Flight Behavior (31 page)

“But what about all the rain we had last year? All those trees falling out of the ground, after they’d stood a hundred years. The weather’s turned weird, Cub. Did you ever see a year like we’ve had?”

They arrived at the bottom of the field and turned along the road, the last lap before reaching the house and barn. A black pickup passed with a German shepherd standing in the bed. Finally Cub said, “They don’t call it global weirding.”

“I know. But I think that’s actually the idea.”

Cub shook his head. “Weather is the Lord’s business.”

She felt an exasperation that she knew would be of no use to this debate. She let it rise and fall inside her, along with wishful thoughts. Every loss she’d ever borne had been declared the Lord’s business. A stillborn child, a father dead in his prime.

“So we just take what comes?” she asked. “People used to say the same thing whenever some disease came along and killed all the children. ‘It’s part of God’s plan.’ Now we give them vaccinations. Is that defying God?”

Cub made no reply.

“Here’s the thing,” she said. “Why would we believe Johnny Midgeon about something scientific, and not the scientists?”

“Johnny Midgeon gives the weather report,” Cub maintained, and Dellarobia saw her life pass before her eyes, contained in the small enclosure of this logic. All knowledge measured, first and last, by one’s allegiance to the teacher.

They made their way along the final stretch, approaching the compound of house and barn and Ovid’s trailer, but the sight of home gave her no comfort. Sooner or later he would come out of that camper, they would speak, something would have to happen. Cub getting hurt, she couldn’t abide, but damage seemed so inevitable. The sky was lower and darker than when they’d left the house an hour ago, and the air felt colder. On the north-facing slopes the ground was still frosted white. There had been talk of snow. Broad-leaved weeds growing along the ditch stood wilted on their stems like tattered flags of surrender. The short distance to their house was a gulf she dreaded to cross.

Cub made a small coughing sound, a kind of nervous preparation that caused her own throat to narrow like a drain. “We have to talk about something,” he said.

Her face felt numb. “Okay, what.”

“I don’t know how to say it.”

“Just say it, Cub.”

“I can’t.”

It would be a kindness to help him, but she could not find words. Their unmatched footsteps made a strange, irregular percussion, their heels cracking the thin ice that rimed the mud along the ditch. Finally Cub said, “It’s about Crystal.”

Dellarobia felt her mind briefly slip its tracks. “What?”

He inhaled slowly. “Crystal Estep.”

“I know who Crystal is, Cub. What about her?”

“She’s been coming to the house.”

“What do you mean, when?”

“When you’re still over there working.”

“What, she comes every day?”

“No, it’s been four or five times. Always on the days when I was off from work—I don’t know how she knows. When I’m there with the kids instead of Lupe. She always starts off saying she wants you to look at that letter again.”

“Four or five times in
two weeks
? She can’t remember I’m working now from nine to five? Seems like even Crystal Estep could get that one down.”

Cub’s anguish was visible. He shook his head, looked at the sky.

“Oh, Jesus, Cub. Did you guys—what are you telling me?”

“Nothing. We didn’t do anything, Dellarobia. Believe me, she’s not . . . She’s Crystal. And anyway, with the kids right there, what do you think? I’m a married man.”

She remembered Crystal in the dollar store before Christmas, leaning back against her cart, talking to Cub. That weirdly suggestive posture she had dismissed as the body language of habitual desperation. In some crucial way she had branded Crystal as a noncontender. Dellarobia felt dismayed by the abrupt reordering of her world, Cub’s place in it, and her own. Absorbed in her own infatuations, so sure of herself as the fast horse in this race, she was last to know the joke was on her. A typical wife, blind as a bat, missing every sign as another woman angled for her husband. She would see Cub as quite the catch, would Crystal. He
was
a catch, ample and uncorrupted. A man whose assets were largely going to waste on the woman who’d landed him by accident.

“I would never cheat on you,” Cub said, exhaling spasmodically, close to tears.

“I know you wouldn’t, Cub. You’re a good man. Better than I deserve.”

“Don’t say that,” he said, running his thumb against the inside corners of both eyes. They had arrived at the gate between pasture and backyard. With effort she avoided looking at the shell-like casing of the trailer hunched between their house and the barn. Everything was close together here, the house and driveway crowded into a corner of the farm that had been carved out of the pasture, back when Bear and Hester built the house. Like the wedding and the house itself, it was a hurry-up kind of fence. They’d used metal T-posts and cheap wire that still looked provisional after these many years, like the afterthought it was. She’d always despised that webbed wire crossing the view from her bedroom window. But it was after all just a fence, whose full perimeter she had walked and repaired. The house stood outside of it, belonging instead to the open road frontage it faced. Cub lifted the gate, and she passed ahead of him into the yard, registering the small metallic knuckling of the chain he latched behind her.

P
ete banged loudly at the kitchen door early Monday, startling Dellarobia and the kids, to let her know the work was up on the mountain that day. Dr. Byron was already there, Pete was headed up now, and she was to follow as soon as she was free. He asked her to bring pillowcases. After bafflement over the pillowcases, her first emotion was relief. It would be easier to face him up there than to walk into the lab with the weight of her spy’s conscience. Dr. Byron in the woods would be intent on the butterflies and possibly up a tree. Only secondly did she think to worry on the butterflies’ behalf. The sky had cleared overnight, and the gust of cold air that rushed in at the door’s brief opening lingered unkindly in the kitchen. It must have been worry that sent the men up the mountain at this hour.

The kids were still in their pajamas, eating breakfast. Cordie had a cold that had kept her moody and congested for weeks, mouth-breathing like a bulldog. Dellarobia ached to turn up the heat, but, thinking of the electric bill, did not. Preston would catch the bus at seven forty-five, Cub would be dropping off Cordelia at Lupe’s apartment on his way to work, and the house would stand empty all day. How she would get everyone dressed and ready in the next forty minutes was beyond comprehension, but somehow her lunch-packing, coffee-swilling gallop around the kitchen always got the job done.

Pillowcases? Did Pete mean she should bring pillows as well? There was no end to their ingenuity in applying household items to the cause of science, asking her for clothespins or coat hangers or kitchen sponges for their various contraptions. She had revised her notion of them as spendthrifts as she watched them improvise and make do. Even Gatorade had its use in the lab, as fuel for captive butterflies that had to be kept alive for some experiment. But pillows? She held at bay a vision of twisted bedsheets and Ovid Byron’s body, though her mind pulled in that direction. She slammed the refrigerator door with her hip. Cordie’s hair looked like a golden haystack, but the child was in a rare compliant state, shoveling in breakfast one-handed while keeping a grip on a plaid stuffed bear that dangled from her high chair tray in button-eyed desperation. That was Cordie; from birth she’d kept an eternal hold on something, a toy or blanket or any ponytail that swung into reach. Preston was more self-contained, maybe a boy thing.

Or just a Preston thing. Right now he was ignoring his cereal and poring over his sheep book, one of several Cub had borrowed from Hester to prepare them for possible lambing emergencies after they brought the ewes over. She wished Cub had chosen something more age-appropriate. Preston of course went for the giant veterinary manual filled with every imaginable thing that could go wrong in the barnyard. Poor little guy, he hefted this concrete block of a book from room to room and had asked to take it to school, provoking Cub’s twin admonishments that he couldn’t read, and that people would call him an egghead. Preston registered both as immaterial. He liked being the teeny guy with the big book. And pictures were abundant. He’d easily found the chapter on lambing. Its many line drawings of unborn twin lambs curled together with twined limbs, nose-to-nose or nose-to-tail, made her think of a sex manual.

Cordelia’s attentive eye followed her brother’s. “Goggies,” she pronounced.

“It’s not dogs,” Preston corrected. “They’re baby lambies.”

Dellarobia sat down with a bowl of cottage cheese, her makeshift breakfast, and Preston looked up at her with his eyes full of questions. “Why are they taking a nap in a dog bed?” he asked.

She carefully did not laugh, and told him the oval shape was the womb. The pictures were supposed to show how the lambs looked inside the mother sheep. “They’re still in her tummy waiting to be born, like when Cordie was in mine. Remember that?”

He nodded gravely. They both looked at Cordelia, her face spackled with cream of wheat and her runny nose. Probably they were thinking variations of the same question: Who knew
this
was coming?

“Don’t forget to eat, big guy. Two more minutes and you’ve got to run and get dressed. The school bus waits for no man.”

He spooned in Cheerios absently while leaning into the text, his interest redoubled by the latest revelation. His earnest expression and level brow moved Dellarobia to a second sight: Preston would go far. Maybe he’d be a vet, farmers were crying for them around here. Or even the kind of vet that looks after elephants in zoos. For all her worry about his lack of advantages, Preston would be like Ovid Byron. Already he seemed set apart by a devotion to his own pursuits that was brave and unconforming. People were so rarely like that, despite universally stated intentions. Most were like herself and Dovey, the one-time rebel girls with their big plans to fly out of here. Her boldness had been confined to such tiny quarters, it counted for about as much as mouse turds in a cookie jar. Until recently, when the lid blew off, and the whole world could peer in at Dellarobia, and what do you know, she was a mouse. But here sat her lionhearted son. Maybe it wasn’t a decision, but something drawn from the soup of birth. A lightning strike.

“Mama, what’s this man doing?” he asked, sounding anxious.

“Let me see.” She slid the book over, hoping he hadn’t come across something that would warp him for life. The drawing baffled her: the man in the picture was holding a lamb by its hindquarters, apparently swinging it through the air. She studied the caption. “Resuscitation,” she said. “He’s bringing it back to life.”

Preston looked at her with frank disbelief, and she corrected herself. “I didn’t say that right—if something’s dead, you can’t bring it back. But if a lamb is not breathing when it’s born, this is how you can help get it going.”

“By
throwing
it?” he asked incredulously.

She scanned the writing on the page. “He’s not throwing it, he’s swinging it around in a circle. If the lamb is born with its nose and throat plugged with mucus, this is what you’re supposed to do. ‘Grasp it firmly by the hind legs and swing it,’ is what the book says. The centrifugal force will clear out the nose and lungs.”

The text also advised, “Make certain there are no obstructions in your path,” but that brought to mind a violent, cartoonlike outcome, so she didn’t read that part aloud. She was mindful of how the kids took their cues from her on what to take seriously, even at hectic times like this, the eye of their morning tornado.

Preston asked quietly, “Will we have to do that?”

“Oh, sweetie. No.” She eyed the plaid bear that still dangled from Cordie’s high-chair tray. How tempted she was to snatch it up by its heels and give it a practice whirl around the kitchen, lightening this mood, giving her children the easy gift of a belly laugh, but the better part of her nature resisted. A life was a life. She’d been orphaned at an age to internalize death as poor material for a joke. And likewise, salvation.

T
he cold was stupefying. She pulled on her heavy wool cap and mittens as she hoofed it up the hill, wishing for a scarf to pull across her nose. The frigid air prickled inside her nostrils and her eyes felt sticky, as if her tears were freezing up. She’d stuffed four clean pillowcases into a big shoulder bag along with her lunch and other necessities. On the outside chance she’d misunderstood Pete’s instructions, those linens could spend a quiet morning hiding out in her purse. She wished she’d taken the time to put on more clothes. She had not checked the temperature at Ovid’s camper, did not know when or if she’d bring herself to try that again, but this had to be mid-twenties, if not lower. Or maybe she’d forgotten how to judge the cold, in the course of these mild, dreary months.

At the top of the pasture she was surprised to see a drift of white on the dark tree branches and the shady floor of the woods. Snow had fallen in the night. The sky had cleared and the early light had melted any trace of it from the fields below, if it had stuck there. But up here on the mountain it was winter. The idea of snow on the butterfly trees pulled her toward panic. Snow falling on the butterflies themselves, their brittle wings and tender bodies, was a heartbreak she had failed as yet to imagine. She hit the trail at a hard lope and would have run, if she were a thousand packs of cigarettes younger. Briefly she considered going back to get the ATV, but knew there was no real need. Her presence at this disaster could not alter it, the damage was done.

Snow softened the forest’s darkness, dusting evergreen limbs with light and reflecting the bright sky. Where the trail to the study site branched off from the gravel road, she noted that even this smaller path had become well marked by use. Signs of the visitors and their leavings were everywhere, blackened rocks pulled together for campfires, twinkling bits of broken glass rising through the thin floor of snow. She slowed her pace, to keep breathing, and tried to be observant. Clumps of snow-covered leaves high in the branches caught her eye, squirrel nests, but no living butterflies.