They paused again to rip the wild, disorganized tangles of vines from the neat rectangles of woven wire. She couldn’t even guess how many times they’d done this over the years, ever hopeful they could keep the stuff at bay. It was probably their chief project as a married couple, she thought: tearing honeysuckle out of a fence.
After a while Cub asked, “You’re saying butterflies can go wrong in their heads?”
“No, it’s not that. Other things go wrong, and they stay the same, so it confuses them. It’s like if every Friday you drove to Food King, but then one Friday you did the same as always, followed the same road signs, but instead of Food King you wound up at the auto parts store. You’d know something was messed up. Not with you necessarily, but something out of whack in the whole town.”
Cub appeared to take this in.
“So they’re here by mistake,” she said. “And they can’t adjust to it. Dr. Byron said it’s like if we got persuaded to come out here for some reason and live among the sheep. We still couldn’t eat grass. And we wouldn’t have baby sheep, we’d have babies, and they’d be in trouble with the freezing rain and the coyotes.” She’d embellished Ovid’s example, but felt it was valid.
“What persuaded the butterflies off their track?” Cub asked.
“Well, see, that’s what they’re wanting to figure out,” she said. “And Dr. Byron’s not the only one wondering. There’s more to it than just these butterflies, a lot of things are messed up. He says it’s due to climate change, basically.”
“What’s that?”
She hesitated. “Global warming.”
Cub snorted. He kicked up a cloud of dusty frost. “Al Gore can come toast his buns on this.” It was Johnny Midgeon’s line on the radio, every time a winter storm came through.
“But what about all the rain we had last year? All those trees falling out of the ground, after they’d stood a hundred years. The weather’s turned weird, Cub. Did you ever see a year like we’ve had?”
They arrived at the bottom of the field and turned along the road, the last lap before reaching the house and barn. A black pickup passed with a German shepherd standing in the bed. Finally Cub said, “They don’t call it global weirding.”
“I know. But I think that’s actually the idea.”
Cub shook his head. “Weather is the Lord’s business.”
She felt an exasperation that she knew would be of no use to this debate. She let it rise and fall inside her, along with wishful thoughts. Every loss she’d ever borne had been declared the Lord’s business. A stillborn child, a father dead in his prime.
“So we just take what comes?” she asked. “People used to say the same thing whenever some disease came along and killed all the children. ‘It’s part of God’s plan.’ Now we give them vaccinations. Is that defying God?”
Cub made no reply.
“Here’s the thing,” she said. “Why would we believe Johnny Midgeon about something scientific, and not the scientists?”
“Johnny Midgeon gives the weather report,” Cub maintained, and Dellarobia saw her life pass before her eyes, contained in the small enclosure of this logic. All knowledge measured, first and last, by one’s allegiance to the teacher.
They made their way along the final stretch, approaching the compound of house and barn and Ovid’s trailer, but the sight of home gave her no comfort. Sooner or later he would come out of that camper, they would speak, something would have to happen. Cub getting hurt, she couldn’t abide, but damage seemed so inevitable. The sky was lower and darker than when they’d left the house an hour ago, and the air felt colder. On the north-facing slopes the ground was still frosted white. There had been talk of snow. Broad-leaved weeds growing along the ditch stood wilted on their stems like tattered flags of surrender. The short distance to their house was a gulf she dreaded to cross.
Cub made a small coughing sound, a kind of nervous preparation that caused her own throat to narrow like a drain. “We have to talk about something,” he said.
Her face felt numb. “Okay, what.”
“I don’t know how to say it.”
“Just say it, Cub.”
“I can’t.”
It would be a kindness to help him, but she could not find words. Their unmatched footsteps made a strange, irregular percussion, their heels cracking the thin ice that rimed the mud along the ditch. Finally Cub said, “It’s about Crystal.”
Dellarobia felt her mind briefly slip its tracks. “What?”
He inhaled slowly. “Crystal Estep.”
“I know who Crystal is, Cub. What about her?”
“She’s been coming to the house.”
“What do you mean, when?”
“When you’re still over there working.”
“What, she comes every day?”
“No, it’s been four or five times. Always on the days when I was off from work—I don’t know how she knows. When I’m there with the kids instead of Lupe. She always starts off saying she wants you to look at that letter again.”
“Four or five times in two weeks? She can’t remember I’m working now from nine to five? Seems like even Crystal Estep could get that one down.”
Cub’s anguish was visible. He shook his head, looked at the sky.
“Oh, Jesus, Cub. Did you guys—what are you telling me?”
“Nothing. We didn’t do anything, Dellarobia. Believe me, she’s not . . . She’s Crystal. And anyway, with the kids right there, what do you think? I’m a married man.”
She remembered Crystal in the dollar store before Christmas, leaning back against her cart, talking to Cub. That weirdly suggestive posture she had dismissed as the body language of habitual desperation. In some crucial way she had branded Crystal as a noncontender. Dellarobia felt dismayed by the abrupt reordering of her world, Cub’s place in it, and her own. Absorbed in her own infatuations, so sure of herself as the fast horse in this race, she was last to know the joke was on her. A typical wife, blind as a bat, missing every sign as another woman angled for her husband. She would see Cub as quite the catch, would Crystal. He was a catch, ample and uncorrupted. A man whose assets were largely going to waste on the woman who’d landed him by accident.