If he took his time he would remember. Weed killer, of course! Roundup, one-gallon concentrate. He almost laughed aloud. It was coming back: Roundup, malathion, and paint markers for the trees, which he really shouldn't buy; he had some in the barn.
"Now does it sound like more of a whine, or more of a buzz? Because when the gearing pops out of whack, hit'll do that on you." One of the brothers up at the register was chatting with a customer. That would be Big, or Marshall. Dink always stayed by the door.
"What I'm saying is I didn't even hear it," the customer argued. "I turned my back and it ran off down the hill."
Weed killer and malathion. He spied a bottle of malathion on a shelf midway down the aisle past the galvanized buckets. Even though it was a spray bottle and not the size he needed, he walked over and seized it for courage. He was an old man lost in a hardware store, missing the fine print on all he surveyed; he needed to arm himself. What else had been on that list?
"They don't make them any bigger than that, or any meaner. Just a monster, and you'll have to take my word for it," the customer said.
"Well, Big here's the expert on big," said Marshall.
"Now, you boys aren't listening to me," the voice said coyly.
The brothers were laughing to beat the band, but Garnett's heart skipped a beat. He knew that voice. Good Lord in Heaven, was he meant to suffer like Job? It was Nannie Rawley.
Garnett stood next to the wheelbarrow at the end of the aisle, listening. How could she be here when she'd been down the street selling froufrou at the Amish market ten minutes ago? Was she one of those Unitarian witches, whizzing around Egg Fork on a broomstick? He leaned forward and peered around a stack of galvanized buckets, looking for an escape path. He could just leave, go home, get his list, and come back in half an hour. There would still be time for fish dinner afterward. Pinkie's stayed open till four.
But there was no way out. The register was near the front door, and that was where she was, holding court, making her ridiculous small talk with Dink, Big, and Marshall. He nearly covered his ears, so unbearable was that voice to him. However entertaining it might be proving at the moment to the indolent Little brothers. They were laughing like a pack of hyenas.
"Not a snapper!" one of them cried.
"Yes, a snapper," she replied, sounding both indignant and amused.
Garnett sat down in the wheelbarrow and held his head in his hands. This was too much to bear. This was beyond even what he expected of Nannie Rawley, whose sole claim on any kind of decency was that she was generally not a rumormonger.
"Law, I think I'da had to seen that to believe it," said Marshall, practically doubled over with amusement.
How could she do this to Garnett, her own good neighbor? How dared she ridicule him in public over that business with the snapping turtle? When the whole thing had been her fault!
"It was her fault," he said faintly, much too faintly to be heard, from his undignified post in the wheelbarrow. "Her weeds."
They were still braying like donkeys as they rang up her purchases--did it take all three Littles to ring up a blessed purchase? They were acting like schoolboys, making over her as if she were some beauty queen instead of a backbiting hag in a calico skirt. She had this whole town under her spell. Now she was asking for their advice about roofing compounds! Was there to be no end to this torment? Apparently she meant to stand there flirting all day, until Pinkie's Diner closed and the chickens went home to roost.
Garnett was going to have to march past them. This became clear. Suddenly all he could do was picture himself safely home at his kitchen table reading the farm news in the paper. That was where he wanted to be, more desperately than he desired any love or grace on this earth or beyond it: home. He wouldn't even go to Pinkie's. There was no point now. It was all-you-can-eat, and he'd lost his appetite.
Garnett stood tall and marched toward the door, holding his spray bottle of malathion in front of him to clear the path. They turned to stare as he stalked wordlessly and with great dignity past the counter.
"Why, Mr. Walker!" she cried.
Well howdy-do to you, he thought. There you are, caught in your tracks, you old biddy, you and your gossipmongering friends. Let your sins keep you awake at night. He nearly knocked his head a second time on the June Mower Sale sign but remembered to duck--praise Jesus!--in the nick of time.
He found his truck and was two blocks down the street past the Amish market before his heart stopped pounding in his ears. And he was beyond Black Store, halfway up Route 6 to his house, somewhere in front of Nannie Rawley's farm frontage, when it occurred to him that her lawn mower was a Snapper. Her mower that he knew had been giving her trouble, which she'd purchased at Little Brothers'. A Snapper.
He was parked in his own driveway before he realized he had shoplifted a bottle of malathion.
{10}
Moth Love
Swallows looped and dived inside the barn, swooping from their nests in the rafters overhead toward the doorway and out into the bright-purple evening, where the low sun glinted off their streamlined, back-curved wings. They were like little fighter planes, angry at any intrusion, expressing their ire in motion like bullets. Every evening Lusa came into the barn to milk, and every evening the swallows responded this way. Like some people, she thought: short on sense, long on ambition. Sunset canceled all previous gains, and the world was good for a fresh fight every day.
Her thoughts trailed off into a kind of trance as she milked and watched the barn swallows make their repetitious oval flights out over the flat surface of the pond, which the sunset had laminated with gold leaf. Suddenly she jumped, startling the cow. Little Rickie was standing in the doorway, all six and a half feet of him.
"Hey, Rickie. How's it going?" He ambled toward the stanchion where she sat on a stool working the udder to its end. Down here in the cellar of the barn where the stalls were, the roof was low. Little Rickie's head nearly touched the rafters.
"Good, I reckon."
"Well, good. How's your family?"
Rickie cleared his throat. "Fine, I guess. Dad sent me up to tell you we won't be setting tobacco on Saturday. Tomorrow, I guess he means."
"No?" She looked up at him. "Why not? The ground is drying out. I walked out there on the tobacco bottom this afternoon, and it's not that bad. In fact I called down there to tell him everything looked good for tomorrow, but nobody was home. I think the rain's really stopped, finally."
Rickie looked as if he'd rather be anywhere in the county, pretty much, than in this barn talking with Lusa. A family trait. "Well, Uncle Herb said he's got real busy with his calves. And Dad said you wasn't all that interested in us setting your tobacco anyways, is what they said."
"Oh, I see. I'm supposed to go down there and apologize for my rash attempt at self-rule and beg them on bended knee to come set my tobacco." She saw she was being punished: the tobacco had been their idea, and now they were using it against her. Lusa put her shaking hands on her knees to force some calm onto herself. Her sudden anger had upset the cow enough to stop her milk for the moment. There was nothing doing until she let down again. Cows were a lesson in patience.
Rickie shrugged his shoulders inside his jean jacket, that particular movement owned by teenaged boys trying to fit their adult bodies. She shouldn't speak her mind to this kid, she realized; he must already consider her a hysteric. A redhead, Cole used to say. The boy kept a nervous eye on Lusa while he shook a cigarette out of his pack and lit it. As an afterthought he held out the pack to her, but she shook her head.
"No thanks, I don't smoke. Which is a misdemeanor in this county, I gather."
He ran a hand through his thick black hair. "I don't think Dad and them is wanting you to get on your knees and beg them or nothing."
"No," she said. "I'm sorry for snapping. I didn't mean that literally."
"Anyways it wouldn't matter if you did, since Dad didn't get sets from Jackie Doddard. There's prolly none left in the whole county b
y now, I don't reckon."
"Oh. Well, I guess that settles it. My goose is cooked."
She returned her hands to the cow's udder and manipulated it gently to submission. There was no sound in the barn but the rhythmic ring of the milk stream against the metal bucket and the syncopated, soggy-sounding drips from the waterlogged joists where the roof had leaked. Every drip reminded Lusa of the barn-fixing money she didn't have and now would not earn from tobacco.
"Got some leaks," Rickie said, looking up.
"About three thousand dollars' worth, I'm guessing. Maybe more, once they get into those rotten roof beams."
"Hay's going to spoil."
"Oh, don't worry about that. I probably won't even get any hay mowed or put up in the barn this summer. The baler's broken down, and the tractor's probably going to be repossessed. I was thinking I'd just let the cows eat snow this year."
Little Rickie stared at her. His big body was a cool seventeen, but his face looked younger. What was wrong with her, why was she venting her ironic wrath on this child? He was only the messenger. She was shooting the messenger.
"Hey," he said. "I'm real sorry about, you know. Uncle Cole."
"Thank you. Me, too." She exhaled slowly. "It hasn't even been a month. Twenty-seven days. Seems like twenty-seven years."
He repositioned himself against one of the massive old chestnut posts that held up the upper floor of the barn. Upstairs where they hung the tobacco, the barn was lofty as a cathedral, but down here where the animals stayed it was friendly and close with the sweet, mixed smells of grain, manure, and milk.
"Me and Uncle Cole used to go fishing. He ever tell you about that? We'd skip school together and go trout fishing up on Zeb Mountain. Man, it's pretty up there. They've got trees so big you just about fall over from looking at them."
"You'd skip school together?" Lusa considered this. "When you were in first or second grade, Cole was still in high school. I never even thought about that. He was your pal. Like a big brother."
"Yeah." Rickie looked down, being careful where he put his cigarette ash. "He always told me stuff. How to talk to girls and stuff."
Lusa raised the heel of her hand against one eye and turned away, unprepared to cry in front of Rickie. "Yeah. That was one thing he sure knew how to do."
The cow lowed, a small protest in the dripping silence. Her calf in the neighboring stall immediately began to bawl, as if he'd just woken up to the injustice of milk robbery.
"Milking, huh?" Rickie noted.
"Yep."
"Looks like you're good at it."
"Cole taught me; he said I had a talent. Stupid thing to be good at, right?"
"Not really. Animals, you know. They can tell what's what. You can't fool them like you can people."
The calf next door was still bawling, and she crooned to calm him: "Hush now, your mama will be there in a minute." He quieted, and Lusa returned to the milking. There was comfort in this work. Sometimes she felt flooded with the mental state of her Jersey cow--a humble, unsurprised wonder at the fact of still being here in this barn at the end of each day. Lusa actually enjoyed the company. She'd been tempted to name her, until Cole pointed out that they were going to eat her child.
"Uncle Herb, over at his dairy? Him and the cows is like oil and water, he says. He does all the milking with machines. Hooks up bossy to the tank and sucks her dry."
"Yikes. Poor bossy."
"I don't think they mind it none. They're just cows."
"True."
"How many times a day you milk her, twiced?"
Twiced, they all said. Oncet, twiced. She wondered if that was a vestige of Old English hanging on in these isolated mountain towns. "I just milk once a day, believe it or not. Even that's more than I need now. Just before you came in that door, I was making up my mind for this to be my last milking."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. Tomorrow I'm pasturing this girl out with her calf so all that milk can go to the stomach it was made for. It doesn't do much for mine."
"Don't care for milk, do you?"
"It doesn't cd this for Cole because he loved fresh cream. I like making yogurt, laban zabadi--I'll miss that. But I've frozen enough butter and cheese to last me all winter, and fresh milk I just don't need. Unless your family wants it?"
"Nah, we get a gallon a day from Uncle Herb. We drink it, too. Mostly I do."
"Well, good for you. I wasn't raised on it like you were." Lusa was finished. She opened the stanchion to release the cow's head and carefully backed her out of it. The gentle old Jersey ambled straight to the stall that held her calf, and Lusa let her in, giving her broad flank one good pat for good-bye. She felt ridiculous for the tears in her eyes.
"Yeah, Mom said you were...something."
"She thinks I'm something, does she? That's nice." Lusa brushed off her jeans and shook bits of hay out of the tails of her stained white work shirt, which reached to her knees. It was one of Cole's, pulled on over a rust-colored velvet T-shirt she used to feel pretty in, once.
"No, I mean, some nationality."
"I knew what you meant. Rickie, everybody's some nationality."
"Not me. I'm just American."
"Is that why you've got a Rebel flag on the bumper of your truck? Because the Confederacy tried to bust up the American government, you know."
"A southern American, then. What are you?"
"That's a good question. Polish-Arab-American, I guess."
"Huh. You don't look it."
"No? What do I look like to you?" She stood under the light, holding her arms out straight against the planks of the stanchion. Her hair was curly and wild in this humidity, a strawberry-blond halo around her face in the harsh light. Small white moths batted circles around the lightbulb overhead. Rickie inspected her politely.
"You look like a white person," he said.
"My mom's parents were Palestinian, and my dad's were Jews from Poland. I'm the black sheep of your family, and for all that I still sunburn like nobody's business. Just goes to show you, Rickie, you can't tell a book by its cover."
"I heard Mom and Aunt Mary Edna talking about that, that you were one of those other Christianities."
"I can just imagine that conversation." She picked up the flathead shovel to clean up the floor of the milking parlor, but Rickie took it out of her hands, excusing himself for bumping her shoulder. She never knew how to take these country kids--rudeness and politeness in an unfathomable mix. He scraped the manure into a small pile and carried it a shovelful at a time to the mound just outside the door.
"It wasn't nothing against you, Aunt Lusa," he said from the darkness, giving her a jolt. It had been so long since she'd heard her name spoken aloud. Twenty-eight days, exactly. Nobody else in the family ever said it. Rickie ducked back into the bright milking parlor. "It was just one time when they were just talking about, what if you and Uncle Cole had kids. This was before..."
"He died. When kids were more of an option for us."
"Yeah. I think they just wondered, you know, how the church part would work. That it would be hard on his kids."
She gathered up the bucket and rag she'd used to wash the Jersey's udder, and set the lid onto the stainless steel milking bucket. The rim felt warm.
"It wasn't hard on me, being mix-and-match," she said. "I'll grant you we weren't really devout, either way. My dad hated his father and kind of turned his back on his religion. And I'm not a good Muslim, that's for sure. If I were, you'd see me turning"--she rotated slowly in the barn cellar, finding east--"that way and kneeling down to pray five times a day."
"You pray towards the chicken house?"
"Toward Mecca."
"Where's that at, North Carolina?"
She laughed. "Saudi Arabia. It's where the prophet Muhammad was born, so you send your prayers in his direction. And you have to wash your hands first, too."
Now Rickie looked amused. "You wash your hands before you pray?"
"Listen, you haven't se
en religious. You're not supposed to touch alcohol or cigarettes, and women cover themselves up totally, all but their eyes." She held her hands in front of her face, peering through her fingers. "If a man sees a woman's foot, even, or her shape, it'll lead him to impure thoughts, see? And it's all her fault."
"Man, that's harsh. I thought Aunt Mary Edna was harsh. You believe in that?"
"Do I look like it? No, my mom never even wore the veil. Her parents were already pretty westernized when they left Gaza. But I have cousins who do." Yeah?"
"Yep. The American version is a scarf and a long raincoat. I'd always have to do that whenever we went to the mosque with Mom's relatives in New York."
His eyes widened. "You've been to New York City?"
She wondered what that place was in his mind. As far from the truth as this barn was in the minds of her Bronx cousins. "A hundred times," she said. "My parents both came from there. We always tried to go back for their families' holidays. I think the deal on religion between Mom and Dad was that we'd skip the guilt-and-punishment stuff and celebrate the holidays. Feasts, basically." Lusa smiled, thinking of boy cousins and music and reckless dancing among lawn chairs in a small backyard, festivals of love and fitting in. "I grew up on the best food you can imagine."
"Huh. I thought people that didn't believe in God just mostly worshiped the devil and stuff."
"Whoa, Rickie!" She laughed weakly, sitting back down on her milking stool. "Don't you think there might be a couple of options in between?"
He shrugged, embarrassed. "Maybe."
This was her cue, surely, to shrug this boy off and shoo him home. But then what? Wait for Cole to explain her to this family? Her body ached with the burden of her aloneness. Nobody was going to do this for her. She pressed her folded hands between her knees and looked up at him. "Who are you saying doesn't believe in God? Jews believe in God. Muslims believe in God. To tell the truth, most Jewish people and all Muslims I know spend more time thinking about God than you do around here. And definitely less of their church time on gossip."