Page 42 (1/1)

I waited on the porch and was relieved when Loyd pulled up before E with a family that paid attention to reet ht lunch," I told Loyd, sliding into the cab with a basket Eht before

He shty white of you"

I didn’t knohat topeople said, but usually when they said it both people hite

I asked him to detour past the Post Office so I could check for ular rounds A daily route up these stairstep streets would have put soory Every family had a box at the PO, which they could check daily or annually, as they pleased Emelina leaned toward annual I persuaded her to turn over the key toht into the outside wall of the Post Office I peeked through the littleof the Doin of an air the envelope as I bounced back to the truck He didn’t seeua" I checked the postmark to make sure this was true, and it was Mailed nearly three weeks ago The sta across oceans and continents a child-like revolutionary hopefulness: a painting of a wo red coffee beans, and her baby strapped on her back Hallie was in the fields of her dreams

I ripped it open and read quickly She’d arrived ot ua and then backtracked straight to the rural area near Chinandega She’d expected (or feared) a little for her one and only dress "I’ up that dress and striding across the plowed rows, leading a battery of stunnedsprayed to death and still eaten up eevils Cultivation practices are pitiful I know exactly what to do I think we’ll get productivity up about 100 percent froine? You’d think it was Christ about how the collective could use this prosperity: they could get a secondary-school teacher in here full tiot a vivid picture of Hallie’s face and could hear her voice as I read Her hair would be restrained in a red bandana, her face tense with concentration and her eyebrows knit at angles like accent marks I could also recall her exact expression as she lay on our living-roos propped up, one hand pushing the hair up froh forehead, while she calmly dispensed information over the Garden Hotline I understood the full extent to which she’d been wasting her life on house plants

The letter was short She was living in a two-roo children, who insisted that Hallie have one of the rooms to herself-a luxury thatto spare The day she hbors and soht over a plate and a tin cup for her, and soht a fork Both women had recently lost sons

The territory she would have to cover, giving crop advice, was huge She was issued a horse There were problems with the roads, she said, that made Jeeps a less desirable mode of transport for short trips: horses usually weren’t heavy enough to trigger the land mines the contras buried in the roads The horse’s naned it, "Your insane-with-love sister Hallie," with a PS:

Re your question about botany: tell your students plants do everything anirow, travel around (how do you think palot to Hawaii?), have sex, etc They just do it a lot slower Bear this in ans of plants Tell the boys to consider that when they’re buying their dates corsages for the prom

And a PPS:

Sure I remember e almost drowned in a flood Plain as day God, Codi, don’t you? We found those abandoned coyote pups, and the river was flooding, and you wanted to save them You said we had to I was chicken because Doc Homer would spank the shit out of us and I wanted to run for it, but you wouldn’t let ua," I told Loyd

"She’s a doctor? I thought she was a farmer"

"People can’t live without crops There’s more than one way to skin a revolution"