Flight Behavior

Flight
Behavior

A Novel

Barbara Kingsolver

Dedication

For Virginia Henry Kingsolver

and Wendell Roy Kingsolver

Contents

1

The Measure of a
Man

A
certain
feeling comes from throwing your good life away, and it is one part rapture. Or
so it seemed for now, to a woman with flame-colored hair who marched uphill to
meet her demise. Innocence was no part of this. She knew her own recklessness
and marveled, really, at how one hard little flint of thrill could outweigh the
pillowy, suffocating aftermath of a long disgrace. The shame and loss would
infect her children too, that was the worst of it, in a town where everyone knew
them. Even the teenage cashiers at the grocery would take an edge with her after
this, clicking painted fingernails on the counter while she wrote her check,
eyeing the oatmeal and frozen peas of an unhinged family and exchanging looks
with the bag boy:
She’s that one.
How they admired
their own steadfast lives. Right up to the day when hope in all its versions
went out of stock, including the crummy discount brands, and the heart had just
one instruction left: run. Like a hunted animal, or a racehorse, winning or
losing felt exactly alike at this stage, with the same coursing of blood and
shortness of breath. She smoked too much, that was another mortification to
throw in with the others. But she had cast her lot. Plenty of people took this
way out, looking future damage in the eye and naming it something else. Now it
was her turn. She could claim the tightness in her chest and call it bliss,
rather than the same breathlessness she could be feeling at home right now while
toting a heavy laundry basket, behaving like a sensible mother of two.

The children were with her mother-in-law. She’d
dropped off those babies this morning on barely sufficient grounds, and it might
just kill her to dwell on that now. Their little faces turned up to her like the
round hearts of two daisies: S
he loves me, loves me
not.
All those hopes placed in such a precarious vessel.
Realistically, the family could be totaled. That was the word, like a wrecked
car wrapped around a telephone pole, no salvageable parts. No husband worth
having is going to forgive adultery if it comes to that. And still she felt
pulled up this incline by the hand whose touch might bring down all she knew.
Maybe she even craved the collapse, with an appetite larger than sense.

At the top of the pasture she leaned against the
fence to catch up on oxygen, feeling the slight give of the netted woven wire
against her back. No safety net. Unsnapped her purse, counted her cigarettes,
discovered she’d have to ration them. This had not been a thinking-ahead kind of
day. The suede jacket was wrong, too warm, and what if it rained? She frowned at
the November sky. It was the same dull, stippled ceiling that had been up there
last week, last month, forever. All summer. Whoever was in charge of weather had
put a recall on blue and nailed up this mess of dirty white sky like a lousy
drywall job. The pasture pond seemed to reflect more light off its surface than
the sky itself had to offer. The sheep huddled close around its shine as if they
too had given up on the sun and settled for second best. Little puddles winked
all the way down Highway 7 toward Feathertown and out the other side of it,
toward Cleary, a long trail of potholes glinting with watery light.

The sheep in the field below, the Turnbow family
land, the white frame house she had not slept outside for a single night in
ten-plus years of marriage: that was pretty much it. The widescreen version of
her life since age seventeen. Not including the brief hospital excursions,
childbirth-related. Apparently, today was the day she walked out of the picture.
Distinguishing herself from the luckless sheep that stood down there in the mud
surrounded by the deep stiletto holes of their footprints, enduring life’s bad
deals. They’d worn their heavy wool through the muggy summer, and now that
winter was almost here, they would be shorn. Life was just one long proposition
they never saw coming. Their pasture looked drowned. In the next field over, the
orchard painstakingly planted by the neighbors last year was now dying under the
rain. From here it all looked fixed and strange, even her house, probably due to
the angle. She only looked out those windows, never into them, given the company
she kept with people who rolled plastic trucks on the floor. Certainly she never
climbed up here to check out the domestic arrangement. The condition of the roof
was not encouraging.

Her car was parked in the only spot in the county
that wouldn’t incite gossip, her own driveway. People knew that station wagon
and still tended to think of it as belonging to her mother. She’d rescued this
one thing from her mother’s death, an unreliable set of wheels adequate for
short errands with kids in tow. The price of that was a disquieting sense of
Mama still coming along for the ride, her tiny frame wedged between the kids’
car seats, reaching across them to ash her cigarette out the open window. But no
such thoughts today. This morning after leaving the kids at Hester’s she had
floored it for the half-mile back home, feeling high and wobbly as a kite. Went
back into the house only to brush her teeth, shed her glasses, and put on
eyeliner, no other preparations necessary prior to lighting out her own back
door to wreck her reputation. The electric pulse of desire buzzed through her
body like an alarm clock gone off in the early light, setting in motion all the
things in a day that can’t be stopped.

She picked her way now through churned-up mud along
the fence, lifted the chain fastener on the steel gate, and slipped through.
Beyond the fence an ordinary wildness of ironweed and briar thickets began. An
old road cut through it, long unused, crisscrossed by wild raspberries bending
across in tall arcs. In recent times she’d come up here only once, berry picking
with her husband Cub and some of his buddies two summers ago, and it definitely
wasn’t her idea. She’d been barrel-round pregnant with Cordelia and thinking she
might be called on to deliver the child right there in the brambles, that’s how
she knew which June that was. So Preston would have been four. She remembered
him holding her hand for dear life while Cub’s hotdog friends scared them half
to death about snakes. These raspberry canes were a weird color for a plant, she
noticed now, not that she would know nature if it bit her. But bright pink? The
color of a frosted lipstick some thirteen-year-old might want to wear. She had
probably skipped that phase, heading straight for Immoral Coral and Come-to-Bed
Red.

The saplings gave way to a forest. The trees
clenched the last of summer’s leaves in their fists, and something made her
think of Lot’s wife in the Bible, who turned back for one last look at home.
Poor woman, struck into a pile of salt for such a small disobedience. She did
not look back, but headed into the woods on the rutted track her husband’s
family had always called the High Road.
As if
, she
thought. Taking the High Road to damnation; the irony had failed to cross her
mind when she devised this plan. The road up the mountain must have been cut for
logging, in the old days. The woods had grown back. Cub and his dad drove the
all-terrain up this way sometimes to get to the little shack on the ridge they
used for turkey hunting. Or they used to do that, once upon a time, when the
combined weight of the Turnbow men senior and junior was about sixty pounds less
than the present day. Back when they used their feet for something other than
framing the view of the television set. The road must have been poorly
maintained even then. She recalled their taking the chain saw for clearing
windfall.

She and Cub used to come up here by themselves in
those days, too, for so-called picnics. But not once since Cordie and Preston
were born. It was crazy to suggest the turkey blind on the family property as a
place to hook up.
Trysting place
, she thought, words
from a storybook. And:
No sense prettying up dirt
,
words from a mother-in-law. So where else were they supposed to go? Her own
bedroom, strewn with inside-out work shirts and a one-legged Barbie lying there
staring while a person tried to get in the mood? Good night. The Wayside Inn out
on the highway was a pitiful place to begin with, before you even started
deducting the wages of sin. Mike Bush at the counter would greet her by name:
How do, Mrs. Turnbow, now how’s them kids?

The path became confusing suddenly, blocked with
branches. The upper part of a fallen tree lay across it, so immense she had to
climb through, stepping between sideways limbs with clammy leaves still
attached. Would he find his way through this, or would the wall of branches turn
him back? Her heart bumped around at the thought of losing this one sweet
chance. Once she’d passed through, she considered waiting. But he knew the way.
He said he’d hunted from that turkey blind some seasons ago. With his own
friends, no one she or Cub knew. Younger, his friends would be.

She smacked her palms together to shuck off the
damp grit and viewed the corpse of the fallen monster. The tree was intact, not
cut or broken by wind. What a waste. After maybe centuries of survival it had
simply let go of the ground, the wide fist of its root mass ripped up and
resting naked above a clay gash in the wooded mountainside. Like herself, it
just seemed to have come loose from its station in life. After so much rain upon
rain this was happening all over the county, she’d seen it in the paper, massive
trees keeling over in the night to ravage a family’s roofline or flatten the car
in the drive. The ground took water until it was nothing but soft sponge, and
the trees fell out of it. Near Great Lick a whole hillside of mature timber had
plummeted together, making a landslide of splintered trunks, rock and rill.
People were shocked, even men like her father-in-law who tended to meet any
terrible news with “That’s nothing,” claiming already to have seen everything in
creation. But they’d never seen this, and had come to confessing it. In such
strange times, they may have thought God was taking a hand in things and would
thus take note of a lie.

The road turned up steeply toward the ridge and
petered out to a single track. A mile yet to go, maybe, she was just guessing.
She tried to get a move on, imagining that her long, straight red hair swinging
behind her might look athletic, but in truth her feet smarted badly and so did
her lungs. New boots. There was one more ruin to add to the pile. The boots were
genuine calfskin, dark maroon, hand-tooled uppers and glossy pointed toes, so
beautiful she’d nearly cried when she found them at Second Time Around while
looking for something decent for Preston to wear to kindergarten. The boots were
six dollars, in like-new condition, the soles barely scuffed. Someone in the
world had such a life, they could take one little walk in expensive new boots
and then pitch them out, just because. The boots weren’t a perfect fit but they
looked good on, so she bought them, her first purchase for herself in over a
year, not counting hygiene products. Or cigarettes, which she surely did not
count. She’d kept the boots hidden from Cub for no good reason but to keep them
precious. Something of her own. In the normal course of family events, every
other thing got snatched from her hands: her hairbrush, the TV clicker, the soft
middle part of her sandwich, the last Coke she’d waited all afternoon to open.
She’d once had a dream of birds pulling the hair from her head in sheaves to
make their red nests.

Not that Cub would notice if she wore these boots,
and not that she’d had occasion. So why put them on this morning to walk up a
muddy hollow in the wettest fall on record? Black leaves clung like dark fish
scales to the tooled leather halfway up her calves. This day had played in her
head like a movie on round-the-clock reruns, that’s why. With an underemployed
mind clocking in and out of a scene that smelled of urine and mashed bananas,
daydreaming was one thing she had in abundance. The price was right. She thought
about the kissing mostly, when she sat down to manufacture a fantasy in earnest,
but other details came along, setting and wardrobe. This might be a difference
in how men and women devised their fantasies, she thought. Clothes: present or
absent. The calfskin boots were a part of it, as were the suede jacket borrowed
from her best friend Dovey and the red chenille scarf around her neck, things he
would slowly take off of her. She’d pictured it being cold like this, too. Her
flyaway thoughts had not blurred out the inconveniences altogether. Her flushed
cheeks, his warm hands smoothing the orange hair at her temples, all these were
part and parcel. She’d pulled on the boots this morning as if she’d received
written instructions.

And now she was in deep, though there had been no
hanging offenses as yet. They’d managed to be alone together for about ten
seconds at a time behind some barn or metal shed, hiding around the corner from
where her car was parked with the kids buckled up inside, arguing at full
volume.
If I can still hear them, they’re still
alive
is not a thought conducive to romance. Yet the anticipation of
him prickled her skin. His eyes, like the amber glass of a beer bottle, and his
face full of dimpled muscles, the kind of grin that seems to rhyme with
chin
. His way of taking her face in both his hands,
dear God. Looking her in the eyes, rubbing the ends of her hair between his
thumbs and fingers like he was counting money. These ecstasies brought her to
sit on the closet floor and talk stupid with him on the phone, night after
night, while her family slept under sweet closed eyelids. As she whispered in
the dark, her husband’s work shirts on their hangers idly stroked the top of her
head, almost the same way Cub himself did when she sat on the floor with the
baby while he occupied the whole couch, watching TV. Oblivious to the storms
inside her. Cub moved in slow motion. His gentleness was merely the stuff he was
made of, like the fiber content of a garment, she knew this. Something a wife
should bear without complaint. But it made him seem dumb as a cow and it made
her mad. All of it. The way he let his mother boss him around, making him clean
his plate and tuck in his shirttails like a two-hundred-pound child. The
embarrassment of his name. He could be Burley Junior if he’d claim it, but
instead let his parents and the populace of a county call him Cubby as if he
were still a boy, while they hailed his father, the elder Burley Turnbow, as
“Bear.” A cub should grow up, but at twenty-eight years of age, this one stood
long-faced and slump-shouldered at the door of the family den, flipping a sheaf
of blond bangs out of his eyes. Now he would let himself be shamed by his wife’s
hardheartedness too, or fail to notice it. Why should he keep on loving her so
much?