“They could talk to Dr. Byron. He’s out here twenty-four/seven, looking at all the angles, trying to figure out what’s going on.” She felt the squeeze of her heart and the race of pulse when she said his name, like a doctor observing a patient. She was surprised to realize she had no intention of running from this, or quitting her job. She had to be part of this story. She would die of him or be cured.
They walked on, she and Cub together studying the fence for need of further mending. From this high part of the pasture they could see in all directions through the barren woodlands. The topography of the farm came clear: the steep, high reach of mountains behind, the narrow drainage of the valley below. It occurred to her how much was obscured in summer by the leaves. With all those reassuring walls of green, a person could not see to the end of anything. Summer was the season of denial.
At the upper east corner of the field they began to make their way down along the property line between their pasture and the Cooks’ dead orchard. The skeletal peach trees in their rows leaned into the slope with branches upstretched like begging hands. Casualties of this strange weather. The window in Preston and Cordie’s room looked out on these trees, and for a while she’d kept the curtains drawn, it was so depressing. But here they stood anyway. Someone at church had said the Cooks were now in Nashville for the duration of some further treatment, bone marrow or something, probably torturous. That poor child. Poorer still, the parents.
“I was thinking that,” Cub said, after a long interval. “What you said about talking to the doctor. Jack Stell and them ought to ask him about the butterflies. But maybe he wouldn’t tell them what they want to hear.”
“People do manage to cope with bad news,” she replied. But it was true, no one in town wanted Dr. Byron’s counsel. She’d tried to send newspeople his way, but they didn’t bite. The high school teachers hadn’t thrown out the welcome mat either. She thought of how Bobby Ogle moved people, persuading them with his demeanor, so loving and forthright. Whatever he said, you wanted it to be right for his sake. Ovid had that same air about him, for the most part he listened and did not judge. It made no sense that people would embrace the one and spurn the other.
“He’s not from here, that’s the thing,” Cub said.
“Just because he’s the outsider, he has no say? Should we not read books, then, or listen to anybody outside this county? Where’s that going to leave us?”
Cub made no attempt to answer.
“Watching our grass grow, is where.” She tried to tame the defensiveness in her tone, knowing this was not Cub’s fault. People who’d never known the like of Ovid Byron would naturally mistrust him. They couldn’t close out the whole world, maybe, but they could sure find something on their TV or radio to put scientists or foreigners or whatever they thought he was in a bad light. Truly, they were no better than the city people always looking down on southerners, with one Billy Ray Hatch or another forever at their disposal. If people played their channels right, they could be spared from disagreement for the length of their natural lives. Finally she got it. The need for so many channels.
“How do you like that, anyway?” Cub asked.
“Like what?”
“That job. Doing stuff out there in the barn. What do you do?”
She had assumed Cub was incurious and had never tried to explain her days, which were in any case inexplicable. As soon as we finish the lipids, I am going to put you on OE counts. This is interesting. Have a look. Never in her life had anyone spoken to her this way, and now someone had, and it made her a different sort of person. Someone she would like to keep on being.
“I see new things,” she said simply. “I’m not actually in charge of anything. I’m kind of a glorified secretary.”
“You type?” Cub asked, and she laughed. She could hardly think when she’d seen anyone use a typewriter, except secretaries on television. Maybe the ladies at the DMV, filling in some form for a driver’s license.
“No, I write down numbers in a notebook. I keep track. That’s really what Dr. Byron and Pete do, too. They measure different things and write it all down.”
“I guess it’s in knowing what to measure.”
“You’re right,” she said. “That’s what it is.”
“Same in farming,” he said, and she saw he was right about that too, it was astute. Someone on this farm had to check the inner eyelids of the ewes and lambs every week, watching for anemia by degrees as an indication of parasite load. They monitored the hayfield for the right proportion of seedhead to stem. They bred and culled the sheep based on meat yields and staple lengths of the fleece. Hester was the director of operations, and kept the best notes.
“It’s more detailed, though,” she said. “All this week I counted parasites in the microscope. And helped measure the amount of fat in a butterfly’s body. They can measure a thousandth of a gram. A gram is, like, teeny. There’s hundreds of them to a pound. In that lab they could weigh your eyelashes and lay them out in order of size.”
Cub whistled.
“Not that they actually would,” she said. “It’s just an example.”
“Why do you need to know how fat a butterfly is?” Cub asked.
“It’s just knowing all there is to know about an animal. Like sheep, like you said. Little signs tell you a lot. He wants to know what’s making the butterflies sick.”
“They’re sick?”
“They all came here for the winter, and they shouldn’t have, because the winter’s too cold here. But they came because of things being too warm. Or, I guess we don’t know because of what. But he says it’s something gone way wrong.”
“Now see, I don’t hold with that,” Cub said. Exactly as she’d expected. Cub would not be disposed to this way of thinking, any more than the people in town or Tina Ultner and her national broadcast audience. All were holding out for the miracle angle. Honestly, it made a better story.
“Suit yourself,” she said. They descended the slope, passing near enough to the Cooks’ house to see lights on inside and a car in the drive, not the Cooks’ farm truck but a white sedan. So someone was looking after the place for them. Dellarobia knew she ought to call the house and ask after the boy. It was so hard. What if he’d passed away?