Flight Behavior

“What do we do?” Cub kept asking.

Get it warm, get it to nurse, make the mother accept it. She told Cub to go get grain and lead the mother into the barn while she warmed up the lamb in the house. They would milk that stupid ewe right now, because the colostrum was crucial. The newborn intestine only stays open a few hours to receive the mother’s antibodies. They had a bottle somewhere. But instead of jumping to her feet, Dellarobia found herself curled like a fist around the lamb with Cub’s arms around her so tightly she could hardly draw breath. The sobs in his great chest racked them both like the bucking of a terrified animal. She sobbed too, for nothing, it seemed. It was all impermanent, the square white corners of house and home, everything. This one little life signified nothing in the long run; it would get eaten.

“It wasn’t all a waste,” she told him over and over, holding on. Some things they got right, she was sure of that. The children. And for all the rest they wept, a merged keening that felt bottomless. For the years and years of things that didn’t exist, fantasies of flight where there was no flight. Nothing, really, but walking away on your own two feet. She felt tears frozen on her face.

“How can you know?” he kept asking her. She told him she was never really sure how she knew. Reading, filing stuff away, or just guessing, if that was the only choice. She and Preston had read about swinging around a newborn lamb. But never in a million years did she think she’d actually do that. Things look impossible when you’ve not done them.

She pulled away in order to look her husband in the eye. “This is all going to scare us to death,” she said. “You and me. But we’re still going to have to do it.”

“Maybe,” he said.

“Not maybe, Cub. For real.”

They found their feet and edged down the precarious slope to their separate tasks. With the lamb cradled inside her coat Dellarobia followed the fence line, for something to hang on to. She thought of the times she’d walked this fence with Cub, tearing out honeysuckle and briars to mend it. But the weeds were still here, it was plain to see, encircling the whole pasture, threaded through wire and post and skeletal trees. With their glassy stems encased in ice the weeds looked more substantial than the fence itself, the seasons of secret growth revealed in a sudden disclosure of terrible, cold beauty.

She felt Preston’s hand slip into hers while she stood at the stove making pancakes. She’d decided to tell him today, before the bus, and not tomorrow on his birthday. In her mind he was still in bed, so the cool hand startled her and the eyes rising solemnly to hers made her heart seize. “What’s wrong, honey?”

He tugged on her hand. She turned off the range and followed him to his bedroom, where Cordie breathed in her crib, asleep. She knelt with Preston on his unmade bed and looked out the window and saw what he saw, a bud colony on the neighbors’ dead peach orchard.

She knew what it was, despite the absence of any expectation. Ovid had apprised her to be on the lookout for something like this, in the unlikely event, but not to look there, on these puny saplings whose tops now drooped over like Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree. Whose limbs were copiously flocked with vivid orange. “Oh my gosh, Preston,” she said, bouncing on her knees, looking at him openmouthed, bounding off the bed. “Look how many. Put on your boots and coat. Let’s go see.”

The resurrection and the life, she kept thinking over and over, a natural hazard with words like those, as she bundled wool onto Preston and they crunched out over the yard. Those little trees looked alive again, resurrected. Enveloped with the souls of dead children. It was no easy trek across the field. Preston had to hang on to her hand as they stomped through thick layers of melting, collapsing snow. Sometimes they broke all the way through to the dark, soaked ground that stood as wet pools in the bottoms of their footprints. It was hard to see where all this could possibly go when it melted. But the deep snow remained, the white of it dazzling them all over again, even now at dawn.

More dazzling still were the monarchs. Down here in the open without the camouflage of forest, with their cover utterly blown, it looked as if some other world had touched this one and bled orange. She could not guess the number of individuals in these clusters, maybe a few thousand. She was still no good at estimating. It wasn’t a million, that much she knew, and if these were the sole survivors, it wasn’t enough. It would take a bigger gene pool to get them through. And mortality was still dogging them, she saw; dark flecks of bodies were sprinkled over the snowy ground here like pepper on mashed potatoes. Maybe those were males that had already mated, their DNA packaged to go. Ovid had shown her pictures of bud colonies in Mexico where the butterflies descended from their roosts in March to cluster in the valleys, staged for liftoff, blanketing roofs and hedges and fields of dry cornstalks. Theoretically this meant they were ready to launch out. In the known world, anyway, it meant that.

Preston had brought his sit-upon from the kindergarten field trip so they could sit on the snow in the dead peach orchard and look at the butterflies. Dellarobia brought a raincoat to sit on. They chose a spot at the base of a little tree high on the hill so they could look up at butterflies, and down at butterflies. She had never allowed herself to picture this. After the storm on Tuesday Ovid had told her they were still on the trees up there, a few million butterflies frozen onto the branches beneath a covering of snow. Probably they would slough off with the thaw like so much dead skin. In the last two days he’d packed up the lab with the mood of closing a house after a death in the family. Deciding what to keep, what to give away. Survival wasn’t possible, he said, given the mortality under that snow. It would take a crowd of variations and mistakes and resilience, at least a million individuals, he thought, to add up to survival of a species. So what about the animals two-by-two on Noah’s ark, she’d asked, and he replied that they would have marched off that boat to die out in a couple of malformed generations, thanks to inbreeding. His bitterness was understandable. As they broke his laboratory down to its bones, Dellarobia watched the void of this man where once there had been wonder, and she despaired of her future. In such a short time he had relieved her of a lifetime of illusions, and already she missed them. Noah’s Ark and better days ahead. She found herself still rooting for this sliver of a generation that had made its way down the precarious mountain to rest on a blighted orchard.