Flight Behavior

It was so easy for her to say a thing like that, with full enthusiasm for the eccentric coordinates of her man. At some point in the evening Dellarobia had stopped being amazed that Ovid had turned into someone new, and understood he had become himself, in the presence of his wife. With the sense of a great weight settling, she recognized marriage. Not the precarious risk she’d balanced for years against forbidden fruits, something easily lost in a brittle moment by flying away or jumping a train to ride off on someone else’s steam. She was not about to lose it. She’d never had it.

First Bear, then Hester, then Cub and Dellarobia: the four of them, it struck her, were arranged on this pew exactly as they were to be laid in the cemetery, according to a burial plan they’d paid money down on eleven years ago. Bear sitting in the sanctuary with his wife, rather than smoking it out in Men’s Fellowship, was no ordinary event, probably part of the family negotiation Hester had mentioned a while ago. Right after this service, in Bobby Ogle’s office, they would settle the question of the logging contract. Once she remembered this agenda, Dellarobia saw hints of it everywhere. The choir sang, “Oh this earth is a garden, the garden of my Lord, and He walks in His garden in the cool of the day.” Maybe it was coincidence. But it also seemed possible that Bear was being set up.

Cub sat holding both Dellarobia’s hands, not in the casual way he normally laid claim to her, but imploringly, his big fingers threaded tightly through all of hers. It felt like having both hands jammed through a wrought-iron gate. She abided captivity, for the complicated chain of trespasses that had gotten her stuck this way. Her detachment from Cub the previous evening seemed this morning to explode the minute the shades came up. The sight of his eyes in the mirror as he brushed his teeth, this immense sad man in his boxers, wrenched her stomach and made her turn from the light. This morning she was doomed to nurse Cub like a hangover.

“My Lord He said unto me, do you like my garden so fair?” the choir members sang earnestly, their many possible differences disguised beneath the words of a song. “You may live in this garden if you keep the grasses green, and I’ll return in the cool of the day.” In his sermon Bobby warned against losing gratitude for the miracle of life. If God is in everything, he asked, how could we tear Him down? A love for our Creator means we love His creation. “What part of love,” he paused, searching his audience, “do we not understand? The Bible says God owns these hills. It tells us arrogance is a sin. How is it not arrogance to see the flesh of creation as mere wealth, to be scraped bare for our use?” Dellarobia recognized a possible opening round aimed at Bear, though it might also be a metaphor for credit card debt. Living within your means was a major theme of Bobby’s.

She was surprised to see Bobby had sprouted a beard since last Sunday, or the outline of one: no mustache, just a dark fringe that encircled his face like a basket handle, emphasizing its roundness. He looked to be aiming for millennial-generation today, wearing jeans and a long-tailed maroon shirt and plain black sneakers, the cheap kind she bought for her kids. Their white soles blinked as he paced around on the darkened stage.

“He’ll speak to us if we let him. Little old raggedy us. We all know what it’s like to come up short. We are southerners. We understand that macaroni and cheese is a vegetable.” Bobby chuckled at the assent that came back to him from the darkened room. “And we are Americans.” Assent came again. Bobby often spoke with his cupped hands, scooping the air toward him to emphasize his points. “We want the things we want, and we want them now. But that is not a reason to rob Peter to pay Paul.”

Okay, credit card debt, Dellarobia thought, but in his closing prayer, Bobby requested of the Lord that they experience the blessing of His creation and share that with others. “May we look to these mountains that are Your home and see You are in everything. The earth is the Lord in the fullness thereof.” So it could go either way.

The rest of her family headed for Bobby’s office afterward, in the slow-moving way of animals maneuvering through a herd, but Dellarobia detoured through the Sunday-school building to make sure someone would still be there to watch the kids. She steered clear of Brenda’s scary mother but got waylaid by Preston, who wanted her to admire the Lego enterprise he had going with Chad or Jad, an older boy she didn’t recognize. This boy snarked his nose in a constant, repeating sniffle, and bore the marks of an encounter with a bag of Cheetos. The orange crumbs glowed on his hands and clothing and every Lego he’d touched, like fingerprint dust. Dellarobia made a mental note to scrub Preston before he touched food, and scooted to Bobby’s office, where the rest of the family was already seated. Still in cemetery order, she noted, realizing she had no idea where the baby would fit in, even though it was the only one of them already buried. She stood a moment in the doorway, wowed by the tall windows rising behind Bobby’s desk. They showed a whole lot more of God’s mountains than she ever got to see from her house.

When she slid into the empty chair facing Bobby’s deep oak desk, she registered with surprise that it was Cub speaking. “There’s the well water,” he said, counting off points on his fingers, “and there’s mudslides. That is a fact, Dad, about mudslides. I can show you where they logged over by the Food King and it brought the whole mountain down. In all this rain. What if we have another wet year again?”

“We won’t,” Bear said, sounding utterly sure of this.

“Well, they say it could,” Cub said quietly.

Dellarobia understood she had missed something significant. Cub was already up to four fingers, and Bear looked wary and mad, as if he’d been gut-punched. Certainly he would not have expected this from his son’s corner.

“That right there is all he needs to do,” Hester said to Bobby with some finality, leaning forward to hand a stack of papers across the desk. The logging contract possibly, though some of those pages had come out of Hester’s printer; Dellarobia recognized the weird black-to-blue fading ink color. She always waited too long to put in a new cartridge. Bobby turned slowly through the pages, giving careful attention to each, while Bear intermittently erupted in a legal-sounding phrase. “In perpetuity not to be breached,” or words of that nature. Bear’s black suit jacket pulled in horizontal creases across his shoulders and his white shirt collar bit into the meat of his neck. He looked like a pit bull on a short chain.