Inadmissable thoughts. Dellarobia forced herself now to try being someone else, a wife from Mars with a nicer personality. She’d come down that mountain feeling so sure there was something new here to see. She slowed her breathing and just watched the little threads that clung to his jeans, standing straight out as he pulled them away from the fabric. The night air was crisp for the first time in months, full of promise and static. Spark weather, was how she thought of these fall nights when the air suddenly went so dry her pajamas lit the sheets with little sparks. Why would cool weather make dry air? She’d wondered such things a thousand times, inciting the regular brainless replies: woolly worms predict the weather and the Lord moves in mysterious ways. Good night. She knew she should be patient with those underly endowed with intelligence, but could everyone at once be below average? Most, she suspected, were just sliding by.
She had seen trees aflame on the mountain. For some reason that knowledge was hers alone. What had she been thinking? The full proposition now flooded her with panic, shutting her into a tight place. “They can’t log that mountain,” she said.
“Why not?”
“I don’t know why not.”
A lake of fire, what would Cub make of that? The route to the world’s end, a vivid moral suggestion he’d heard all his life and probably believed. The Revelations. Her mind worked differently. Flame and inundation were opposites, they canceled. “The world can surprise you,” she said finally. “It could be something special up there.”
Cub lifted the plane of his eyebrows. “He’s selling trees, Dellarobia.”
She balked, knowing his wariness of people who wanted to save trees for trees’ sake. An easy want, when they weren’t your trees, or your foreclosure. “But what kind of trees?” she pressed. “I mean, are they big or little or red or blue or what? If Bear’s signing a logging contract, I think he should walk up there and look at what he’s selling. You both should.”
Cub stopped picking at his jeans and looked at her as if confronted with a whole new wife. Like those sheep out there, bewildered by the familiar. He took off his cap, ran a hand over his standing-up hair, and replaced it, studying her all the while. For the first moment in a long invisible time, she actually felt she was being seen.
“What for?” he asked, at last.
“What for? It’s out of the question to walk your own land?”
“Not my land yet.”
She had carried the leaf rake up here, and now pictured herself walking to the haymow door and throwing it out, just to hear the satisfying metallic clatter. Cub still drove the same pickup truck they’d dated in, now on its third engine overhaul, with so many miles on it you’d think surely he’d been somewhere. But he hadn’t seen a state line, and didn’t care. What did it take to move a man who, when he ran out of steam, which he didn’t have much to begin with, resembled a mountain?
“If it’s not your land, then what are we, sharecroppers?” she asked. “We work this farm, it’s almost our entire living, so you might want to claim it. Even if your dad has not passed away as of yet. Why won’t you act like one thing in the world is yours?”
“I walked the fences that time when the ram got out.”
“Jesus Christ, that was the winter I was pregnant with Preston.”
“No need to take the Lord’s name in vain.”
“I’ve hardly seen you set your boots outside this barn in five years. That’s a fact, Cub. How do you even know what’s up there in that hollow? There could be anything. You all are fixing to sell off something, and you don’t even know what it is.”
“Well, I don’t expect there’s any gold mines. Just trees. The green ones, I’m a-thinking.”
“Trees, okay. But you could go look at them. The logging company could rob you blind. They could tell you the timber is not any count, when it is.”
“How do you know what it is?”
“We’ve been up there, you and me. We’ve consumed some Ripple in that turkey-hunting shack.” She blushed, her fair skin ever ready to give her away. But Cub was so unsuspecting. He would think it was sins of their own she was blushing over.
He smiled. “Maybe we ought to go up there again one of these days, baby.”
“Okay, let’s do that. We’ll have one last look before you go knocking down all the trees with your shock and awe, turning your family’s land into frickin’ Iraq.”
“Ain’t no A-rabs on the Turnbow property, Dellarobia.”
“That’s not what I meant. Anyway, for all you know, there could be terrorists camped up there on the ridge. Who’d find them? Nobody around here will get out of their darn pickup trucks. That ridge is probably the safest hiding place in the world.”
Cub rolled his eyes, and she felt overwhelmed with futile energy, like a dog chasing its tail. She could see this was going the way of all their arguments, poised to step from the ground of true complaints into the quicksand of trivial nonsense. With full righteous outrage intact. “You and your dad ought to lay eyes on your own property once in a while, is all I’m trying to say.”
“Why are you nagging me about this all of a sudden?”
“I don’t know. There’s just reasons. There could be more treasure than you think in your own backyard.”
He shook his head. “What you’re saying is what you always say. Work harder, Cub, go faster, Cub.”
“Is not.”
“Well, what am I supposed to do? The ATV busted an axle last month.”
“Busted an axle all by itself, as I understand it. With no help from your drunk friends.”
“Nobody was entirely drunk.”
Here we go, she thought, into the quicksands of stupid. She stood up. “I’m going in the house. I just thought I’d mention that God gave you feet, to set one down in front of the other, if memory serves me. Seems like you’d go up there and look at what you’re selling off before it’s gone. It’s just good business.”
“Good business. Since when did you get your business-lady degree?”
The contempt startled her. That wasn’t even Cub, he was just parroting his father in some last-ditch attempt at manhood. She made for the stairs without looking back. “I hear you. Good business, and it’s none of mine.”