Flight Behavior

“This property’s been in my dad’s family for close to a hundred years,” Cub said, as if that mattered in the slightest. Dellarobia took a bite of her supper, trying to be patient with her husband’s view of things. Next he’d be bringing up the logging contract. Who knew, maybe Mr. Byron would be interested in man talk. She couldn’t read him very well. She reached over and tried to wipe Cordie’s face, but the wild child batted the napkin away, singing “nananana.” The artistic temperament of the family. Dellarobia watched her daughter finger-paint with cheese sauce on the tray of her high chair, moving both hands in big circles. Landscape of a planet with two suns, by Cordelia Turnbow.

Everyone had stopped speaking for the moment. In the conversational pause Dellarobia heard muted applause from the living room, the TV no one had thought to turn off. It sounded like some dumb Spike thing, which the kids had no business watching. About once a week she threatened to cut off the cable, but they had a weird package with Bear and Hester that made it essentially free. Also Dellarobia doubted the family could live without it. It was like drugs. These companies mainlined you.

“They eat poison milkweed, too,” Preston piped up. “Tell him that, Mama.”

“That’s right, they eat milkweed, which is toxic I guess. Not the butterflies, they don’t have chewing mouthparts, they just go around drinking nectar from flowers. But when they go to lay their eggs, they lay them on a milkweed plant. So when the eggs hatch out as caterpillars, those babies will eat nothing but poison leaves.”

Preston added breathlessly, “And when they, when they eat that and grow up, it turns the butterflies poison, too. So nothing will come along and eat them!”

“Poisonous or distasteful to birds,” Dellarobia corroborated, quoting from memory.

Ovid crossed his arms over his chest and made a face that said, Very impressed, nodding admiringly at Preston. “What a smart young fellow. A little bird tells me”—he circled his finger in the air, then pointed it right at Preston—“that you are a scientist.”

“They’re also called King Billies,” Dellarobia said. “That’s what people call them around here. I have no idea why.” Was she competing with her five-year-old for this man’s approval? She bit her lip.

“King Billy, I have not heard that one,” Ovid said. He turned his chair a little toward Preston and asked in his lilting way, “Now, tell me something. Why do you suppose a butterfly would fly so far to join his companions in the winter?”

Preston put down his fork and closed his eyes, the better to engage every brain cell. Finally he gave it a shot: “He’s lonely?”

“A reasonable hypothesis,” Ovid replied. “His friends are very dispersed, you know. They fly all about. They cover a large territory. So, coming back to the group gives him a chance to find a wife, right? An extra good wife, from another part of the country, you know? You are too young to be thinking about dat, of course,” Ovid winked at Cub. “But one day, when you have a car—” He rolled his eyes and whistled. “Then you will know what I mean.”

Dellarobia was taken aback at this turn of the conversation, and prevailed upon herself to keep her mouth shut. She couldn’t tell what her husband was thinking as he shoveled in the calories over there. Cub seemed cordial, hungry, slightly out of the loop. His normal self, in other words.

Ovid continued, “Why else do you suppose he might go so far? So far south, to be precise. To the sunny land of Mexico?”

“To keep warm!” Preston blurted quickly, like a contestant on a game show.

“So they will not freeze, exactly. Really, Preston, I like your thinking. And now, look at it another way. What if he is really a creature of warm, sunny places? Like me. I also come from such a place. But life has given me opportunities to wander north, you see, looking for things that interest me a lot. What if the butterfly does this also, but he cannot endure the frosty winter? Then what will our friend do?”

Preston giggled, glancing at his mother. “Buy a coat?”

“If only he could. But he is a butterfly.” The man had a winning smile, so wide it showed his eyeteeth along the sides.

“That was a joke,” Preston said primly. “He would go back home in the winter. So he wouldn’t freeze up.”

“Just so.” Ovid clapped his hands together, to Preston’s pure delight. The man knew how to talk to kids. “So what are we proposing here?” he asked. “Maybe that Mr. Monarch is not really our butterfly at all, here in our gardens. Not flying south in winter. Maybe he is really a Mexican butterfly coming north in summer, just for a visit.”

Preston nodded, wide-eyed, actually seeming to follow this line of thinking.

“But a scientist doesn’t just make a wild guess, you know. He measures things. He does experiments. How can we discover the truth about Mr. Monarch?”

“Ask somebody?” Preston suggested.

“We ask his family.”

“How?” Preston was hooked. A small, four-eyed fish.

“There are ways to do this,” Ovid said, leaning back in his chair, crossing his long legs, an ankle on his knee. “People have done it. And do you know what they found? All his relatives are tropical butterflies. In his whole family, which is called the Danaus family, Mr. Monarch is the only one clever enough to seek his fortune in a cold place.”

Dellarobia felt numb. Hoodwinked, embarrassed, furious, entranced. “A little bird tells me,” she said, pointing at Ovid, “you are a scientist.”

He spread his hands wide, caught out, smiling so broadly he was a landscape all his own. Like Cordelia’s, a world with extra sunshine.

“Well, why in the world?” Dellarobia choked a little, coughing until she recovered. She drank her glass of tea to the bottom. “I just made a jackass of myself, thank you very much.”

Cub seemed suddenly to have awakened. He smacked both hands flat on the table, as if getting the joke, and declared, “You’re a butterfly-ologist, aren’t you?”

“Entomologist, lepidopterist. Biologist is fine. I don’t put a lot of stock in titles.”

“But”—Dellarobia struggled to frame her question—“you’ve been to college and studied all this, right? Or, what am I saying, you probably teach college.”