Flight Behavior (7 page)

They rounded a bend in the trail and could see the whole dark green mountain range laid out above them, stippled with firs along the bumpy spine. Limestone cliffs erupted here and there, gray teeth grinning through the dark trees. Wherever sun fell on them, the tops of the knolls faintly glowed. The color could have been a trick of the light. But wasn’t. She turned, risking a glance at Cub’s face.

“Is that it?” she asked quietly. “That shine on the trees?”

He nodded. “You knew, didn’t you?”

“How would I?”

He said no more. They kept moving. Her guilty mind ran down a hundred alleys, wondering what he implied. He knew she’d been up here? No possibility made sense: mind-reading, sleep-talking, these things happened in movies. She’d told only Dovey, who honestly would endure torture without betraying her. They entered the chilly darkness of the fir forest. Its density was so different from the open sky and widely spaced trunks of the leafless deciduous woods.

“Why in the world did these evergreens get planted up here?” Dellarobia asked. She needed to hear someone talk.

“Bear’s daddy wasn’t the only one,” Hester said. “There was other ones that put them in. Peanut, didn’t your daddy plant some?”

Dellarobia had vaguely understood it to be a touchy topic, but now she got it. The family joke, a Christmas tree boondoggle. Probably she should not have asked.

“The extension fellows told him to,” Norwood said. “The chestnuts was getting blighty, and they’s looking for something new to put in. The Christmas tree market.”

“Christmas tree market,” Bear spat. “In the nineteen-forties, when a man could cut a weed cedar out of his woodlot for free. They couldn’t get two bits for them. It wasn’t worth hauling them out.”

The old firs stood fifty feet tall now, ghosts of Christmas past. An image landed in her head with those words, the hooded skeleton pointing at gravestones that scared the bejesus out of her in childhood. A library book, Charles Dickens. But that was the Yet to Come ghost, and these were just geriatric trees. Ghosts of bad timing, if anything. She wasn’t going to bring it up, but she knew some farmers were planting Christmas trees again, hiring Mexican workers for the winter labor. Presumably the same men who showed up in summers to work tobacco. They used to go home in winter and now stayed year-round, like the geese at Great Lick that somehow quit flying south. She’d seen these men in hard-luck kinds of places like the Cash Rite, which she and Dovey called Ass Bite, a Feathertown storefront where she sometimes had to go for a substantially clipped advance on Cub’s paycheck if the bills came in too close together. Christmas tree farms were just proof that every gone thing came back around again, with a worse pay scale.

Conversation ceased while they mounted a steep section of the rutted trail, then came to the flat section she recognized as the spot where she’d stopped for a smoke. She scanned the ground, knowing Cub would recognize the filter of her brand if he saw it. She felt strung out from nerves and exhaustion. Soon they would round the mountainside and gain the view of the valley, and then what? Several trees along the path bore the bristly things she’d seen before, the fungus, if that’s what it was, but the men seemed not to notice. They looked ahead, picking up the pace.

Hester seemed increasingly put out, to be dragged from her routine. She hummed steadily under her breath in a thin, monotonous way. Some hymn. Or a show tune—with Hester there was no telling. Dellarobia could not imagine humming or anything else that required extra oxygen. They were all out of shape except Hester, who stayed miraculously shipshape on her regimen of Mountain Dew and Camel Lights. Dellarobia counted steps to make the time pass, watching her feet. She noticed little darts in the trail, first one and then more, scattered on the ground like litter. They were the same orange as the flagging tape but made of something brittle that crunched underfoot. Little V-shaped points, like arrows, aimed in every possible direction, as if scattered here for the purpose of sheer confusion. To get people lost in the woods.

They rounded the bend to the overlook and came into the full sight of it. These golden darts filled the whole of the air, swirling like leaves in a massive storm. Wings. The darts underfoot also were wings.
Butterflies
. How had she failed to see them? She felt stupid, or blind, in a way that went beyond needing glasses. Unreceptive to truth. She’d been willing to take in the run of emotions that stood up the hairs on her neck, the wonder, but had shuttered her eyes and looked without seeing. The density of the butterflies in the air now gave her a sense of being underwater, plunged into a deep pond among bright fishes. They filled the sky. Out across the valley, the air itself glowed golden. Every tree on the far mountainside was covered with trembling flame, and that, of course, was butterflies. She had carried this vision inside herself for so many days in ignorance, like an unacknowledged pregnancy. The fire was alive, and incomprehensibly immense, an unbounded, uncountable congregation of flame-colored insects.

This time they revealed themselves in movement, as creatures in flight. That made the difference. The treetops and ravines all appeared in strange relief, exposed by the trick of air as a visible quantity. Air filled with quivering butterfly light. The space between trees glittered, more real and alive than the trees themselves. The scaly forest still bore the same bulbous burden in its branches she’d seen before, even more of it, if possible. The drooping branches seemed bent to the breaking point under their weight. Of
butterflies
. The verity of that took her breath. A million times nothing weighed nothing. Her mind confronted a mathematics she’d always thought to be the domain of teachers and pure invention.

“Great day in the morning,” Hester said, looking stricken.

“There you go,” Bear said. “Whatever the hell that is, it can’t be a damn bit of good for logging.”

“I’d say it would gum up their equipment,” Norwood agreed. “Or we might run into one of those government deals. Something endangered.”

“No sir,” said Bear. “I believe there’s more of them than we’ve got people.”

The numbers could not be argued. Butterflies rested and crawled even on the path around their feet, giving the impression of twitchy, self-automated dead leaves marching across a forest floor. Dellarobia squatted down and waved her hand over one, expecting it to startle and fly, but it stayed in place, wings closed. Then opened wide to the sudden reveal:
orange.
Four wings, with the symmetry of a bow-tied shoelace. Preston had spent all of a recent morning trying to tie a bow, biting his lower lip in concentration, but here was perfection without effort. He would love to see this. She let it crawl onto her hand and held it close to her eyes. The orange wings were scrolled with neat black lines, like liquid eyeliner, expertly applied. In almost thirty years of walking around on the grass of the world, she couldn’t recall having spent two minutes alone with a butterfly.

It flew, and she stood up, meeting the unguarded eyes of both Hester and Bear. They seemed expectant, or even accusing, as if it might be up to Dellarobia to arrange this nonsensical sight into something ordinary and real. She couldn’t imagine it. Cub stared at her too, through the moving light, and then startled her by pulling her to him, his arm around her shoulders.

“Mother, Dad, listen here. This is a miracle. She had a vision of this.”

Bear scowled. “The hell.”

“No, Dad, she did. She foretold of it. After the shearing we were up talking in the barn, and she vowed and declared we had to come up here. That’s why I kept on telling you we should. She said there was something big up here in our own backyard.”

Dellarobia felt a dread of her secrets. She recalled only her impatience, speaking to Cub in anger that night, telling him anything could be up here. Terrorists or blue trees.

Hester peered into her face as if trying to read in bad light. “Why would he say that? That you foretold of it.”

A movement of clouds altered the light, and all across the valley, the butterfly skin of the world transfigured in response, opening all the wings at once to the sun. A lifting brightness swept the landscape, flowing up the mountainside in a wave. Dellarobia opened her mouth and released a soft pant, anticipatory gusts of breath that could have become speech or laughter, or wailing. She couldn’t give it shape.

“Here’s your vision. I see a meddling wife.” Bear shook his head in weary disgust, a gesture that defined him, like the dogtags he still wore after everyone else had given up on his war. A large and mighty man among the trifling, that was Bear’s drill. “You all need to get down off your high horses,” he said. “We’re going to spray these things and go ahead. I’ve got some DDD saved back in the basement.”

“You’ve got 3-D in your basement?” asked Norwood.

“DDT,” Cub told him. “Dad, that stuff has been against the law for more than my whole life. No offense, but it must be something else you’ve got stored.”

“Why do you think I saved it up? I knew it would be hard to get.”

“That stuff’s bound to go bad on you,” Hester argued. “After this many years.”

“Woman, how is poison going to go bad? You reckon it’ll get
toxic
?” Bear laughed at his own joke. No one else did. Cub normally cowered like a cur under this tone from his father, but was strangely unyielding now.

“There’s not enough spray in the world to kill that many bugs, Dad. That might not be the thing to do.”

“I guess you’ve got money to make the equipment loan, then.” Bear’s eyes were the color of unpainted tin, and exactly that cold. Dellarobia kept her mouth shut. She knew they had received a down payment on the logging, already forwarded in part to the bank and the taxes. Two places, along with the grave, that didn’t give back if you changed your mind.

“Listen, Dad. There’s a reason for everything.”

“That’s true, Bear,” Hester said. “This could be the Lord’s business.”

Cub seemed to flinch, turning to Dellarobia. “That’s what
she
said. We should come up here and have a look, because it was the Lord’s business.”

Dellarobia plumbed her brain for what he might have heard her say, but came up empty. Once, in bed, he’d asked what she was smiling at with her eyes closed, and she’d mentioned colors moving around like fire. Only that. Cub now gazed at the sky.

“It’s like the tenth wonder of the world,” he said. “People would probably pay to see these things.”

“That they might,” Norwood agreed.

“We should wait till they fly off,” Cub declared, as if he’d made such decisions before. “I bet we can get that much grace out of the company, Dad.”

Bear exhaled a hiss of doubt. “What if they won’t fly off?”

“I don’t know.” Cub still held onto Dellarobia by the shoulders. “Y’all just need to see the Lord’s hand in this and trust in His bidding. Like she said.”

This boldness was so unlike him, she wondered if Cub was play-acting, tormenting her as a reprisal. But deceits were beyond her husband’s range. He just held her there like a shield in front of his chest. Hester and Bear were scarcely more than an arm’s length away, and even that small distance between them filled now with butterflies, like water through a crevice. In every inch of the air they were moving down-mountain along this path, tumbling, a rush of air, a river in flood. She observed something like a diagram of wind resistance around her father-in-law’s great bulk, made visible by the butterflies that followed smooth, linear paths over and around him. The people, she and the others here, were human boulders in the butterfly-filled current. They had waded into a river of butterflies and the flood gave no heed, the flood rushed on to the valley, answerable to naught but its own pull. Butterflies crossed her field of vision continuously at close range, black-orange flakes that made her blink, and they merged in a chaotic blur in the distance, and she found it frankly impossible to believe what her eyes revealed to her. Or her ears: the unending rustle, like a taffeta dress.

Hester’s eyes dropped from her son’s face to Dellarobia’s, and what could possibly happen next, she had no idea. For years she’d crouched on a corner of this farm without really treading into Turnbow family territory, and now here she stood, dead on its center. She felt vaguely like a hostage in her husband’s grip, as if police megaphones might come out and the bullets would fly. Looking down at her feet made her dizzy, because of butterfly shadows rolling like pebbles along the floor of a fast stream. The illusion of current knocked her off balance. She raised her eyes to the sky instead, and that made the others look up too, irresistibly led, even Bear. Together they saw light streaming through glowing wings. Like embers, she thought, a flood of fire, the warmth they had craved so long. She felt her breathing rupture again into laughter or sobbing in her chest, sharp, vocal exhalations she couldn’t contain. The sounds coming out of her veered toward craziness.

The two older men stepped back as if she’d slapped them.

“Lord Almighty, the girl is receiving grace,” said Hester, and Dellarobia could not contradict her.

3

Congregational Space

D
ellarobia sensed troubled waters at the Café in Christ. Crystal Estep had parked herself at a table front and center, all done up for church, the waterfall of gel-stiffened curls cascading over her shoulders. A regular Niagara of blond highlights was Crystal, sitting alone with her breakfast, gazing at it with such earnest focus, you’d think she was on a first date with that Pepsi and glazed doughnut. People rarely worked up so much innocence without cause, it seemed to Dellarobia. She looked around for the rest of the story and located it near the juice machine, where two tables were occupied by the ex-friend Brenda, of hand-slammed-in-the-car-door fame, and a posse of her mad-looking friends. Dellarobia remembered the injured party was this particular Brenda, one of three sisters who ran the church nursery with their mother. Brenda appeared to be out on disability today, flashing the metal splint on her two middle fingers, basically flipping Crystal the bird in church.

No way was Dellarobia getting involved. The main point of coming to church was to drop off Preston and Cordie in the Sunday school building and take a breather from squabbles over who hit the other one first. Evidently Crystal had already taken Jazon and Mical over there, pawning them off on Brenda’s kin. That must have been interesting. Dellarobia downed her scalding coffee in a couple of gulps where she stood, tossed the styrene cup in the trash, and headed down the hall for the sanctuary. The heels of her oxblood boots struck the waxed floor loudly, advertising her traveling whereabouts like a GPS. A disappointed-looking Jesus eyed her from the wall. She’d ruined herself on these boots for sure, by donning them a month ago for the purpose of committing adultery.
Look, look
, her steps called out,
here is a redheaded sinner on the move
. She felt out of control in some new way, unfixable, unless she could fold her life back into its former shape: pre–Turnbow Family Sideshow, premarriage, back to being just one kid trying to blaze her own trail. It was exhausting, to keep being sorry for everything. Sorry she’d had to run out of the café just now. Bereft, actually, over that one. The café had definitely upped her quality time at Mountain Fellowship since it opened in September. The church was a thriving little village of its own, with new kinds of congregational space forever being discussed or under construction. The modular Sunday-school structure had been replaced last year with a red schoolhouse affair, and now with the new wing open, a person could walk around a good deal without technically leaving church. An enclosed walkway connected the sanctuary to the Men’s Fellowship room and the sunny, tile-floored Café in Christ, where she could sit and have some alone time with a blueberry muffin, with other congregants who would just as soon get their sermon over closed-circuit. The view of Pastor Ogle’s giant pixellated face on the multiple TV screens was perfectly up-close and personal if you didn’t need the live experience, which she did not. Church attendance was a condition of her marriage. Cub felt if they laid out on Sundays, his mother would either drop dead or disown him, and he didn’t care to find out which. Dellarobia would have been willing to give it a test run. But no, they went.

It did get her out, among people. Whether friend or foe hardly mattered; they ate with their mouths closed and wore shoes without Velcro. She hadn’t been much of a player in public after the diner closed six years ago, and she hadn’t planned on missing those long days on her feet or the wages that barely covered her gas. But being a stay-at-home mom was the loneliest kind of lonely, in which she was always and never by herself. Days and days, hours and hours within them, and days within weeks, at the end of which she might not ever have gotten completely dressed or read any word longer than
Chex
, any word not ending in -
os
, or formed a sentence or brushed her teeth or left a single footprint outside the house. Just motherhood, with its routine costs of providing a largesse that outstripped her physical dimensions. She’d seen ewes in the pasture whose sixty-pound twins would run underneath together and bunt the udders to release the milk with sharp upward thrusts, jolting the mother’s hindquarters off the ground. That was the picture, overdrawn. A gut-twisting life of love, consecrated by the roof and walls that contained her and the air she was given to breathe.

But here was church. An hour in the café, the slake of a tall cup of coffee, and stillness, and wearing shoes, a clean tile floor, time off for good behavior. A reminder that she could belong to something the size of this congregation, if they would have her. She was not outside the believer realm entirely. She’d had her phases. Back when her daddy lost everything at once—his furniture-making business, his health, his inner light—she’d prayed for Jesus to bring it all back. When he died, her mother resigned from religion and left Dellarobia working a double shift. By the time her mother got sick, the whole enterprise was tainted with doubt. Cub had persuaded her to give prayer another shot during the years when they were trying and failing to get pregnant, and finally that one had been answered times two, Preston and Cordie, sufficient for the time being.

So she was what Hester called a 911 Christian: in the event of an emergency, call the Lord. Unlike all those who called on Jesus daily, rain or shine, to discuss their day and feel the love. Once upon a time she’d had her mother for that. Jesus was a more reliable backer, evidently, less likely to drink himself unconscious or get liver cancer. No wonder people chose Him as their number-one friend. But if the chemistry wasn’t there, what could you do? Dellarobia scrutinized life too hard, she knew that. For a year she’d gone with Cub to Wednesday Bible group and loved the sense of being back in school, but her many questions did not make her the teacher’s pet. Right out of the gate, in Genesis, she identified two completely different versions of how it all got started. The verses could be a listen-and-feel kind of thing, like music, she’d suggested, not like the instruction booklet that comes with a darn appliance. A standpoint that won no favors with the permanent discussion leader, Blanchie Bise, cheerleader for taking the Word on faith. For crap’s sake, the first rule of
believable
was to get your story straight. Hester let Dellarobia stop coming to Wednesday Bible.

She paused in the doorway of Holy Beacons, the name given the sanctuary, where anyone present might be called out by Pastor Ogle as a beacon. The newly remodeled sanctuary was huge. This church was the biggest show in Feathertown by far. Bobby Ogle pulled people out of bed from far and wide on Sunday mornings, even from the larger town of Cleary, fourteen miles away. Dellarobia studied the backs of all those heads, the females vivid with individualized hues, the males surprisingly uniform. Three hundred people quieting down, readying themselves for what they were about to receive. The nourishment was so real to them. Dellarobia felt a stab of envy, as if everyone here was getting a regular paycheck and only hers bounced. It made no sense. Up on the mountain that first day, she’d had no trouble believing in some large glory tailor-made for herself, but here in this fold she struggled with everlasting doubts as to her status. The sole glory she could hold in mind at the moment was the blueberry muffin she’d planned to buy in the café. She craved it like a cigarette: the sticky, too-big puffiness of that muffin spilling over its fluted paper cup, crumbling all over the table, sweetly filming her throat with whatever it was those things had. Probably something that bunged your arteries like bacon grease in a drain. She weighed her options: that muffin, Crystal, Brenda. No. She located the back of Cub’s head towering over his mother’s and moved down the center aisle toward them, avoiding eye contact with the sanctuary regulars.

She scooted in next to Cub. He was thrilled, reaching for her hand and threading his big fingers through her little ones. It was mildly painful but authenticating, to have him lay claim to her here in front of Hester and God, in case either of them was looking. That was one thing she could do well, make Cub happy, if only she could apply herself. She took this vow as regularly as she breathed, and reliably it was punctured by some needling idea that she was cut out for something more. Something, someone. She leaned against his shoulder and sighed, wistful for the breakfast that almost was. She could make it through another hour if her stomach wouldn’t growl.

She watched Pastor Ogle walk onto the stage, dressed exactly as usual in jeans and an open-collar shirt, nothing out of the ordinary. Yet the congregational atmosphere shifted like weather. Given the drawing in of breath, the speculative waiting, Bobby Ogle could be that famous groundhog that would or wouldn’t see his shadow. If she ever had people’s attention like that, even for ten seconds, there was no telling what she’d say. Bobby was amazing. And he hadn’t even called the faithful to order yet, he was just checking in with the choir director before the opening hymn. She’d seen TV preachers with styled hair and diamond rings that sparked in the studio lighting, and wondered how anyone trusted such showy men with their tithes. Pastor Bobby was the opposite, possessed of the same rumpled appeal Jesus probably had. Maybe in this day and age Jesus would buy his clothes at the outlet stores where the Ogles shopped, and shed the hippie haircut for one like Bobby’s, with bangs straight across. He looked like some kid you’d want to invite home for dinner. Though Bobby, unlike Jesus, might empty your fridge. He must weigh 280 at least. He’d played football for the Feathertown Falcons, as Cub did five years later when he got to high school. She happened to know they’d called him Titty Ogle back then, due to his anatomy. Kids are evil. Which of these congregants remembered that now? She’d bet money that some of these churchful people had once laughed at Bobby Ogle in his football uniform with his chest bob-bob-bobbing along the fifty-yard line. But he had made something of himself, gone to seminary school, founded this church with his wife, and raised up a set of twin girls, never allowing bitterness to curdle his spirit. His face told the whole story now, as he listened to the choir director: pure patience. Even though most people found Nate Weaver way too full of himself. Nate seemed dressed for a whole different show, packed into his shiny brown suit like a sausage casing, and his new little goatee did nothing to hide his double chin, if that’s what he was thinking. Dellarobia knew these thoughts made her a small person.

Pastor Ogle could look past petty things. He clapped Nate kindly on the shoulder and walked to center stage to stand a moment in the bright stage lights with his head bowed, no notes in hand. No pulpit. Just plain Bobby, standing on the pool of his own shadow. He motioned then for the congregation to stand for the hymn, “What a Friend I Have in Jesus,” and all rose. Mr. Weaver pumped his hand to direct the choir in the too-vigorous way that got on Dellarobia’s nerves. Hester was hogging the hymnal, making Cub share it on her side, managing to imply even in the Lord’s abode that three was a crowd. She looked fanciful as ever today, in a blue dress with a ruffled stand-up collar of the type Loretta Lynn made famous at the Grand Ole Opry. Pastor Ogle had lured Hester over from a harder line of Baptists, and Dellarobia knew some marital compromise was involved. Bear had stopped attending over there. Here he could sit out the service in Men’s Fellowship, which had checkers and country music pitched low enough you could still hear the sermon on the closed-circuit if you so desired. Bobby had found the key to modern believers: that many preferred their salvation experience to come with a remote.

Dellarobia thought Men’s Fellowship had its appeal, all the more so right now as the audience heaved into verse four of “What a Friend,” dragging it like a plow through heavy clay. Certainly in Men’s Fellowship no one ever made you sing. She just wished it had a more welcoming vibe for the female of the species. She’d strolled through a time or two to retrieve a Diet Coke out of the machine, and observed that they even allowed smoking. The family always split four ways, Bear going with the men, the kids to the Sunday school, she to the café, and Hester to the sanctuary with Cub in tow, playing her boy like a trout on a line, always reeling him in at the end. Dellarobia had tried to get Cub to go with her to the café, which was mostly younger women, but also some couples, “Christ’s love everywhere in equal measure” being the theme of the Ogle ministry. But there was no battling Hester, she was wired to win, just made that way: sinewy, righteous, unbeatable.

Soft, round Bobby was precisely the reverse. He won people over in a different way, using his hands to push and pull his congregants as if kneading dough and making grace rise. Like a humble baker making bread. He was actually a foundling, people said, abandoned at birth, adopted by an elderly minister and his wife who’d since passed away. Dellarobia wondered what that would feel like, to have no inkling of your people. All hers were dead, but at least a known quantity. Bobby dedicated every Mother’s Day sermon to the saintly woman who’d taken him in, heeding God’s call to embrace the rejected and discarded. Bobby was love personified, to the extent that this was rumored around town to be a no-heller church. Or that in Bobby Ogle’s version of heaven everyone would wind up in one place, criminals and Muslims included. Dellarobia could not confirm or deny the accusations; in Bobby’s light all things seemed possible. The way he was warming up right now, with everyone singing happiness and love in his general direction, his body seemed to be manufacturing some kind of vitamin from the gaze of the worshippers. Hester’s ponytail practically flapped in the breeze of hallelujah.

After the hymn Bobby said quietly, “Would you be seated,” no question mark, his hand moving toward the floor as if urging a dog to sit. They sat. Dellarobia kept her eyes open during prayers, a long habit, just a watchful person by nature. She quietly snapped open her purse and made sure her phone was on vibrate, since Dovey liked to text her on Sunday mornings for her own entertainment. There was one waiting now:
COME YE FISHERS OF MEN: YOU CATCH, GOD WILL CLEAN
. Dovey’s fondness for one-liners-in-Christ was bottomless, she collected them off church marquees. Back before texting, she used to pass them over during health or history class on scrims of folded paper. Dovey was Italian Catholic, she and her five brothers with all that darling mess of dark curly hair, and claimed she’d logged enough church hours in childhood to do her for life. Dellarobia fished her glasses out of her purse and put them on, possibly to spite her mother-in-law. “Boys don’t make passes at girls wearing glasses,” Hester liked to singsong, a joke so tired she could scream. If boys didn’t, the woman would not have the grandkids she did at this point in time. People could overlook anything when it suited them, right down to the making of the Lord’s baby children.