Flight Behavior

She worked steadily through the afternoon counting insects. She’d had worse jobs in her life. One quadrat she split with Mako, and all the ones still uncounted she did by herself while the rest of the crew did other work. They measured trees by looking at them through a little yellow instrument, and measured wingspans using tweezer things called calipers, and measured what they called wet weights using tiny scales that looked like drug-dealer equipment to Dellarobia, not that she knew. When the light began to wane they headed down-mountain. She was ready to bolt and run toward the sight of her dear children and, more importantly, her cigarettes. But they all walked together, climbing back up through the forest to the High Road and descending it with the sun at their backs. Butterflies that had moved around during the day now flowed toward them up the road, coming home to roost. They’d been out seeking flowers if they could find any here, for nectar, Ovid said. Warm days that got them awake and flying around would deplete their fat reserves. Fat reserves, on a butterfly? Yes. In fact, he said, warm spells might be a bigger danger here than the cold snaps. The butterflies would burn through their fuel much more quickly than in the steady cool of Mexico’s high-altitude roost. That was a big problem on this mountain, with no winter flowers for refueling. She tried to picture winter flowers, and came up blank. Poinsettias? Depauperate of nectar sources, was what he said. She tried not to take it personally that her mountain was poor in all ways, even flower-wise.

She tried to calm her burgeoning resentments and just float on the tide of butterflies that surrounded them. It was like being inside a video game. Little V shapes of moving orange light kept coming at her, sweeping around. They seemed to magnify the sunlight, igniting the air. She could see how they would need steady cues in their unsteady world. She felt for them. She wanted to like the scientists too, who really did care about the butterflies, probably a far cry more than she did. It was true what Ovid said, they were only taking the measure of things. If the news was bad, that wasn’t their fault. They were just people. Kids, for the most part, basically her own generation, with jackets tied around their waists, walking along in a river of butterflies.

Earlier in the day she’d taken a look at Mako’s coat with its wrecked zipper, and had considered offering to replace it, but hesitated. Maybe he didn’t care one way or the other. She made the offer now.

“Replace it? You mean, take out the zipper and put in a new one?” he asked her, apparently unacquainted with the concept of clothing repair. These kids must think their expensive gear grew on trees.

She laughed. “Lay that coat out on a table and use some of those measuring tools you’ve got to measure the zipper. You can buy one just like it at the Walmart in Cleary, they’ve got fabric and notions. Bring it to the house tomorrow, if you can get by without your coat for a day, and I’ll fix you right up.”

“You’ve got, what, like a sewing machine?” His surprise was genuine.

“Well, yeah,” she said, “a sewing machine. It’s not like an atom-smasher or anything. Just a needle that goes up and down. I used to make just about everything I wore, in high school. Prom dress, the works. It was the alternative to fashion death, in my income bracket.”

“But how did you learn to do that?” Bonnie also seemed floored. All these college graduates, mystified by Dellarobia’s store of knowledge. She wasn’t sure whether to feel proud or mocked.

“It’s nothing all that hard, it just takes patience. My mother was a seamstress.”

“Really,” Mako said. “Like, what would she sew?”

“Her specialty was business suits, if you can imagine. Mostly for women, but some older men still had their suits made to order, when I was little. Before they all went over to buying factory made at half the price.”

“In some sweatshop,” Bonnie said.

“Or foreign-made at one-tenth the price, right,” she agreed. “Mama brought me up to be really picky about double seams and linings, and then set me loose in a world where those things don’t even exist.”

The students seemed to be digesting this. Maybe they didn’t know about seams and linings either. Mako changed the subject, remarking that the washed-out road would hinder her mother’s tourism business. It took her a second to realize he meant Hester.

“Oh. That’s not my mama. My mother-in-law.” She decided not to mention her dead parents, a reliable conversation-stopper.

“Who does she bring up here?” Mako wanted to know. The others were listening too, she could tell, surprisingly curious about these personal things. She was not the only one with questions she was afraid to ask. For the first time all day, it dawned on her that these scientists owned nothing here, and knew it. Her husband’s family could kick them out and tear down the trees and the butterflies uncounted, at the snap of a finger. There were two worlds here, behaving as if their own was all that mattered. With such reluctance to converse, one with the other. Practically without a common language.

“Well, it was all church groups to begin with,” she said. “This has been a meaningful thing in our church, people appreciate . . .” She hesitated to use churchy words. “The beauty, I guess. It’s inspiring for people to see. It helps them respect the earth.”

The forest went still under golden evening light that made everything look precious. Even the roar of the water seemed to quiet. “How big is your church?” Bonnie asked, after a bit.

“Over three hundred people,” she said, a figure that raised their eyebrows. She wondered what sort of church college students attended, if any. “And it’s not just our congregation. First it was just kind of locally famous, but people are starting to come from Cleary and places farther away. Now that it’s been in the paper twice.” The second time, when a reporter and photographer came, they’d claimed they were there to interview the science team, but it hadn’t gone that way.

“Hester keeps the touring pretty well organized. She doesn’t like the groups to be more than eight or ten at a time. And if people are, you know, old or something, disabled, or little children, she brings them on the ATV. She charges more for that.”

“So no senior discount,” Mako observed.

“Nope. My mother-in-law is not one for making allowances. If she were an undertaker, she’d tell her clients to quit whining and walk to the cemetery.”