Flight Behavior (9 page)

“Sister Turnbow,” Bobby said, “your family has received special grace. Friends, are you with me? Sister Hester, will you covenant with us?”

It seemed like a dare. Hester looked like she’d swallowed a chicken bone. She was accustomed to special favor in all things church, and taking second fiddle to Dellarobia was not on the program. But there would be no slugging it out here. She conceded, “I will.”

Pastor Ogle beamed first at Hester, then Dellarobia, as if lifting a big bouquet from the arms of one to the other. Welcome to the fold. He asked all those present to covenant with him in celebrating a beautiful vision of our Lord’s abundant garden.

The doors at the back of the sanctuary flew open, admitting Brenda and Crystal in their own raucous packet of atmosphere. Actually it was Crystal versus Brenda’s whole family, broken fingers and all. The mother led the pack, trailed by Brenda and the other two daughters, then Crystal, her hellion boys, and a slew of kids from the nursery swarming around the adults like sweat bees.

“I’m sorry for the interruption, Bobby,” Brenda’s mother said, cocking one hand on her hip, doing a poor job of looking sorry. That family reminded Dellarobia of the Judds, with the mother trying to out-pretty and out-skinny her daughters. Her hairdo was a fright, however. The battle must have come to blows. Pastor Ogle’s hands came together as his mouth made a little O.

“I beg your pardon,” she repeated, “but me and my daughters need to leave immediately for Brenda’s personal safety, and we have got to return these children to their parents.” She glanced around and made a defiant little side-to-side move with her head, like the saucy girls in music videos. “I’m sorry. If you all were about done.”

The children charged down the aisle with Preston leading, headed for Dellarobia. He grabbed the hem of her sweater and pulled hard, as if he meant to climb her like a tree, and Cordie followed, wailing, with her arms upstretched. Other kids followed like panicked cats, and within seconds were hanging on Dellarobia too. Cub held on hard, keeping her upright. She felt like the pole in that famous statue of soldiers grappling the flag at Iwo Jima.

“Suffer the little children to come unto me,” said Pastor Ogle with an appealing little chuckle, recovering his calm. “My friends, I want you to celebrate with all these little ones. I think they must know our sister here has received the grace.”

Brenda’s mother marched out one hip at a time, exiting with her entourage. The heavy double doors folded closed behind them as if in silent prayer. All eyes circled back from the rear of the sanctuary to the front, wheeling like a great flock of blackbirds flushed up from one place and settling down on another: the spectacle of Sister Turnbow. And it wasn’t Hester. The family had a new beacon.

4

Talk of a Town

H
ester called the butterflies “King Billies.” She seemed to think each one should be addressed as the king himself. “There he goes, King Billy,” she would say.

She said it now, in her kitchen. Dellarobia glanced up from her work but from where she sat with her back to the window, she couldn’t see it. Instead she watched the butterfly pass in a reflected way as Hester, Crystal, and Valia all faced the morning-lit window and followed the motion with their eyes. Even the collies stood up, ears pricked, alert to the unusual human attention. If someone asked her later, Dellarobia realized, she might think she’d seen that butterfly herself. False witness was so easy to bear.

Seeing King Billy down here around Hester’s house was becoming an everyday thing. On Thanksgiving Day, while Cub and the male Turnbow cousins were in the yard reliving their football days, Dellarobia and Preston had sat on the porch steps and counted the passing of eleven butterflies. She suspected they’d been sneaking up the valley to their convention all summer long. Possibly even for years. Everyone could have missed them, given the tendency for all eyes to remain glued to the road ahead and last month’s bills. Bear’s theory was that the insects had suddenly hatched and crawled out of the trees, which Dellarobia knew was ignorant. If they’d hatched, something had to go up there first and lay an egg. Even miracles were somehow part of a package deal.

“Where’d that name come from, King Billy?” Valia asked. She was fiddling with wet skeins of rainbow-colored wool that hung from an old wooden laundry rack and dripped onto a tarp spread underneath. She poofed and lifted the loops of yarn like a hairdresser working on a punked-out client.

“It’s just something I learned from my old mommy,” Hester said. “Valia, honey, you need to quit fussing with those skeins or they’ll get felted together.”

Valia pulled her hands back as if scorched. Hester was poking at her dye pots and didn’t notice. She was looking particularly witchy today in her most ruined cowgirl boots and stained apron, with three enormous cauldrons boiling on her old monster of a stove. Witchy with a country-western motif. This was one of Hester’s winter projects, dyeing all the yarn that remained unsold when the summer farm market in Feathertown closed for the season. The natural colors did okay, but people reached their limits on gray and brown. Hester’s solution was to perk it up with color, and her instinct about that was right, every spring when the booth reopened, the customers were so fed up with winter they’d reach for anything bright. Like zombies stalking a heartbeat.

Dellarobia sat at the table preparing skeins for dyeing, with Cordelia close by in the wooden high chair that had once held her father and maybe her grandfather. This house was stuffed with Turnbow antiques, of the half-their-screws-loose variety. Dellarobia unfailingly checked the legs on that chair before inserting any child of her own, and had furthermore tied Cordie in with a dishtowel because there was no strap. The chair pre-dated the whole notion of child safety. Cordie was eating applesauce and occupying herself obligingly with the toy she called Ammafarm, a red plastic barn with levers that made animals come out and bleat their sounds. A city child would get a sorry education from a toy like this, as the cow, horse, dog, and chicken were approximately equal in size and all uttered the same asthmatic wheeze. None of that bothered Cordelia. “Moooo!” she cried into the face of the petite cow that emerged from its flimsy door.

Dellarobia had asked Hester the same question about the name King Billy. Her mother-in-law had evidently paid some attention to butterflies in her time. She’d mentioned some others by name: swallowtails, tigers, the cabbage eaters. And King Billy, who had lately come to reign over their property.

“I didn’t mind when it was just people from church coming up,” Hester complained to Valia, “but now everybody and his dog wants the grand tour. After it came out in the paper. It was about thirty of them up here the Friday after Thanksgiving. I want to tell you! That’s not normal, for the day after Thanksgiving.”

“No, it isn’t,” Valia agreed. “People should be at the mall.”

“Dog says wow wow wow!” Cordie announced, bobbing her head. Dellarobia had managed to corral her fleecy hair into two wild blond poofs, with a center part so crooked it could get you a DUI, and that was the sum total of grooming the child would presently allow. Dellarobia harbored a secret fondness for that wild streak, something she herself had swallowed down long before her daughter was born, only to see it erupt again in Cordie like a wet-weather spring.

“That article in the paper was good, wasn’t it?” Valia said. “I cut it out and saved you an extra copy. Help me remember that, Crystal, it’s in my purse.”

Crystal, being in Crystal-zone, scowled deeply into her cell phone. She was supposed to be helping with the wool, but had yet to pick up a skein.

Dellarobia knew what Hester had thought of the newspaper article. The reporter was a girl from Cleary, a town fifteen miles down the road where people went to college so they could regard people in Feathertown as hicks. When she’d shown up here in pressed slacks and pointy-toed shoes, Hester had driven her up the mountain in the ATV to see the butterflies, but the reporter only wanted to discuss Dellarobia. Not
actual
Dellarobia, but the one who’d had a vision, who could see the future, who probably peed on dead flowers and made them bloom. Dellarobia had no idea the talk had gone so crazy. She’d barely adjusted to her place in the center of a family controversy before being thrust into the limelight of a church congregation. And now this, the talk of a town. The reporter made Hester come straight back down to Dellarobia’s house for a highly unfortunate thirty minutes. The girl had a camera. Dellarobia wore sweatpants and the universal whale-spout hairdo of exhausted mothers. Cordie had skipped her nap and was tromping around the living room with her boots half off, emitting a volcanic eruption of demands, spit, and tears. It was not an environment conducive to journalism. All Dellarobia wanted was to escape the newspaper girl’s weird line of questions.

Cub had puffed up like a rooster when the article came out, taking it in to show the guys at the gravel company. He was impressed with all celebrity in equal measure, the type of kid who had cut out pictures of football players, Jesus, and America’s Most Wanted to tape on his bedroom wall. He’d confessed to having cried in sixth grade when he learned that superheroes weren’t real. Dellarobia was his Wonder Woman. But Hester seemed incensed by the article, which referred to Dellarobia as Our Lady of the Butterflies. Among other complaints, Hester said it made them sound Catholic.

The day darkened outside and thunder rumbled, an unusual sound for the first of December. Rain began to slash at the window, giving the kitchen a closed-in feeling that did not help Dellarobia’s prickly impatience. She put no stock in the sainthood business, but what if this winter was meant to be her one chance at something huge, and she spent the whole thing tying yarn in loops and listening to the Hester channel? She noticed that Cordie had changed the subject of her monologue from “moo” to “poopoo.”

“My sentiments exactly,” Dellarobia griped quietly, pouting at the armload of skeins Valia was bringing over to plop down on the table between herself and Crystal. The mound of grayish yarn in front of her was already gigantic. She felt like a picky-eating toddler having a spaghetti nightmare. They’d ended this year with more unsold goods than usual, which stood to reason, given the economy. Her job in today’s production was to tie each drab skein in a loose figure eight so it wouldn’t tangle up in the dye bath, and put it in the sink to soak in Synthrapol while awaiting its makeover. Hester mixed the dye powders based on the weight of goods, and tended the cauldrons. Valia weighed the skeins prior to processing, and Crystal did nothing whatsoever.

“Are we coming to any kind of a stopping place?” Dellarobia asked, wondering if Crystal might get the hint and start helping. “Because I can’t stay much longer.”

Hester and Valia ignored her. They were discussing the details of the upcoming visit of Pastor Ogle. “Do you think I should move this table out and get a better one in here?” Hester fretted. “Mommy’s antique one is up in the attic, we could bring that down. It’s smaller, but it’s not all scarred up like this one.”

The scar she meant was a darkened crescent in the center of the table that now stared at Dellarobia like an eye. During the brief time she and Cub had lived in this house, between their hasty wedding and the rushed completion of their home, Dellarobia had marred the kitchen table with a hot skillet. She’d been seventeen, for Pete’s sake. The skillet was burning her hands through the potholders. For these many years that burn mark had remained for Hester what might be called a conversation piece.

“Could you use a tablecloth?” Valia asked. “What are you going to serve him?”

“I thought we’d have coffee and cake. A jam cake, I’m thinking.”

Valia nodded thoughtfully, as if foreign policy were on the hook here. “That caramel icing is a dickens to make. But you’re right, I bet Bobby would love that. You could use placemats on the table. A centerpiece or something.”

“Do you think just coffee and cake will be enough?”

“Alien alert,” Dellarobia muttered, finally getting Crystal to glance up from her phone. “Hester just asked your mom for advice.”

Crystal’s eyebrows arched. “So?”

So, Dellarobia thought, she’s had a personality transplant. The idea of Pastor Ogle visiting her home was cranking her into nervous overdrive. It was surprising, actually, that Hester hadn’t had him in before. Bobby visited parishioners and their jam cakes with gusto. But the real shock was seeing Hester cowed by the prospect.

“Poopoo!” Cordie shouted again, kicking her legs vigorously to get her mother’s attention. She was reaching toward the table with her fingers stretched as wide as they would go, like little starfish.

Dellarobia followed her gaze to a jar of dye powder. “Oh. Purple?” she asked.

“Pupuw,” Cordie replied, giving her mother a look of exhausted relief.

“Sorry, baby. Like,
hello
, you’re trying to say something here.” She kissed her fingertips and reached over to touch the sugarplum nib of her daughter’s nose, provoking a blinky grin. Dellarobia picked up another jar. “What’s this one?”

“Geen!”

“Hester, did you hear that? Cordelia knows her colors.”

Hester appeared unimpressed with her genius grandchild, as only Hester could. Apparently she only had eyes for Bobby Ogle. Dellarobia studied the label on the jar. It had so many warnings, if you read all the way to the end you’d probably want to run for your life. She took a second look at Hester’s giant kettles, wondering if they were the same ones they used for the tomato and pickle canning in summer. “You think it’s okay for Cordie to be eating applesauce in the presence of”—she studied the tiny print—“tri-phenyl-methane?”

“Cub used to just about drink this stuff whenever we dyed the wool,” Hester replied curtly. “And look at him.”

No one responded to this. In the awkward moment, Cordie flung her spoon across the table and let loose a string of vowels that made both the dogs look up, wondering if they’d missed something. Dellarobia leaned over to retrieve the spoon. “Maybe we should try doing different colors this time,” she proposed. As colorful as Hester was, her dyeing was uninspired. She stuck with the packaged colors, which had alluring names like Amazon and Ruby, but came out plain old green and red. Much like life itself.

“What’s wrong with my colors,” Hester asked, not really asking.

“We could mix it up a little. I’m sure you could blend these powders together to get in-between colors.”

Something between tomatoes and a ladybug
, he’d said, touching her hair as if its color alone held exquisite value. Sometimes this still came over her in surprise attacks, the illicit flattery. And all the shame she had to bear, looking back on that, wondering how she’d been taken in. Again. She’d fallen before, never that hard maybe, but that stupidly. Two years ago, the man with sky blue eyes at Rural Incorporated who’d helped her week after week with the Medicaid papers when she was pregnant with Cordie. Before that, the mail carrier, Mike, who sometimes subbed their route. And Cub’s old friend Strickland with the biceps and his own tree-trimming business. She knew there was something wrong with her. Some insidious weakness in her heart or resolve that would let her fly off and commit to some big nothing, all of her own making.

Hester and Valia had returned to their earlier topic of the visitors who’d been showing up to look at the butterflies. Hester became herself again, begrudging the presence of a miracle in her vicinity. Bobby’s impending visit had let loose the floodgate of his followers, and Bear and Hester seemed to be butting heads over their next move. The miracle was whatever it was, but a logging contract was money in the bank.

Cordie had meanwhile discovered the game of Make Grown-Ups Jump. She threw her spoon on the floor next to Crystal’s green Crocs, and watched Crystal’s face closely for results. Crystal declined to be distracted from her phone’s tiny keyboard, working so desperately to communicate with her two thumbs that the gesture struck Dellarobia as somehow monkeylike. It also struck her that there was no cell signal in this house.

“Crystal, if you can work it into your agenda, could you pick up Cordie’s spoon?”

Crystal looked at the floor. “You want me to wash it?”

“Eat a peck of dirt before you die!” chimed Valia, without looking up from her sums. She had to keep track as she weighed the skeins, penciling her numbers in careful columns, and was doing it with what Dellarobia felt to be a desperate air, as if keeping score of some game she was bound to lose. What a mother-and-daughter pair, those two. Valia had no opinions of her own, apologized to her shadow, and did exactly as she was told, all of which signed her on as Hester’s BFF. Whereas Crystal lived the whole mistake-parade of her life as the majorette, bowing to the applause, ready to sign autographs. Crystal put the
con
in self-confidence. How could two people get the same set of parts and make such different constructions? But then, there was raising. That had to be taken into account. What could a doormat rear but a pair of boots?