“Yes!” Hester said back. “But it wasn’t something to count on.”
“What in the hell. Sorry for the language, Hester. I’m just a little shocked.” Dellarobia stomped back to the trail, crunching through the leaves, canvas bag rattling. She threw the bag on the ground. There was nothing breakable in there anyway. She wished there had been. She was in the mood to break something into a hundred pieces.
“So I wasn’t good enough for your son. Is that what you’re saying?”
“You know it isn’t.” Hester’s voice had grown quiet. She spoke straight out through the upright trunks of the bare grove as if having a prison visit with God.
“Well, why, in the name of . . . Well, Jesus, Hester. You never saw fit to mention this before? Like after we lost that baby? We could have called it quits right there after six weeks of marriage and gone our ways. If you thought I was so unsuitable.”
“Wasn’t my place.”
Dellarobia said nothing to that. They’d just tried to do the right thing. For the sake of Cub’s parents as much as anyone. The breeze made a large and continuous shushing sound in the leafless forest, under the low winter sky.
“But I never made up a feather bed for you either,” Hester said. “If you noticed.”
“Oh, I noticed.” Dellarobia took off her gloves, fished a tissue out of her pocket, and blew her nose. She contemplated walking over there to snatch Hester’s cigarettes and smoke the whole pack.
“If you were going, you were going, I figured. Taking those babies with you.”
“Preston and Cordie?” Dellarobia turned to stare. Could any of this be true? That Hester expected to lose them, all this time? The woman had practically pronounced the marriage vows herself, she and Bear, and thrown together that house before the ink was dry. Built, though not paid for. “You built us a house,” she said.
“It’s what we owed our son.”
“And you think I’ve had one foot out the door. All along.”
“Have you not?”
“No!” Dellarobia drew the vowel out into two syllables as in, No, stupid. She made herself breathe slowly, feeling numb. It was an earthquake, an upheaval of buried surfaces in which nothing was added or taken away. Her family was still her family, an alliance of people at odds, surviving like any other by turning the everyday blind eye. But someone had seen the whole thing.
After they had their words, they could only keep walking. The trail climbed to the rocky spine of a ridge that divided the butterfly valley with its dank, looming firs from the broader south-facing hollow above Bear and Hester’s house. The lay of the land was plain from up there, the patchwork of brown farmlands below and the blue-gray wall of mountains that contained all. The sky opened by degrees, and it grew nearly too warm for brisk walking inside layers of winter wool. As they descended the south-facing incline, Dellarobia saw a glint of sun reflected off the steep tin roof of Bear and Hester’s farmhouse far below. They passed through more groves of these little trees that held on to their leaves for no good reason she could guess, except to rattle like worn-out lungs with any faint movement of air. The woods possessed but one color, brown, to all appearances dead. Yet each trunk rose up in its way distinct. Shaggy bark and smooth, all reaching for the sky, come what may. Hester could have said what they were. She was a fount of strange woodland names like boneset and virgin’s bower, for which no person of their acquaintance seemed to have any use. That must be lonely, Dellarobia thought, to have answers whose questions had all died of natural causes. The trees were skinnier here and the woods more open, though still as varied as any standing congregation of human beings. She knew this valley had been cleared of its timber in Cub’s youth. So this had all grown up during her own time on earth. The thought amazed her.
In the clearing she spied a flower and let out a small oh. Hester must have seen it too, the sole speck of white in the winter-killed monotony, just a handful of little fringed blossoms no taller than a shoe. Dellarobia knelt down to get close, the myopic’s everlasting impulse, and saw each blossom was a whole cluster of petaled flowers. Black specks danced on filaments held above the flowers’ gullets. There were no green leaves, only the floral bunches on naked pink stems poking straight up through matted dead leaves. That looked eerie, like some posy handed over from the other side, from death.
“That’s them,” Hester said. “I thought there’d be more.”
“Well, there might be.” Dellarobia was not about to dig this one up if it was the sole delegate. She remained on her knees, connected through her thigh muscles to all the hours she’d spent in that posture as if in prayer or surrender, counting dead butterflies. She feared taking her eyes off this one live thing. It could disappear.
“Mommy called them harbingers. Some of them says salt-and-pepper flower.”
Dellarobia found it hard to imagine the people who knew, much less disagreed about, the name of a Cheerio-size flower that bloomed in the dead of February. What would possess them to come out here and find it?
“I see more,” Hester said. Dellarobia removed her pink wool scarf and laid it in a ring around the first one so as not to lose it, but Hester was right, there were more. Salted across the dun floor of the woods she counted three, four, a dozen small bouquets. Once her eyes knew how to see them, they became abundant. She took the trowel from her bag and dug into the dank forest floor, which was wet and gravelly just under the top inch of matted leaves. While she chipped at the inhospitable garden, the air stirred and in plain sight the experiment ran ahead of itself. Monarchs were already here, this source discovered. She saw two bright drifters coasting tentatively in the woods, and near Hester’s boots, the duller orange of folded wings at rest on a flower cluster. Nectaring, that was the verb. King Billy nectaring on the harbinger.
Beyond all half-answers and evasions one question had persisted, since forever, and it was why. In Dellarobia’s childhood it plagued and compelled her, one word, like one silver dollar on the floor of a wishing well, begging to be plucked up but strategically untouchable. Unsatisfactory answers crowded the waters around it, she could measure her life in those: because you are too young, because it was his time, because it isn’t done, because I didn’t raise you to behave that way, because it’s too late, because the baby came early, because life is like that, just because. Because God moves, it goes without saying, in mysterious ways.