“I don’t know. I just know he’s not very happy.”
Dovey cocked an eyebrow. “And there’ll be happiness,” she sang, “for every girl and boy.” Clint Black, slightly revised.
Dellarobia watched Preston tug a pair of water wings onto his sister’s arms over her sweater. “You need these so you won’t fall in the water and drown,” he advised. Cordie flapped her inflated wings and ran from him in loopy circles like some kind of moth. Then abruptly stopped and climbed aboard a rocking horse.
Dellarobia said, “I don’t want to play this game.”
Dovey pushed her cart away without a word, steering around a fake tiger rug with sad-looking eyes. Dellarobia stayed where she was, in Playland, fighting back inexplicable tears as she walked through what seemed like acres of bike helmets and strollers and child safety seats. Every ambulatory child in the store was here flinging toys around, tentatively cavorting with strangers. Older kids were patently bossing the younger ones, shouting, “You’re going to break that!” Or the universal affront, “That’s for babies.” She browsed a shelf of one-dollar toys, pausing on an alphabet-learning contraption called Little Smarty. It had dials that turned to match letters to pictures, the kind of thing Preston could play with all day long. But the name put her off. Obviously it was manufactured in a different era. What modern parent wanted her kids to be Little Smarties? The word was a rebuke: smart-mouth, smarty-pants. Don’t get smart with me.
A grandmother-toddler team joined her at the toy shelf, the kid leaning out of his stroller in all directions to grab anything he could. Every child on the premises was being conveyed by a Mammaw, it seemed. This one idly handed her grandson a plastic baseball bat, which he turned around and choked up on like a pro, swinging at nearby shoppers. Dellarobia scooted away and found Dovey with Cordie on her hip checking out a throng of baby dolls gathered under a sign: SMALL BABIES 50¢, ALL OTHERS $1. The petite devalued as usual, Dellarobia thought with rancor. Poor Preston, if he didn’t start catching up to his classmates soon, she might join Cub in his prayers for their son’s growth spurt. “Have it, have it?” Cordelia chanted as Dovey picked up dollies and made them talk. The selection was overwhelming. Few looked like actual babies, and some were weirdly sexy, with factory-installed eye shadow and big pouty lips. Cordie grabbed the homeliest of the lot and shoved it head-down in her alligator bag.
“Baby!” she declared when she saw her mother, offering it up for approval. The thing had a potato-like head, created by someone who’d stuffed a nylon stocking and sculpted the eyes, mouth, and cheekbones with a needle and thread.
“Sorry,” Dovey said, “I’m buying your daughter the March of Dimes child.”
“Look at all those tiny stitches. Can you imagine?”
Dovey gave the doll a second look before setting Cordie down. “Hester could probably make things like that. She does all those crafty woolly things.”
“If only she were grandchild-inclined.” Dellarobia pictured her own mother hand-stitching a doll. The grandma Cordie would never meet, like the fish that got away.
Immediately behind them, a twenty-foot-long wooden crate of fifty-cent sweaters was attracting attention. Shoppers surrounded it on all sides like livestock at a trough, churning the contents. Winter had dawned on the neighborhood.
“Oh, man, look at this!” Dellarobia extracted a huge Crayola-orange sweater.
“Yikes,” Dovey said. “You put that on Cub, y’all will look like a solar system.”
Dellarobia laughed. “It’s not for anybody to wear. There are these girls up on the mountain that are knitting monarch butterflies out of old sweaters.”
“Excuse me?”
“They pull sweaters apart to get the yarn. Recycled. That’s their big thing.” Dellarobia tried to assemble words to describe the ragamuffin girls who were camping out near the study site. “They’re from England,” she said. That was a starting point.
“And they crossed the ocean blue to come here and pull sweaters apart?”
“Well, yeah, they’re crazy, number one. I guess they don’t have kids or anything. They saw us on the news and came to do a sit-in against the logging, and now it’s a sit-in about global warming. They sit up there all day and knit little monarch butterflies out of recycled orange yarn. They hang them all over the trees. It looks kind of real.”
Dovey looked skeptical.
“It’s on the Internet,” Dellarobia maintained. “They told me they have this campaign of asking people to send in their orange sweaters, to help save the butterflies. For these girls to rip up, and knit with. They’re getting boxes and boxes of sweaters, that much I can tell you. Anything with ‘butterflies’ in the address comes to our house.”
“This I have got to see.” Dovey had her phone out. “What do I search?”
Dellarobia thought for a moment. “Knit the Earth,” she said. “Or Women Knit the Earth. Something like that.”
Dovey’s eyes grew large. “Holy cow,” she said, standing by the sweater bin, peering into the World Wide Web. “This is happening on your property? It’s like, huge. They’ve got over a thousand Likes on Facebook.”
“So that’s a lot?” As usual Dellarobia felt out of the loop. She had squirreled $110 into her account thus far, her computer fund, but dreaded asking Dovey about prices. She probably wouldn’t get in the ballpark before her job ended next month.
“W-O-M-Y-N,” Dovey added. “That’s who’s knitting the Earth.”
“Well, they’re from England,” Dellarobia said. “Maybe spelling is not their long suit. These girls are kind of rough. But they’re good knitters, you should see their little monarch butterflies. Are there photos?”
Dovey nodded slowly, stroking the face of her phone. “There are.” After a minute she put it away. “What else are you not telling me?”
“Find some more orange sweaters, and I’ll tell you.” Together they combed the bin and fished out nine altogether, in various shades of hideous. The knitter-women had hit on a jackpot scheme. Nobody really wanted to keep their orange sweaters anyway.
Dellarobia wasn’t hiding anything. She’d only gotten the story on the knitters this week when the boxes arrived. The rest was all science, monitoring and sampling, nothing Dovey wanted to hear. “Hester thinks God is keeping the winter mild to protect the butterflies,” she said. “There’s a faction at church that thinks that too. The butterflies knew God was looking after things here, and that’s why they came to Feathertown.”