Flight Behavior (5 page)

“You’re welcome,” she announced finally. “I’ll go see if my husband needs any help.” All four women turned simultaneously to gawk at her, as if her life had become a bad school play. “The kids are hungry,” she added. “If y’all are about to feed yourselves, you might think of them while you’re at it.”

The shadows outside were longer than she’d expected, the long dusk of wintertime. Bear’s penned hounds were snuffling and growling low in their throats, maybe catching wind of some raccoon on the ridge they pined to chase down and take apart. The wind banged the doors of the metal building behind the house where Bear had his machine shop, in the middle of what looked like a truck graveyard. Dellarobia had never even entered that shop, knowing it would make her homesick for the long-ago place where her own father built furniture. Even this fleeting thought, the shop doors banging, socked her with a memory of sitting on his shoulders and touching the cannonball tops of bedposts he’d spooled out of wood with his lathes.

She drew a very squashed pack of cigarettes from the back pocket of her jeans and lit up, thinking that if someone had asked her to wait one minute longer for it, she might have taken them out. She was trying hard not to smoke around the kids. Just a couple of sneaks, one of them when she’d gone upstairs to hide Jazon’s shoe, and that was it, in over six hours. In truth, Hester’s reproach the other day had left its impression. Dellarobia now felt her foggy head clear as she picked her way across the muddy ground and entered the fluffy storm inside the barn, where fluorescent lights blazed and it looked as if it had snowed indoors. She found the broom exactly where she’d left it, beside the leaf rake and boxes of trash bags. If Cub was cleaning up, he was doing it without much in the way of technology. Where was he? When she opened her mouth to speak, she had a weird feeling that squeaky muppet voice would come ratcheting out. And that he would answer in a child’s voice. She was not born into this family business, which explained her low-ranking position, but they had no excuse for treating Cub as they did. How could a man amount to much when his parents’ expectations peaked at raking up waste wool? Dellarobia doubted she’d have much gumption either, if she’d been raised by a mother like Hester. The woman ran all horses with the same whip. She’d even aimed some hits at the shearer today about second cuts, but he’d ignored her, exactly as he ignored Bear’s posturing. Maybe that vibrating metal cylinder next to Luther’s skull drowned out the whole family. Dellarobia could use a thing like that.

“Cub?” she called, and heard a faint reply. Animal or husband, she couldn’t say. She peered into the paddocks one after another, all empty of sheep. The shearing stall was knee-deep in belly wool, so Crystal must have abandoned her post as cleanup girl after about ten seconds. Lucky her, she could defect without getting court-martialed. Dellarobia called Cub’s name repeatedly and heard an answer each time, eventually realizing it was coming from overhead. She climbed the narrow stairs to the hay mow and found him lying on his back across a row of hay bales. This time of year the mow should have been packed like a suitcase, filled side to side and top to bottom, but the cavernous loft was more than half empty. They’d lost the late-summer cutting because three consecutive rainless days were needed for cutting, raking, and baling a hay crop. All the farmers they knew had leaned into the forecasts like gamblers banking on a straight flush: some took the risk, mowed hay that got rained on, and lost. Others waited, and also lost.

“Cub, honey, what’s wrong. You dead?”

“About.”

“I’ve seen you further gone than that, and resurrected at the sight of a cold beer.”

He sat up straight. “You got one?”

“From your mother’s kitchen?”

He flopped back against the hay, taking off his Deere cap and settling it over his face. She sat down opposite him on the lowest row of bales, which were stacked like a wide staircase leading up to the rafters. Not many farms still maintained the equipment to make square bales, instead favoring the huge rolls that were handier to move with a tractor and fork. But these made nice furniture. She dragged one close for a footstool, swung up her short legs and leaned back against a prickly wall of hay, waiting for further signs of life from her husband. Lying on his back, he resembled a mountain: highest in the midsection, tapering out on both ends. He pulled his cap farther down over his face.

“You’re just worn out,” she offered.

“No, it’s more than that.”

“What, are you sick?”

“Sick and tired.”

“Of what?”

“Farming.”

“I hear you.” She was conscious of her unfinished cigarette, aware that only a fool or city person would smoke in a hayloft. It could catch fire in a flash. But that would be in some year other than this one, in which the very snapping turtles had dragged themselves from silted ponds and roamed the soggy land looking for higher ground. A little tobacco smoke might help dry out this hay. Cub evidently didn’t disagree, for he lay silent awhile. Then spoke from under his cap.

“Dad’s fixing to sign a contract with some loggers.”

“You mean to cut timber? Where?”

“That hollow up behind our house. All the way to the top, he said.”

“What possessed him to do that now? That timber’s been standing awhile.”

“The taxes went up, and he’s got a balloon on his equipment loan. You and I are behind on our house payments. Money’s coming in even lower this year than last. He’s thinking we’ll have to buy hay out of Missouri this winter, after we lost so much of ours.”

She looked at the backs of her hands. “Just one month behind, you and me.”

She’d been hoping Bear and Hester didn’t know about the missed payment, but every nickel gained or lost on that farm went on the same ledger. Bear and Hester knew every detail of their lives, as did their neighbors and eventually the community as a whole, thanks to the news team down at Hair Affair.

“I talked to the man at the bank about our payment, Cub. It’s Ed Cameron, you know who that is. He said it was no big deal, as long as we’re caught up by year’s end.”

“Well, foreclosure on Dad’s equipment loan is a big deal.”

She felt something in herself drop. “That’s not an issue, is it?”

“The word was mentioned.”

She wanted to throw something, though not necessarily at Cub. She hated how his parents left them in the dark, even on something so important. Bear earned as much or more on machine repair and metalwork in his shop than from anything that happened in this barn. For years he’d gotten steady contracts making replacement parts for factories and something for the DOT, a bracket for guardrails, was her understanding. Dellarobia kept out of it. Bear seemed to think of these contracts as more valid than regular farm work, maybe because he’d learned welding in the military. He’d borrowed a huge sum to expand his machine shop, a few months before transportation departments everywhere suddenly came up strapped, and people decided they hated government spending. The equipment loan was backed up by a lien on the land.

“So what happens to us, if this farm gets folded in half overnight?”

Cub remained mute and supine on his bed of hay. Cub’s only off-farm income was what he made driving a truck that delivered gravel, intermittently, as that company was not seeing a lot of action these days either. Ever since the economy tanked, people had been settling for what they had. Renewing their vows with their bad gravel driveways.

His inert response to this crisis was predictable. In case of fire, take a nap. She tried an easier question. “How’d you happen to come by this information?”

“Listening. He talks more to Peanut Norwood in a day than he does to me in a year.”

“Lord, if he’s telling the neighbors of his downfall, we must be pretty near the end of the rope. You know your dad.”

“Yeah, I do.”

“No bad news comes looking for Bear Turnbow that he can’t send running.”

“I know, I was thinking that. It’s worse for the Norwoods, I guess. Peanut wants to log out his side too. They said it works best if they clear-cut the whole deal at once.”

“A clear cut. Cub, honey, could you at least sit up and discuss this like a human? You mean where they take out everything down to the slash?”

Cub sat up and gave her a sorry look. He had fleece clinging to his trousers and hay in his hair, a sight to see. “That’s where they’ll give you the most money. According to Dad, it’s easier when they don’t have to pick and choose the trees.”

She stared at Cub, trying to find holy matrimony in there, pushing her way back through the weeds as she always did. To what she’d seen in him when she was still looking: the narrow face and long chin that gave an impression of leanness, despite his burgeoning middle. The thick lashes and dark, ruler-straight eyebrows like an interrupted pencil line across his forehead, behind the pale forelock that hung in his eyes. The cause of their marriage had been conspicuous at the wedding, but she’d gone a little foggy on the earlier motives. She recalled the nice truck, other plans canceled, an ounce of pity maybe. A boy named Damon who’d kissed her half to death and then left her for dead, on the rebound. And there stood Cub, with his rock-steady faith that she knew more than he did, in any situation outside of automotive repair. His bewildered sexual gratitude, as near a thing to religious awe as a girl of her station could likely inspire. These boyish things had made him lovable. But you could run out of gas on boyish, that was the thing. A message that should be engraved in every woman’s wedding band.

“So this is a done deal,” she said finally. “Has he talked to the logging people?”

“Whatever’s too little to cut up for lumber, he said they can grind into paper.”

“Oh, Cub. They’ll make it look like a war zone, like the Buchman place. Have you looked at that mountain since they finished logging it out? It’s a trash pile. Nothing but mud and splinters.”

Cub began pulling white threads of wool from the knees of his jeans, one at a time. The air was so dry they stuck to him, drawn by static electricity. How strange, the humidity dropping like that overnight. She cleared a spot on the floor and carefully ground out her cigarette with the toe of her work boot. “I drive past there every time I go to Food King,” she said. “It looks like they blew up bombs all over it. Then all these rains started and the whole mountain is sliding into the road. They have road crews out there blading the muck out of the way. I bet I’ve seen that six times since July.”

Cub’s voice flagged in ready defeat. “Well, you won’t have to drive past Dad’s upper hollow when you go get your groceries.” He was already losing interest, ready for a new topic, the same way he went glassy in front of the TV every night and channel-surfed without cease. Some flashy woman in a silk suit would be describing a faux-emerald necklace, and suddenly they’re landing the biggest fish in the Amazon. Or Fox News would morph into a late-night comedian making jokes about Christians and southerners. Cub claimed the surfing relaxed him. It made Dellarobia grind her teeth.

“I need to get back to the house,” she said. Hester was feeding Preston and Cordie their supper, probably an array of items from the choking-hazard checklist: grapes, peas, hot dogs cut crosswise. There was no point in arguing with Cub, when neither of them had a say in the family plan. She and her husband were like kids in the backseat of a car, bickering over the merits of some unknown destination.

She stood up, but instead of heading for the stairs, walked on impulse to the end of the loft, where the giant door was propped open to ventilate the hay. A person could just run the length of the haymow and take a flying jump. For the first time in her life she could see perfectly well how a person arrived on that flight path: needing an alternative to the present so badly, the only doorway was a high window. She’d practically done it herself. The next thing to it. The thought of that recklessness terrified her now, making her step back from the haymow door and close her eyes, trying to calm down.

When she opened them she looked down on the sheep milling around in the dusk, surprisingly slim and trim without their wool. Pastor Bobby at Hester’s church spoke of Jesus looking down on his flock from on high, and it seemed apt: an all-knowing creator probably would find humans to be exactly the same kind of ignorant little dumb-heads as these sheep. Right now they were butting each other like crazy. Hester said head-butting was a flock’s way of figuring out who was boss, so it was normal to some extent, but Dellarobia had noticed that shearing always left them wildly uncertain as to who was who. She had asked about it, but no one in the family could say why. She stood watching now, oddly fascinated. Grumpy ewes lowered their horns to toss off lambs that weren’t theirs, the poor little things bunting at the wrong udders, and one old girl in particular was running up against puny yearlings, revisiting arguments long ago settled. Suddenly they were strangers, though they’d been here together all along. In the still evening she heard the dull, repeated thud of heads making contact, horn and skull. They must have some good reason; animals behaved with purpose, it seemed. Unlike people.

And then it dawned on her: scent. They must recognize each other that way. And all their special odors had been removed with the wool. They’d be blind to one another’s identities until they worked up a good personal aroma again. Dellarobia felt a glimmer of pride for working out this mystery by herself. Maybe one day she’d inform Hester.

She walked back and sat down across from Cub. “When do you think your folks were planning to clue us in about the foreclosure?”

“I don’t know.”

“Just one day the phone would ring and they’d be like, ‘Hey, pack up the kids, get a new life, we just lost your half of the family deal.’ Or that they’re moving in with us, or us with them? Cub, I swear, your mother and me under one roof, never again. You’d just as well call nine-one-one right now and get it over with. Because homicide will ensue.”

“I know that, hon.”

“If he can’t make the payment, why wouldn’t they just repossess his equipment?”

“Depreciation, I guess. It’s not enough. They needed that lien on the farm.”