Flight Behavior

Dellarobia blew across her cup. “As opposed to watching sheep, you mean.”

“Sheep put food on the table and clothes on your back.”

“Well, I guess God made butterflies for some reason, and He sure put a truckload of them down on us. Maybe we just need to pray about it.” Dellarobia felt thrilled by her moxie. She drank her coffee in silence, squelching a grin.

Cordie had begun stalking around the room, saying, “Wow wow wow,” still gripping the receiver and dragging the plastic telephone by its cord. Taking her doggie for a walk. Every few seconds she looked back to make sure it was following her. It had no wheels, being a telephone, and made a pitiful pull toy. It kept flipping over onto its rounded side and lolling like a turtle on its back, being dragged by the neck until dead.

Dellarobia was startled when she looked back at Hester to see tears welling in her eyes. “Hester, what’s wrong?”

Hester quickly turned her face aside. Possibly she hadn’t known she was revealing emotion. When she spoke, her voice was raspy and thick. “I am praying about it. And I still don’t know what to do.”

Dellarobia put out a hand to quiet Cordie, who had now discovered she could lift the phone by its cord and bounce it against the floor like a yo-yo. In the gentlest voice she could muster, she asked, “Do about what?”

Hester’s face was the customary knot of anger and disapproval, but the gray eyes seemed to be coming from somewhere else, two pools of expectation. Dellarobia glimpsed a younger person in there, someone who could have hoped for things and fallen in love. The girl who wore those clothes to the hoedowns for which they were intended.

“Bear’s signed the contract,” Hester finally said. “With those Money Tree men. He says he’s going ahead with it, rain or shine. King Billies or no King Billies. Now see, I don’t know why they couldn’t wait a month or two and see what happens. I pray about it every day. The Lord says attend to His glory. You were the first one of us to pay attention.”

Dellarobia utterly lost her bearings, sputtering inside herself like a car out of gas. Without the vexation between them, her relationship with Hester had no traction. She stood up from the table, lifting Cordelia onto her hip. She needed a diaper change. Should she leave the room at a time like this? She sat down again, with Cordie on her lap warbling, “Free-too, free-four.” Preston had been teaching her to count.

Hester looked at Dellarobia, unguarded. “Cub stood up for you,” she said. “First I didn’t see the good in that. But see, that was good of him, a good husband. The boy’s got a pure heart. But his daddy is not going to let up on him till this is all over.”

“So Bear won’t budge, on the logging.” Dellarobia’s own thoughts about the butterflies were so unsettling she’d begun to ration them, like something sweet and scarce. The valley of lights, the boughs of orange flame. She would never be able to tell anyone how it was. That she’d been there first. Already that first day seemed untrue. Hester let her breath out slowly, and Dellarobia could hear a racking tremble in it, as if the woman were bearing up to terrible pain. Sometimes the ewes breathed like that during lambing. A frightening thought. She was still waiting for the birth, whatever monstrous thing her mother-in-law had come to deliver in her kitchen.

“He and Peanut Norwood won’t give an inch,” Hester said. “I don’t think it’s just the money. I mean, it is the money. But to be in such a rush over it, not listening to anybody. I think they’ve put each other up to that. A man-to-man kind of thing.”

Dellarobia’s mind had pretty well finished beating itself senseless, and now went empty of normal thoughts. For some reason she thought of Honors English, the great themes: man against man, man against himself. Could man ever be for anything?

Hester avoided looking at her directly. “I think Cub would stand up to them, if you backed him up.”

Dellarobia saw it all then in a flash: Hester weighing the moral choices, swallowing her vast and considerable pride. To do the right thing she needed Dellarobia, mark the date. “Hester,” she said, “you look like you could use a cigarette.”

Hester’s face fell slack with gratitude, like the faces of the women they’d seen on TV last week when their men were finally saved from a mine disaster. Salvation in all forms registered about the same way. With Cordie still on her lap, Dellarobia reached to open the kitchen drawer that hid her ashtray. She slid it across to Hester, along with her own pack of smokes. The wrong brand, but for once Hester might not find fault.

“I need to go change a diaper,” Dellarobia said, “I’m sorry. You just make yourself at home, and I’ll be back in a minute. I’m going to see if I can put this one down for a little N-A-P before lunch.”

Cordie ignored the n-word, busily tapping the yellow head of her telephone receiver against the edge of the table. She frowned in concentration, directing the blows, tap-tap-tap. Using it as a hammer, Dellarobia realized. Driving nails, as she’d seen her father do last night when he replaced the weather stripping.

Hester almost smiled. “That child surely has ideas about what to do with a telephone. Everything but talk on it.”

Dellarobia studied the toy—bulky body, cord, receiver, dial—and realized it did not resemble any telephone that existed in Cordelia’s lifetime. Phones lived in people’s pockets, they slid open, they certainly had no dials.

“Why would she talk into it? She doesn’t know it’s a telephone.”

Hester wouldn’t get this, of course. In her eyes it was a phone, and that was that. Dellarobia could barely get it herself. She’d seen something so plainly in this toy that was fully invisible to her child, two realities existing side by side. It floored her to be one of the people seeing the world as it used to be. While the kids shoved on.

When the storm broke, the world was changed. Flat rocks dotted the pasture with their damp shine, scattered on a hillside that looked like a mud finger painting. The receding waters left great silted curves swaggering down the length of the hill, pulled from side to side by a current that followed its incomprehensible rules. Washed in the blood of the lamb were words that came to mind when Dellarobia ventured out, though it wasn’t blood that had washed this farm but the full contents of the sky, more water than seemed possible from the ceiling of any one county. At the tail end of the storm the electricity had flickered off briefly, so she’d hiked out to the camper to be sure everyone was okay. It felt strange to knock on the tinny door of a camper home, but they’d welcomed her in boisterously, like shipwreck survivors, Ovid and the students all sitting in that dim space around the cramped dinette. They were working with calculators in the glow of a battery-powered lantern. What she’d really noticed were the mounds of wet clothes piled everywhere in that dank little den, from all the days they’d worked in the rain before lightning bolts drove them indoors. Dellarobia tried to imagine loving to do something so much, she would get that miserable doing it. When she’d offered to run a few loads through her washer and dryer, the kids had genuinely cheered, handing over armloads. Mako pulled off his boots and gave her the socks off his feet, which were wet enough to wring out. And later when she returned their laundry, clean and folded, they urged her to sit and chat awhile. This was how she got herself invited to go with them up the mountain. Barring a tornado, they meant to get back to work.