The pounding of What do I want went still in her breast. It didn't matter what she chose. The world was what it was, a place with its own rules of hunger and satisfaction. Creatures lived and mated and died, they came and went, as surely as summer did. They would go their own ways, of their own accord.
{23}
Old Chestnuts
Garnett had made up his mind. He was going to tell her about the shingles. Today, he would tell her.
Nothing was going to get him off the track this time: she could go ahead and be rude, shocking, or blasphemous, it wouldn't matter, he was still going to give her those shingles. He was a Christian man hovering near eighty, and there was no telling when a fellow his age might just keel over. It had happened to younger men, Lord knew. It was not going to happen to Garnett Walker with those shingles moldering in his garage and the sin of spite staining his soul like an inkblot.
Maybe, while he was at it, he would remember to thank her for the pie.
As he walked across his yard toward the gate, he paused to take stock of a pokeberry weed that had shot up in the ditch beside his driveway, out of reach of the mower. He'd been meaning to get down here with the Weedwhacker, but somehow this poke plant had slipped past his good intentions and grown into a monster. It was a tree, practically, ten feet tall, dangling its big, slick leaves and bunches of green berries--all that growth accomplished in just four months, from the ground up, since poke was killed to the ground by frost. He stood with his hands on his hips, scrutinizing its purple trunk. He hated a weed on principle but could not help admiring this thing for its energy. His eye wandered up toward the row of trees that towered along the fencerow, giant leafy masses like tall green storm clouds, and he felt unexpectedly awestruck. A man could live under these things every day and forget to notice their magnitude. Garnett had gradually lost the ability to see individual leaves, but he could still recognize any one of these by its shape: the billowy columns of tulip poplars; the lateral spread of an oak; the stately, upright posture of a walnut; the translucent, effeminate tremble of a wild cherry. The small, lacy locusts were faintly brown this late in summer, and the catalpa at the corner post wore a pale-green color you could pick out on a hillside a mile away, or even farther when it was dangling all over with the long pods that made people call it a bean tree. The sourwood had its white flowers reaching out like skeleton hands in the spring. Trees. Every kind assumed a different slickness in the rain, its particular color in the fall, its own aspect--something you couldn't describe in words but learned by heart when you lived in their midst. Garnett had a strange, sad thought about his own special way of seeing trees inside his mind, and how it would go dark, like a television set going off, at the moment of his death.
What in heaven's name was he doing out here in his driveway looking at trees and thinking about death? He started to turn back toward his house, but from the corner of his sight he registered the rounded shapes of the regularly spaced apples beyond the fencerow and knew, of course, that was it. His mission was Nannie Rawley and the shingles. He thought of going to the garage to check on them first, just to make sure they were in a condition to be offered. But he suspected he might merely be postponing the inevitable. Just pull up your knickers and go, young man, he scolded himself, and obeyed.
He found her in back of the house, where he knew she would be. He'd been keeping an eye out this morning and had seen her carrying an old locust fence rail back there. He'd actually grown a little curious about what she was up to, though he knew curiosity had killed the cat, and that was probably even without the assistance of Nannie Rawley.
She waved merrily when she saw him coming. "Mr. Walker! How's your BPV?"
His what? Was she asking him about underwear? "Fine," he said, with reserved commitment.
"No more dizzy spells? That's wonderful. I'm happy to hear it."
"Oh, that," he said, and the memory of her firm, tender hands cradling his head sent a shock of adrenaline through his old body. He'd had a dream about her, so real to him that he'd awakened plagued with the condition he hadn't known for years. He blushed now to recall the whole business again. He nearly turned tail and ran.
"Are you all right?"
"Much better, yes," he replied, getting his bearings. "I'm not used to it yet. I was so used to getting dizzy, it's taking me a while to get used to not being dizzy."
"That's old age for you, isn't it?" she asked. "If I got out of bed one morning and my knees didn't hurt, I'm not sure how I'd know to walk."
He stared at her, distracted. She wasn't wearing much. He'd noticed that earlier, when he saw her dragging the locust rail up from the ditch. Just a little yellow sleeveless-blouse sort of thing, and short pants. Short pants, on a woman of her age. It was hot, but not so hot as to drive a person to indecent exposure.
"I prayed about that dizziness," he confessed to her. "For several years, I did."
"God moves in mysterious ways," she replied breezily, probably without meaning it in the least. Next she'd be suggesting she was the answer to Garnett's prayers.
"Personally, I've found that my prayers seldom go unanswered," he said, a little more haughtily than he'd meant. "Last August, when it was so dry and so many people were about to lose their tobacco, I got down on my knees and prayed for rain, Miss Rawley. And I want you to know, the very next evening it rained."
She looked at him strangely. "Right before you came over here I had a sneezing fit. I guess my sneezing caused you to come."
"That's a very peculiar thing to say, Miss Rawley."
"Isn't it, though," she replied, turning around and taking up her hammer again.
"I take it you don't put much stock in miracles."
"I'm not in a position to believe in miracles," she said without turning around. She sounded a little angry, or perhaps just a little sad. She was building something, all right, working on that locust rail he'd seen her dragging about. Now she had it propped up onto a sawhorse here in the doorway of her garage and was nailing a crossbar to it. Goodness, it looked like the cross the Romans used for crucifying Jesus Christ. He wasn't going to ask--he made his mind up on that. His second vow of the day; he'd better get to the first.
He cleared his throat and then said, for no good reason, "Did you know there's a pokeberry bush by my driveway that must be eleven feet tall? I've never seen the like."
She paused her hammer and turned back around, eyeing him carefully. "Is that what you came over here to tell me?"
He thought about it. "No. It's just an incidental piece of information."
"Oh. Well, that's something, an eleven-foot pokeberry. If they gave out an award for weeds at the county fair you'd have a contender there. Wouldn't they all be surprised: Garnett Sheldon Walker the Third, first place in the weedy annual category." The usual good cheer had returned to her voice, and he couldn't keep from smiling a little himself. Poke was a half-hardy perennial, not an annual, he was pretty sure, but he refrained from correcting her.
"If I'd thought about it," he said with mock seriousness, "I'd have given it a little ammonium nitrate. I think I could have gotten it up to fourteen feet."
She put down her hammer and seemed to relax. Her trousers, he could plainly see, were a pair of old work pants cut off with scissors. What a thing to do. "You know what I really admire, this time of year?" she asked him.
"I wouldn't dare to guess, Miss Rawley."
"Blackberry canes," she said. "Now you go ahead and laugh at me, because everybody else does; I know they're an awful nuisance. But they're amazing, too."
"I expect they're the fastest-growing plant this side of China," he said.
"Yes, sir! They shoot up out of the ground and by mid-June they're eight feet tall. Then the top starts to bend back down to the ground, and by August they've made an arch of a size to walk under, if you wanted to. Did you ever notice how they do that?"
"I've noticed, and noticed," he said. "I've gone through about eight bush hogs in my lifetime, noticing how blackbe
rries grow."
"I know. I'm not defending them. They'd eat up my whole orchard if I didn't keep them cut back to the fence. But sometimes in winter I just have to stand back and stare at those arches going down the road, up and down, like a giant quilter's needle sewing its way across Zebulon County, one big arched loop per year. You can love them or hate them, either one, but there's no stopping them." She looked at him sideways, like a mother scolding. "And you have to admit, the berries make the best pie there is."
He flushed. "Oh, I've been meaning for the longest time to mention that pie. I thank you for that pie." Short pants, on a woman of her age. From what he could see, she had the legs of a much younger woman. Certainly not what he would have expected in the way of Unitarian legs.
"You're welcome," she said. "Better late than never. If recent trends continue, maybe I'll bake you another one next year."
He looked at her long and hard, wondering frankly if they would both be here next summer. After a certain point, you had to think that way. "Miss Rawley," he declared, "I can't say as I've ever seen short pants on a woman your age."
She looked down at her knees--which were maybe a little pale and knobby, on second thought. If one were to pay attention. She looked back up at him with a girlish grin. "I got hot, Mr. Walker. I got inspired by the UPS boy. He drives that truck in nothing but his swimming suit. I figured if that's legal, then surely an old lady can take a pair of scissors to her old khakis once in a while."
Garnett shook his head. "Dignity is the last responsibility of the aged, Miss Rawley."
"Fiddlesticks. Death is the last responsibility of the aged."
"Don't get fresh with me," he warned. "And don't expect to see me running around in short pants, either."
"I'd sooner expect to see a pig fly, Mr. Walker."
"Well, good, then," he said. But then asked, "Are you saying I'm a pig?"
She crossed her arms. "Are you saying I'm immodest?"
"If the shoe fits," he replied curtly.
"Self-righteous, tedious," she said. "There's a couple of shoes you can try on."
That was it, then. They had stooped to name-calling, like a pair of grammar school children. He took a deep breath. "I think I'm finished here."
"No, you're not," she said firmly, looking at him with a menacing eye. "Tell me what's wrong with me. Let's just get it out. All these years you've been picking at me like a scab. What have you really got against me?"
She stood there fearless, daring him to tell the truth, exciting him toward actually doing it. Garnett turned the thought over in his mind and sighed. With profound sadness, he understood that he could never tell her the answer because he didn't know it himself.
He said, feebly, "You don't act normal for your age."
She stood with her mouth a little open, as if there were words stuck halfway between her mind and the world around. At last they came out: "There isn't any normal way to act seventy-five years old. Do you know why?"
He didn't dare answer. Was she really seventy-five, exactly?
"I'll tell you why," she said. "Considering everything--the whole history of things--people are supposed to be dead and buried at our age. That's normal. Up till just lately, the Civil War or something, they didn't even know about germs. If you got sick, they slapped leeches on you and measured you for a coffin. I wouldn't doubt but hardly anybody even made it to fifty. Isn't that so?"
"I suppose it is."
"It is. Our mammaw and pappaw got to keep their dignity, just working right up to the end and then dying of a bad cold one day, with most their parts still working. But then along comes somebody inventing six thousand ways to cure everything, and here we are, old, wondering what to do with ourselves. A human just wasn't designed for old age. That's my theory."
He hardly knew what to say. "That's one of your theories."
"Well, think about it. Women's baby-business all dries up, men lose their hair--we're just a useless drain on our kind. Speaking strictly from a biological point of view. Would you keep a chestnut in your program if it wasn't setting seeds anymore?"
He frowned. "I don't think of myself as obsolete."
"Of course not, you're a man! Men walk around with their bald heads bare to the world and their pony put out to pasture, but they refuse to admit they're dead wood. So why should I? What law says I have to cover myself up for shame of having a body this old? It's a dirty trick of modern times, but here we are. Me with my cranky knees and my old shriveled ninnies, and you with whatever you've got under there, if it hasn't dropped off yet--we're still human. Why not just give in and live till you die?"
Garnett was so hot under the collar he could scarcely breathe. He had never sworn in front of a woman in his life, not since grammar school, anyway, but this was a near occasion. She was asking for it. Nannie Rawley needed a willow switch, was what she needed. If they'd both been sixty-five years younger, he'd have turned her over his knee. Garnett swore a silent oath, turned on his heel, and walked away without so much as a word. For an occasion like this, there just weren't any words that would do.
An hour and ten minutes later, Garnett returned to Nannie's backyard with one asphalt shingle in his hand. She was carrying a bushel of Gravensteins to her pickup truck, starting to load up for the Amish market tomorrow, and was so startled to see Garnett Walker that she stumbled and almost dropped her basket.
He held up the shingle, showing her the peculiar heart-shaped profile that matched the ones on her roof, and then he threw it at her feet. It lay there in the grass next to a puddle, this thing she needed, like a valentine. A bright crowd of butterflies rose from the puddle in trembling applause.
"There are two hundred of those in my garage. You can have them all."
She looked from the shingle to Garnett Walker and back to the shingle. "Lord have mercy," she said quietly. "A miracle."
{24}
Moth Love
It was nearly noon on a Sunday when Jewel came up to collect the children. Lusa was in the garden picking green beans when she saw her coming up across the yard, moving slowly. "Honey, it's the Lord's day of rest," Jewel called out when she reached the gate. "You shouldn't be working this hard."
"What was God thinking, then, when he made green beans and August?" Lusa replied, trusting that her sister-in-law wasn't really scolding her for sacrilege. Jewel looked pale but jaunty in a little blue cloche someone had crocheted for her. She hadn't ever bothered with a wig but just wore scarves and hats. "Come on through the rabbit fence," Lusa called to her. "The gate just has a wire around the top."
Jewel fiddled with the chicken wire and found her way in. "Lord, this is pretty," she remarked. Lusa sat back on her heels, feeling proud. Red and yellow peppers glowed like ornaments on their dark bushes, and the glossy purple eggplants had the stately look of expensive gifts. Even the onions were putting up pink globes of flower. During all the years of childhood she'd spent sprouting seeds in pots on a patio, she'd been dreaming of this.
"You must be a slave to this garden," Jewel said.
"Just about. Look at this." She gestured at the long row of un-picked beans. "I've done forty quarts of beans already, and I've still got two more rows to go."
"You'll be glad, though. Come next February."
"That's the truth. Between this and my chickens, I may not have to go to Kroger's again till next summer. I've got tomatoes put up, spaghetti sauce--maybe twenty quarts--and I'm freezing broccoli, cauliflower, you name it. Tons of corn. Your kids ate their own weight each in corn last night, by the way."
Jewel smiled. "They would. Lowell will even eat roasting ears, and he is Mister Picky. They didn't put much dent in your broccoli, though, did they?"
"No."
"You could quit on the green beans right now," Jewel said. "If you've got forty quarts, you could just stop picking and say, 'Well, sir, I'm done.' It's not against the law."
"I could," Lusa said. "But Cole planted these beans. He put in most of this. Remember how it got warm ea
rly, in May? I feel like as long as I'm up here picking stuff, he's still giving me presents. I hate to think of the fall, when I'll have to turn it under."
Jewel shook her head. "It's your work, too, though. I swear, this is pretty. It looks like a woman's garden, some way. It doesn't look like other people's gardens."
Lusa thought, but did not say, that this was because she was an outsider. She planted different things: five-color Swiss chard instead of collard greens, and several rows of fava beans to dry for falafel meal. She'd grown four different kinds of eggplants from seed, including the pink-and-white-streaked "Rosa Bianca" for her beloved imam bayildi and baba ganouj.
Jewel was examining the tomato plants, rubbing their healthy leaves between her fingers. "What do you kill the hornworms with, Sevin dust?"
"No, not that. It kills too many of my friends."
Jewel looked over at her with a horrified face, and Lusa laughed. "Bugs, I mean. I know you all laugh at me, but I'm so fond of bugs, I can't stand to use a general pesticide like Sevin. I use different things. I use Bt on the tomatoes."
"B-T?"
"It's a germ, Bacillus thuringiensis. A bacterium that gives hornworms indigestion when they eat my tomatoes but doesn't hurt bees or ladybugs."
"Are you pulling my leg?"
"Nope. Well, bad indigestion--the hornworms die. It works on cabbage loopers, too. Here, there's a peck basket by the fence there, why don't you pick some tomatoes for you and the kids to take home?"
"I won't eat them; my stomach's shot for anything acid, I guess from the chemo. I still can't even drink orange juice. But I'll pick you the ripe ones, instead of just standing here useless. Something else for you to put up."
"I have quit on canning tomatoes. Now I just slice them up with basil and olive oil and eat them for breakfast."
"Oh, shoot, I stepped right on your marigolds."