Flight Behavior (30 page)

“We’ve got to get a chain and a padlock for this gate,” he said.

“I was thinking that. Hester’s ewes will wander off into the wild blue yonder if we can’t keep this closed.” She wondered if the lock would get cut, and knew Cub was thinking the same. He felt all the trespassers were basically the same brand of hoodlum, unwilling to respect private property, but Dellarobia was not so sure. Maybe they thought it was some kind of nature park. The butterflies had now been on the news so many times she’d lost count, which made it seem like anyone’s business, just as the Internet gave away their address simply for the asking. Free was free.

She and Cub followed the fence along the top of the pasture, looking closely for breaches in the perimeter. Downed trees lay across the fence in several places, having fallen over from the woods on the other side. As husband and wife they worked together well, exchanging few words as they hefted dead wood from the wire, freeing the fence from the tangle, reattaching wire to post. No livestock had been in this field since early November, before the fall shearing. Dellarobia had a vivid recall of marching up the hill that day and taking her last look back down that hill, like Lot’s wife, before heading into a new place.
This
new place was the last thing she’d expected.

Ovid Byron’s body in the dimness caught up to her again, and she wished she could scrub her own eyes out. No, not that. But hated how she kept running and her mind still dragged it along, shoving the memory forward, daring her to taste its thrill. It felt acute, like tooth pain, like falling. Not again, this losing her mind to a man. She’d thought surely something had changed, for all the strange fortune those butterflies had brought her. She’d thought she could be free.

A flock of sparrows flushed up from the dead brush with a startling rush of wings. They all disappeared into the woods, save one. This odd loner darted ahead, lighting on one fence post and then the next as Cub and Dellarobia walked along in its direction. “Flying from pillar to post,” her mother used to say, when Dellarobia jumped from one infatuation to another in high school. She hadn’t thought of those words in years.

Cub stopped to study a long section of fence along a washed-out gully that would have to be restrung. She dug in her pockets for her gloves, found her glasses there, and touched the nub of a pencil, one he’d given her in the lab. If only she had not gone out there this morning. If Cub had been ready for once. She couldn’t fathom how tomorrow would go. If she couldn’t face him she’d have to quit. The loss hit her like a death.

“Hey, do you want to hear something funny?” Cub asked, and she said yes, she did. She pulled the panel of woven wire toward the post so Cub could nail it. Though she leaned with her whole body, her full weight was barely sufficient.

“When I saw Dad this morning, he told me he caught Peanut trying to get the butterflies to come over on him.” Cub paused to finish pounding the topmost U-nail, taking some of the pressure from Dellarobia.

“How do you mean?”

“He’s trying to lure them in, I guess. Over the property line onto his land. Dad said he got these hummingbird things, where you put sugar water in them.”

She laughed aloud, one small bark, at the idea of Peanut Norwood creeping around with a bird feeder. “Why on earth?” she asked.

“He wants a piece of the action. Dad says there’s guys in town talking about making it a Disneyland kind of thing.”

“A theme park. That’s crazy. Don’t they know that’s—” She sought some kinder word than
stupid
. “It’s useless,” she finally said. “The butterflies are all going to die, as soon as the temperature goes down into the teens. This could be it already, they might be dying now.”

“Well, but maybe next year.”

Dellarobia felt dragged to her knees by the hopelessness of getting from A to B here. It wasn’t just Cub; much of the town was in on this nonconversation. “There won’t be a next year. It gets too cold, they die, and then it’s over. No next generation.”

“Tell that to Jack Stell and them,” Cub said. “They’ve got it figured like supply-side economics. The Good Lord supplies the butterflies, and Feathertown gets the economics.”

“Really. Just like that, Jesus hands out the butterflies?”

“Why wouldn’t our town deserve to get lucky for once?” Cub asked.

Dellarobia recognized the same naive thinking she had heartily shared in the beginning. If anything, she’d been more selfish, wanting the butterflies to be hers alone. She saw them first. She’d been reluctant to surrender her flight of fancy to the scientists’ prior claim. “We do deserve it, Cub,” she said. “I’m not saying we don’t. But luck is just throwing dice. You can’t build some kind of industry on just hoping they’ll come back. That’s what screws people up. Flying blind like that.”

They finished pulling the bottom strand, and Cub took the time to yank long, leathery tentacles of invading vines from the wire. Honeysuckle was widely despised for taking over fields and entangling machinery, and it was all over this fence. The leaves had a bruised, purple cast in the cold, but the plant persisted. The sheep wouldn’t touch it. Ovid had told her some animals did eat honeysuckle in Japan, where this foreign plant belonged, but they didn’t travel with it. No natural predators here, to keep it in check.

“It’s not just Dad and them,” Cub argued. “The whole state is pushing the natural thing now. For tourists.” He clapped his gloved hands together, trying to warm them, and she did the same, the two of them saluting the cold morning with a muffled applause. She knew the “Natural State” campaigns he meant, to which she’d never given a dime’s worth of thought before Natural landed in her backyard. Only to find out this so-called phenomenon was unnatural in the extreme. She owed it to Cub to explain this, but hardly knew where to begin. It was like telling a story of childhood damage, backing up to the unhappy parents, then the unhappy grandparents, trying to find the whole truth.

“The trouble with that,” she said finally, “with what those guys are saying about the butterflies, is that it’s all centered around what they want. They need things to be a certain way, financially, so they think nature will organize itself around what suits them.”

Cub seemed to consider this. “What else can they do, though?”

“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?

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.