Flight Behavior

Dellarobia was startled to see a woman approaching them through the trees. Two women, carrying armloads of sticks. “Hallo!” they called.

She knew who they were, or what, though she had not met these two in particular. The young one had on men’s coveralls with sweatpants sticking out the bottom and two layers of sweaters at least. The elder wore a more normal coat, but her hair hung in two white braids, not a style you saw every day in the senior set. Both sported stiff woolen hats that stood gnomishly on their heads. Dellarobia stepped forward to shake hands, but instead clapped both in a friendly way on their coat sleeves, since their hands were full. “I’m Dellarobia Turnbow,” she said. “This is Hester Turnbow, my mother-in-law.”

“Brilliant!” said the younger one, shuffling her bundle of sticks into one arm, pumping Dellarobia’s hand and Hester’s. “This is my mum too! Myrtle, and I’m Nelda. We came over here for firewood, hope that’s okay. Our little valley has got picked over.”

Both women wore neat fingerless gloves, probably of their own making, but what hooked Dellarobia was the accent. “Li-ul valley, picked o-vah.” She could listen to this girl all day, like a radio station. “You all must be freezing,” she said. “All this rain.”

Nelda laughed in a burst. “Drenched!” she cried. “We’re drowned rats! And now it’s gone a bit parky, hasn’t it?”

Dellarobia didn’t know the answer to that. She wondered what Hester made of these women who claimed to be knitting the earth together, one unraveled sweater at a time. Maybe they weren’t all from England anymore. They seemed to be multiplying up here. She’d discussed the basics of their arrangement with Hester when they’d asked for permission to camp, and had set up a post-office box for the orange sweaters, which were coming in now by the bushel. There were cash donations, too. The women paid for their P.O. box and a modest weekly fee for camping.

“Hester knits,” Dellarobia offered. “You should see some of the sweaters she’s made for my husband. She does all those cables and things.”

“What do you think of our little fellows, then?” Myrtle set down her firewood and dug in her colorful shoulder bag that was knitted in concentric diamonds of red, yellow, and green. At length she extracted a complicated little mess of orange and black yarn on wooden needles like oversize toothpicks. “Well, here,” she added, pulling out a whole knitted butterfly, actual size. “Here’s the final product. He’s a bit better looking.”

Hester turned over the work in her hands. Dellarobia noticed that both Nelda and Myrtle wore old leather shoes, not the high-tech boots that outdoorsy folks seemed to favor. Every single thing secondhand. That must be the point, she realized, feeling slow on the uptake: their fashion statement was to wear nothing they’d bought new. They were second-time-arounders. Not unlike her family, only prouder of it.

“You use double points and carry the second color across,” Hester observed.

“Yes!” both women answered, with identical enthusiasm. Dellarobia had seen these knitted butterflies by the hundreds hung up in the trees, but hadn’t taken note of the effort involved. It was made all of a piece, wings and body, the black veins knitted right in. She thought of Mako’s story of folding all those paper birds in grade school for world peace. The impulse to keep the hands moving, feeding tiny answers to vast demands. Like spooning peas into a child who would still be hungry for decades. It wasn’t wrong.

“You use black yarn too,” she said. “I never saw mention of black sweaters.”

“We’ve got loads,” Nelda said.

“Too much of the black, never enough orange,” Myrtle agreed. Dellarobia noted they were not a perfect physical match: Nelda plump and rosy-cheeked, her mother fine-boned. The resemblance blazed in their wide brown eyes and the way they nodded, the gnomy caps bobbing. Mother-daughter adventurers. She felt a pang of longing, as she often did in church. Everybody had a mother and a God; those were standard-issue.

Hester handed the object back. “I don’t see how it works,” she said.

“People are chuffed to bits on it!” Nelda said. “You should see the messages we get. Look at this.” She pulled a phone from her bag and touched its screen with her fingerless-gloved hand, reading aloud, “ ‘Go knitters, stop global madness, we love you.’ That’s from Australia, it came this morning. Here’s another, ‘Go ladies, green and clean, from Betty in Staten Island.’ There’s loads. You want to see?” She scrolled down and showed them countless messages in blue type, along with some of the same pictures Dovey had found, of the masses of knitted butterflies hanging in trees. The forest-dwelling women appeared in the photos too, arms around each other, flashing peace signs, citizens of their own cheerful universe despite their full awareness of its unraveling. The fact of the phone itself struck Dellarobia, though. There had to be someone at home to pay that bill. Fathers or husbands.

Hester still seemed perplexed. “I don’t see how you’d get them on,” she said.

“On what?” Myrtle asked.

“On the King Billies,” Hester said.

In the small hush, Dellarobia felt a wave of protectiveness. Fierce, sturdy Hester should not be mocked. She could have made the same mistake herself. “They’re for show,” she explained gently. “Like little stuffed animals. They’re not to keep the butterflies warm.”

Hester’s eyes found Dellarobia’s and lit briefly there.

“Icons,” Nelda chimed in. “Or symbols, yeah? So people all over the world will know about the monarchs’ plight.”

Hester’s features shifted. “You all are getting as drowned out as the butterflies. I ought to knit some little hippie girls so they’ll know about your plight.”

“You should!” sang Nelda, and she and Myrtle laughed the same bright laugh, another likeness. No one was offended. It broadened Dellarobia’s unspecified hopes, like a hole in the clouds. “Cheers, then,” Nelda said after a moment’s pause, picking up her bundle of sticks, and the two sets of women walked their separate ways.

Dellarobia carried a canvas bag containing empty cottage-cheese cartons and a hand trowel. Something in there was making a hollow little rattle with every step. If she found flowers, she was to dig some up and bring them to the lab to test their potential as butterfly resources. She remembered Ovid calling this place “poor in winter flowers,” one long-ago day. She’d taken offense, at the time. As if one mountain had to have everything. What a mindset.