Flight Behavior (14 page)

Ovid continued, “Why else do you suppose he might go so far? So far
south
, to be precise. To the sunny land of Mexico?”

“To keep warm!” Preston blurted quickly, like a contestant on a game show.

“So they will not freeze, exactly. Really, Preston, I like your thinking. And now, look at it another way. What if he is really a creature of warm, sunny places? Like me. I also come from such a place. But life has given me opportunities to wander north, you see, looking for things that interest me a lot. What if the butterfly does this also, but he cannot endure the frosty winter? Then what will our friend do?”

Preston giggled, glancing at his mother. “Buy a coat?”

“If only he could. But he is a butterfly.” The man had a winning smile, so wide it showed his eyeteeth along the sides.

“That was a joke,” Preston said primly. “He would go back home in the winter. So he wouldn’t freeze up.”

“Just so.” Ovid clapped his hands together, to Preston’s pure delight. The man knew how to talk to kids. “So what are we proposing here?” he asked. “Maybe that Mr. Monarch is not really our butterfly at all, here in our gardens. Not flying south in winter. Maybe he is really a Mexican butterfly coming north in summer, just for a visit.”

Preston nodded, wide-eyed, actually seeming to follow this line of thinking.

“But a scientist doesn’t just make a wild guess, you know. He measures things. He does experiments. How can we discover the truth about Mr. Monarch?”

“Ask somebody?” Preston suggested.

“We ask his family.”

“How?” Preston was hooked. A small, four-eyed fish.

“There are ways to do this,” Ovid said, leaning back in his chair, crossing his long legs, an ankle on his knee. “People have done it. And do you know what they found? All his relatives are tropical butterflies. In his whole family, which is called the Danaus family, Mr. Monarch is the only one clever enough to seek his fortune in a cold place.”

Dellarobia felt numb. Hoodwinked, embarrassed, furious, entranced. “A little bird tells me,” she said, pointing at Ovid, “
you
are a scientist.”

He spread his hands wide, caught out, smiling so broadly he was a landscape all his own. Like Cordelia’s, a world with extra sunshine.

“Well, why in the world?” Dellarobia choked a little, coughing until she recovered. She drank her glass of tea to the bottom. “I just made a jackass of myself, thank you very much.”

Cub seemed suddenly to have awakened. He smacked both hands flat on the table, as if getting the joke, and declared, “You’re a butterfly-ologist, aren’t you?”

“Entomologist, lepidopterist. Biologist is fine. I don’t put a lot of stock in titles.”

“But”—Dellarobia struggled to frame her question—“you’ve been to college and studied all this, right? Or, what am I saying, you probably
teach
college.”

“I do. Devary University, in New Mexico. I did my graduate studies at Harvard, and
that
”—he gave Preston a knowing look—“is a
very
cold place.”

“You came all the way here from New Mexico?” Cub asked. “Sheez! That’s what, two thousand miles? How long a drive is that?”

“I came by plane. It’s a long ride in a small seat, I can tell you that, my friend.”

“I’ve not been on an airplane, nor my wife either one,” Cub said, with unbridled awe. Cub himself was an accessory to this voyage; his small place in the world had appeared on the map of the learned man. A dining event of national proportions. Dellarobia felt as if she’d received a blow to the head.

“You came here because you’re one of the people who study these monarchs,” she said.

“You are exactly right. I spent the day doing a quick census up there.”

Quick, she thought, as in nine hours. Had he counted them all? “So, you do what, experiments, or observations? And write up what you find out?”

He nodded. “A dissertation, articles, a couple of books. All on the monarch.”

“A
couple
of books,” she said to this man, recalling his look when she’d informed him,
They’re called monarchs
. So there were worse things than feeding meat loaf to a vegetarian. Like blabbing wiki-facts to the person who probably discovered them in the first place. She was in the same camp with her blithe, cheese-covered daughter here, acting like a toddler with food on her face. Minus the good excuse of actually being one.

Preston, on the other hand, appeared keen to crawl into the man’s lap, and Cub wasn’t far behind him. Only Cordie remained aloof, putting the finishing touches on her composition, getting her hair into play. Ovid Byron did not seem insulted by any of it. He was helping himself to seconds on the casserole.

“So,” Dellarobia asked, “what kinds of things would you study, on a monarch?”

He finished chewing a mouthful before he spoke. “Things that probably sound very dull. Taxonomy, evolution of migratory behavior, the effect of parasitic tachinid flies, the energetics of flight. Population dynamics, genetic drift. And as of today, the most interesting and alarming question anyone in the field has yet considered, I think. Why a major portion of the monarch population that has overwintered in Mexico since God set it loose there, as you say, would instead aggregate in the southern Appalachians, for the first time in recorded history, on the farm of the family Turnbow.”

They all stared, to hear their family name at the end of a sentence like that.

Dellarobia’s eye caught the remains of a pink balloon dangling from the fixture over the table, the months-old vestige of a birthday party she had overlooked in today’s cleaning binge and many others. Small, limp, and shriveled, it looked like an insulted testicle, and although she obviously didn’t have those, she could guess. It pretty well went to her state of mind. You get racked, you keep going, but merciful heavens the hurt.

“Mr. Byron,” she said, “why did you let me rattle on like that through half of supper? When you ought to have been telling
us
about the monarchs?”

He laughed and hung his head, feigning remorse to put her at ease, she could see that. “Forgive me, Dellarobia. It’s a selfish habit. I never learn anything from listening to myself.”

6

Span of a Continent

P
reston gave up hoping for a white Christmas and asked his mother if Santa knew how to drive a boat. That’s the kind of December they were having. It fell on them in sheets and gushes, not normal rain anymore but water flung at the windows as if from a bucket. At times it came through the screens, visibility zero, and gusts of air seemed to burst from the ground, swirling the deluge around in clouds of spray. Groundwater was rising everywhere. The front yard became a flat, grassy pool. Dellarobia couldn’t let the kids play out there unless they wanted to pull on their rubber boots and splat around on it. She would have considered putting them in their swimsuits, if it were just a hair warmer, so they could run around as they did in summertime under the sprinkler.

But this was winter, the dead of it. Johnny Midgeon on the morning radio show sang “I’m Dreaming of a Wet Christmas,” inventing new verses daily, of which Dellarobia had had enough. The rain made her want to bawl. For days without cease it had lashed the window casings and seeped under the kitchen door, puddling on the linoleum. She got tired of mopping and blocked it with rolled-up towels. The times seemed biblical.
Save me, O God, for the waters have come up to my neck
: that line in particular she remembered, from the Psalms, because it sounded dramatic and modern, like something Dovey would say.

Just now Dellarobia was jonesing to step out on the back porch for a very quick smoke, but was thwarted by the pink roll of towel that lay at the bottom of the door like a dank, fat snake. She knew that thing would be cold to the touch, like something dead. She fingered the cigarette pack in her sweatshirt pocket, feeling trapped. Cordie sat on the floor, playing with her toy telephone. Dellarobia was trying hard to raise her kids unfumigated by secondhand smoke. What would Mrs. Noah do? Their house was becoming a boat, her family launched out to sea.

She pulled the door open gently, shoving the pink snake with it, noticing nose prints that covered the storm door up to a height of two feet. They weren’t put there by the dogs, either. She left both the inner and outer doors propped open so she could listen for Cordie and slid out to the back porch to light up, inhaling and slowly exhaling a long, silent exclamation mark at what she beheld. The pond was completely blown out. The drainage gully down the center of the pasture had swollen into a persistent, gushing creek. After last night’s strong winds, a fresh raft of sticks and small trees had washed down into the pasture and were strewn down the full length of the hill, pinned on their sides like little dams so the runnel broadened and poured over each one in turn. No creek had ever run here, in any year Cub could remember, and now a series of waterfalls climbed the hill like a staircase. Her eye was not used to so much flickering motion back there. It made her fretful. Piles of dark detritus lay in leafy clumps at the edges where the flow had receded, and these, she knew, were not leaves but corpses. The latest round of insect invasion that had swamped her life. Before this year she had hardly looked a butterfly in the face, and now they were star players in her own domestic drama. Which was officially no longer just domestic. She eyed Dr. Byron’s camper for signs of life.

The man she’d impulsively invited to supper two weeks ago was now living next to the barn. The arrangement seemed unreal to Dellarobia, like so much else that had arrived out of her initial recklessness. It had been Cub’s idea to let him park his RV behind their house, near the old sheep shed, and Cub who had rounded up the all-weather extension cord to hook him up to the electricity in the outbuilding. Dellarobia wouldn’t have thought to suggest it. It wasn’t her place. Even after all this time on her in-laws’ land, she felt connected to security by something far more tenuous than an orange extension cord. All she’d offered at supper that first night with Ovid Byron, besides the casserole, was a warning about the motel. “They call it the Wayside,” she joked, “as in, ‘fallen by the . . .’ ” He really shouldn’t stay there, when he came back.

Because he was coming back, he’d told them that very evening. His semester at the college was winding up, and with their permission he would like to bring back a small research team to investigate the question of what the butterflies were doing on their mountain. The “alarming question,” as he’d called it. He normally lived in an RV while doing his fieldwork in remote and scattered places, he’d explained, and Cub pointed right out the window. That was where he should park his camper, handy to the scene. That old barn had electricity, and was unused in winter because Hester liked to oversee the siring and lambing from the barn near her house. Dellarobia was amazed; she’d hardly known her husband to take a whiz without first checking in with Bear and Hester, yet he’d thrown out the welcome mat for Ovid Byron, just as she had, within minutes of meeting him. Of course, Cub was inclined to flatten himself before anything or anyone famous. She’d seen him go speechless one time while trying to order fast food when they recognized a NASCAR driver on the premises. So he was helpless to resist Ovid Byron, a very nice man who could probably charm a snake. Educated people had powers.

And the nice man now resided in a white, humpbacked camper attached to the body of a Ford truck, a road-worn affair that looked to have hosted more than a few of his life’s events. He had his own little home sweet home in there: stove, refrigerator, the works. He’d driven it from New Mexico with his young helpers, Pete, Mako, and Bonnie by name. They were post graduates or doc-graduates, something, it was too late to ask now because she’d pretended to know what it all meant when they were first introduced. Unfortunately she’d been distracted by the muscle definition in Pete’s upper arms, and the fact that dark-eyed, long-waisted Bonnie was much cuter than she had any right to look in cargo pants and a fleece vest. The students were lodging at the Wayside. Dellarobia wondered about the specifics of that arrangement—two guys and a girl—and truly, she regretted the accommodations. But the kids were only staying another week. They were young urban people with advanced degrees. They could fend for themselves.

They spent every daylight hour up the mountain, anyway, except during the most unutterable downpours. In the evenings they gathered around a sort of dinette table inside the RV, doing what, exactly, she didn’t know. She’d seen charts of numbers in stacks, and knew they played penny poker because they’d invited her to join them. Once she did, after Cordie and Preston were in bed. Was a hostess gift necessary, she’d wondered, when invited to a camper home? She brought a jar of dilly beans. They got a little bit rowdy playing cards, while Ovid sat off to the side tapping industriously at his slim computer that opened like a sideways book, tilting its blue glow into his face. Its light made his skin a strange color in the dim camper, and his reading glasses two inscrutable rectangles of light.

She felt guilty about not inviting these people into her house for their after-hours activities, but Ovid wouldn’t hear of disrupting her family’s life. The deal hinged on it, he said. This was normal life for field scientists, they all had assured her. Ovid seemed proud of his traveling abode. The toilet was in a tiny closet that also became, with the door tightly closed, a shower. The dinette table folded away and the seats pulled together to make a full-size bed. He would need a good-size bed, with that much height, Dellarobia thought. Did he have a wife or family? She was hesitant to ask. If he meant to remain here through the holidays, that didn’t bode for much in his family department. But yesterday he’d mentioned he would be going away between Christmas and New Year’s, leaving the camper here, and would return in January to stay a good while. She had no idea whether he had people who wanted him home for the holidays, or simply desired to get out of the Turnbow hair at a family-oriented season.

A banging sound, she realized with a start, was coming from inside her own house. Quickly she stubbed out her cigarette in the butt-filled flowerpot and dashed in to find Cordie standing up, gripping her toy telephone’s yellow earpiece so the rest of the phone dangled by its cord.

“Was that you banging?” Dellarobia asked.

“Mawmawmaw,” Cordie replied.

Dellarobia was stunned to look up and see Hester in her hallway.

“I knocked,” Hester declared. “Where were you?”

“Just cleaning, moving some stuff around on the back porch,” Dellarobia lied. She took a quick inventory of the things Hester would hold against her this morning: breakfast dishes in the sink, Cordie in just a diaper and shirt. She’d tried to get her dressed, but the child had pelted her all morning with a hail of
no
; she felt like a woman stoned for the sin of motherhood. “All this water is making me stir-crazy,” she said. “Come on and sit down, I’ll make us some coffee.”

“Well, I had some. But all right, I’d have a cup, if you don’t care.” Hester looked around for a place to hang her dripping raincoat.

“It’s not much of a fit day out, is it?” Dellarobia took Hester’s coat from her, as if she were a guest.

“Reach down your hand from on high, and deliver me from the mighty waters.”

“I was just thinking the same,” Dellarobia said, surprised. “Those psalms about the wreck of the world. People think the Psalms are only about nice stuff.”

Hester appeared unimpressed with Dellarobia’s thoughts on the Psalms. She tried to focus on one thing at a time, hanging up the coat, tidying up the table. Hester was practically a stranger to this house. Everything always happened over at Bear and Hester’s: sheep shearing, tomato canning, family discussions, wakes. This two-bedroom ranch house was flimsy and small compared with the rambling farmhouse Cub and his father both grew up in, but dimensions and seating weren’t the issue. Bear might condescend to helping his son dismantle and rebuild an engine here, and now Hester of course led her tour groups up the nearby hill. But for practical purposes, the corner of their property occupied by their son’s home was a dead zone for Bear and Hester. Eleven years ago they’d built the house with a bank loan, choosing the floor plan and paint colors themselves and making the down payment as a wedding present, when Cub got Dellarobia in trouble, as they put it. Plainly, they’d begrudged the bride price ever since.

“Mawmaw!” Cordelia said again, dropping her phone and bouncing up and down on her bent knees, doing a little dance. Dellarobia was surprised to see Hester invoke happiness in the child, but then realized the radio was blaring “Jingle Bell Rock.” She turned off the music, causing Cordie to drop to the floor like a marionette whose strings had been cut.

“I’m sorry, baby, but Mammaw and I need to hear ourselves think.”

Cordie sought immediate revenge, picking up the toy telephone and getting down to business with the dial, dragging it with her finger to create a thrilling racket. If any object contained within its depths a horrible noise, this girl would find it.

Dellarobia tried to concentrate on making the coffee. She was rattled by Hester’s presence here, which could only mean bad news. Family disagreements were rising over everything to do with the butterflies: charging money for the tours, letting the professor come in. The wildly expanding contentions at church regarding Dellarobia’s role in the so-called miracle. A second newspaper article had appeared, with Dellarobia once again the headliner. If Hester and Bear held someone responsible for all this, it wasn’t Cub. Could in-laws seek a divorce on their son’s behalf? Whatever her mission, Hester was somberly dressed for it, by her standards. Plaid shirt and jeans, big silver belt buckle, old boots. So thoroughly damp, her ponytail was dripping. Did she need a towel?

“I see there’s a tree in your den,” Hester said, as though remarking that an alpaca had been seen in the bathroom.

“It’s looking like Christmas around here, isn’t it? Preston and his daddy cut that little cedar out of the fencerow yesterday. We had to move the TV to get it set up in there.” Dellarobia was layering on the cheer too intensely, thanks to nerves. But her kids had never had a Christmas tree in their own house, not once. Only the one at Hester’s. They did everything over there, including Santa Claus. This year Preston had asked why Santa didn’t like their house, and that settled it. She’d made an executive decision.

“We don’t have any ornaments, though,” she added, hoping Hester might pick up on the hint. Hester had boxes and boxes, so many they could never fit everything on their tree. Weren’t grandparents supposed to share such things? Dellarobia had no family left, so the heritage business was one long wild guess where she was concerned. She wished she still had the hand-turned wooden toys of her childhood, things her father made in his shop, a simplicity she only recognized as poverty in retrospect, after he died. She’d been too young at the time to covet the Christmases other kids had, with batteries. She turned on the coffeemaker with an authoritative snap, then realized she’d set the carafe into it full of water, rather than pouring the water into the machine.

“The bottom pasture’s full of standing water,” Hester said.

Okay, thought Dellarobia, end of the Christmas tree subject. She reorganized and started the coffee again, correctly this time.

“I’ve got all the breeding ewes down there now,” Hester continued, “but I don’t like it. It’s no good for them.”

“Well, the rain can’t keep going on this way, can it?”

“They say it could,” Hester replied. “That bottomland’s good for them usually, the grass down there is good. But not this year.”

Cordie’s ratcheting phone went on and on. Whoever designed toys, in Dellarobia’s opinion, at their earliest convenience, should be smacked. She counted the seconds until the coffee started to pour through. Whatever it was that had brought Hester into this house, it wasn’t sheep. “You could put them over here on this field, above us,” she offered. “If that’s what you want to do. I mean, it’s all your land.”

“I know it is. But they need to get their CDT shots here soon, and next thing you know they’ll start lambing. I like the ewes where I can keep an eye.”