”

  “No, but…” Lusa struggled to put knowledge and words together. “I know that name. I’m friends with his, well, his grandfather, it must be. With that same name. He’s this funny old man who lives over on Highway Six.” Lusa looked from the signature to Jewel. “He’s even been over here, to this house. He helps me with my goat problems.”

  “Oh, well, see, Mr. Walker, that’s Shel’s daddy. He was my in-laws, him and his wife, Ellen. He’s come up here, when? Lately?”