Flight Behavior (47 page)

Dellarobia’s surprise gained a new dimension.

“He’s so
reticent
. He hides his light under a bushel.” Juliet playfully cuffed him under the chin. “The climate science community will probably give him a medal now.”

“The purple heart,” Ovid said.

“You’re still in one piece,” said his wife. They toasted to Tina Ultner.

Dellarobia wondered what Ovid had told her about his first evening at this table. All that lame-brained prattle, her monarch-fact parade, the testicle balloon above the table. The emergency-room fever of that evening’s embarrassment seemed fairly tame now, given the litany of embarrassing delusions that were still to come, regarding Ovid and herself. Her vision of Juliet as an interloper now struck Dellarobia as bizarre. It was hard to feel the remotest sympathy for any of the different fools she had been. As opposed to the fool she was probably being now. People hang on for dear life to that one, she thought: the fool they are right now.

The climate subject left them a little subdued. Ovid confessed they didn’t know where they would spend their sabbatical winter, with the monarch system disintegrating under the pressures of fires and floods. His life was now at the whim of a livid ecosystem. Dellarobia watched as Cub meticulously cleaned his plate, avoiding eye contact, not out of step with the present company but staring through it. If he’d said one word this whole evening she could not remember it. She thought it unlikely that he had any real issue with Ovid and Juliet, Cub was not one to put a lot of energy into tact; he was just brooding, as he had been all day. It was so public and implicating, his sulk, like a forehead bruise on one of the kids that customarily made her blurt explanations to casual strangers at the grocery. Yet here she sat, detached, as if this gigantic miserable husband were not her fault. Just being the fools we are right now, she thought: a condition that inevitably changed, often for the worse. In one transcendent moment buoyed by about two ounces of Riesling she saw the pointlessness of clinging to that life raft, that hooray-we-are-saved conviction of having already come through the stupid parts, to arrive at the current enlightenment. The hard part is letting go, she could see that. There is no life raft; you’re just freaking swimming all the time.

Ovid was explaining something to Juliet that he called the theory of the territorial divide. With some confusion Dellarobia understood this was
her
theory, he was attributing it to her, though the terms he used were unfamiliar: climate-change denial functioned like folk art for some people, he said, a way of defining survival in their own terms. But it’s not indigenous, Juliet argued. It’s like a cargo cult. Introduced from the outside, corporate motives via conservative media. But now it’s become fully identified with the icons of local culture, so it’s no longer up for discussion.

“The key thing is,” Juliet said, resting her elbow on the table, that beautiful wrist bending under the weight of its wooden rings, “once you’re talking identity, you can’t just lecture that out of people. The condescension of outsiders won’t diminish it. That just galvanizes it.”

Dellarobia felt abruptly conscious of her husband and her linoleum. “Christ on the cross,” she said without enthusiasm. “The rebel flag on mudflaps, science illiteracy. That would be us.”

“I am troubled by this theory, Dellarobia,” Ovid said, “but I can’t say you are wrong. I’ve read a lot of scholarly articles on the topic, but you make more sense.”

“Well,
yeah
,” Juliet said, “that’s kind of the point, that outsiders won’t get it.” She looked at Dellarobia, moving her head slightly from side to side in some secret girl signal, as if they were in league. Dellarobia felt herself resisting the invitation. Juliet went to yard sales for entertainment. She’d seen the coral reefs. Which according to Ovid were bleaching out and dying fast, all over the world. Preston would never get to see one. Dellarobia felt like taking a tire iron to something, ideally not now, ideally not herself. She got up to clear the plates.

Cordie had been good through most of supper, if lifting her shirt and playing with her navel counted as being good. And squeezing boiled potatoes in her fists, watching white potato mush squirt out between her fingers. “Good” was a euphemism for quiet. But the internal weather of Cordelia always turned quickly, and now suddenly she was fussy, ready for a bath and bed. Cub lifted her by the armpits and retreated, barely nodding good night. Preston meanwhile was getting cranked up. His science buzz, Dellarobia called this. He remembered to ask Dr. Byron about the Perfect Females, the question he’d been nursing for weeks and weeks. Ovid explained they were females that had their full complement of parts.

Preston crossed his arms on the table and rested his chin there, scrutinizing Ovid for sincerity. “You mean like heads and legs?”

“Those, and more,” Ovid said. “All the inside parts too. So they don’t need helpers or auxiliaries to function, the way worker bees do, or soldier ants. A perfect female is the lady that can go out and start a new colony by herself.”

Preston accepted this and moved on. “Just a sec,” he commanded, dashing from the room.

“Excuse me please!” Dellarobia called after him.

“May-I-please-be-excused!” he yelled from the end of the house, and reappeared in a flash, sliding to a halt in his sock feet. He plopped a yellow book on the table:
Encyclopedia of Animals
, volume 15. “This says monarchs go to Florida in the winter.”

“Florida and the Gulf,” Dellarobia corroborated. She’d read him the monarch entry so often the sight of the page depressed her. It was a deeply unsatisfactory account.

Ovid took the book and found the publication date, nodding. “This was the definitive version of the story in 1952. The monarchs were already a subject of scientific curiosity then. No one knew yet where they went in winter.”

“Not true!” Juliet said. “Woodcutters in Michoacán knew.”

“Outside of a mountain range in Michoacán,” Ovid corrected, “no one knew where. And inside that range, no one knew where they summered.”

“That’s true,” Juliet agreed. “They thought they came there to die.”

“With my wife’s permission, I will put it this way. At the time your book was written, the full story of the monarch migration was unknown to humanity.”

“When did they find it out?” Preston asked.

The answer, to Dellarobia’s astonishment, was within Ovid’s lifetime. He had been just a bit older than Preston when the discovery was announced in the
National Geographic
, in 1976. A Canadian scientist chased the mystery his whole life, devising a tag that would stick to butterfly wings, recruiting volunteers to help track them, losing the trail many times. And then one winter’s day, as an old man on shaky legs, he climbed a mountain in Michoacán to see what must have looked like his dream of heaven. Dellarobia listened to all this while she finished scraping the roast pan and crammed the leftovers into plastic boxes wedged into the refrigerator. Ovid could still quote passages of the article from memory:
They carpeted the ground in their tremulous legions
. He said he remembered exactly where he was when he read that article, and how he felt. She left the dishes in the sink and sat back down.

“Where were you?”

“Outside the post office, sitting on a lobster crate. I spent a lot of Saturdays there. My mother let me read the magazines before they went to their subscribers. I was so excited by the photos in that article, I ran all the way down Crown Street, all the way to West End and out a sandy road called Fortuna to the sea. I must have picked up a stick somewhere, because I remember jumping up and whacking every branch I passed, leaving a trail of flying leaves. When I got to the sea I didn’t know what to do, so I threw the stick in Perseverance Bay and ran back. It was the happiest day of my life.”

Dellarobia wanted, of course, to know why.

“Why,” he repeated, thinking about it. “I was just like any schoolboy. I thought everything in the world was already discovered. Already in my books. A lot of dead stuff that put me to sleep. That was the day I understood the world is still living.”

Juliet reached across the table to pour an inch of Riesling in everyone’s glass. Ovid tapped the yellow volume with his thumb. “The books get rewritten every year, Preston. Someone has to do that.”

“The monarchs are coming out of diapause,” Dellarobia thought to announce.

“We saw them having their family life,” Preston said. “In the
road
.”

“Really,” Ovid said, with convincing enthusiasm. But Juliet revealed that he already knew, he’d noticed it first thing when they drove in this morning. She claimed he was more excited about the butterflies than about seeing his wife.

It was so easy for her to say a thing like that, with full enthusiasm for the eccentric coordinates of her man. At some point in the evening Dellarobia had stopped being amazed that Ovid had turned into someone new, and understood he had become himself, in the presence of his wife. With the sense of a great weight settling, she recognized marriage. Not the precarious risk she’d balanced for years against forbidden fruits, something easily lost in a brittle moment by flying away or jumping a train to ride off on someone else’s steam. She was not about to lose it. She’d never had it.

F
irst Bear, then Hester, then Cub and Dellarobia: the four of them, it struck her, were arranged on this pew exactly as they were to be laid in the cemetery, according to a burial plan they’d paid money down on eleven years ago. Bear sitting in the sanctuary with his wife, rather than smoking it out in Men’s Fellowship, was no ordinary event, probably part of the family negotiation Hester had mentioned a while ago. Right after this service, in Bobby Ogle’s office, they would settle the question of the logging contract. Once she remembered this agenda, Dellarobia saw hints of it everywhere. The choir sang, “
Oh this earth is a garden, the garden of my Lord, and He walks in His garden in the cool of the day
.” Maybe it was coincidence. But it also seemed possible that Bear was being set up.

Cub sat holding both Dellarobia’s hands, not in the casual way he normally laid claim to her, but imploringly, his big fingers threaded tightly through all of hers. It felt like having both hands jammed through a wrought-iron gate. She abided captivity, for the complicated chain of trespasses that had gotten her stuck this way. Her detachment from Cub the previous evening seemed this morning to explode the minute the shades came up. The sight of his eyes in the mirror as he brushed his teeth, this immense sad man in his boxers, wrenched her stomach and made her turn from the light. This morning she was doomed to nurse Cub like a hangover.

“
My Lord He said unto me, do you like my garden so fair?
” the choir members sang earnestly, their many possible differences disguised beneath the words of a song. “
You may live in this garden if you keep the grasses green, and I’ll return in the cool of the day.
” In his sermon Bobby warned against losing gratitude for the miracle of life. If God is in everything, he asked, how could we tear Him down? A love for our Creator means we love His creation. “What part of
love
,” he paused, searching his audience, “do we not understand? The Bible says God owns these hills. It tells us arrogance is a sin. How is it not arrogance to see the flesh of creation as mere wealth, to be scraped bare for our use?” Dellarobia recognized a possible opening round aimed at Bear, though it might also be a metaphor for credit card debt. Living within your means was a major theme of Bobby’s.

She was surprised to see Bobby had sprouted a beard since last Sunday, or the outline of one: no mustache, just a dark fringe that encircled his face like a basket handle, emphasizing its roundness. He looked to be aiming for millennial-generation today, wearing jeans and a long-tailed maroon shirt and plain black sneakers, the cheap kind she bought for her kids. Their white soles blinked as he paced around on the darkened stage.

“He’ll speak to us if we let him. Little old raggedy us. We all know what it’s like to come up short. We are southerners. We understand that macaroni and cheese is a vegetable.” Bobby chuckled at the assent that came back to him from the darkened room. “And we are Americans.” Assent came again. Bobby often spoke with his cupped hands, scooping the air toward him to emphasize his points. “We want the things we want, and we want them now. But that is not a reason to rob Peter to pay Paul.”

Okay, credit card debt, Dellarobia thought, but in his closing prayer, Bobby requested of the Lord that they experience the blessing of His creation and share that with others. “May we look to these mountains that are Your home and see You are in everything. The earth is the Lord in the fullness thereof.” So it could go either way.

The rest of her family headed for Bobby’s office afterward, in the slow-moving way of animals maneuvering through a herd, but Dellarobia detoured through the Sunday-school building to make sure someone would still be there to watch the kids. She steered clear of Brenda’s scary mother but got waylaid by Preston, who wanted her to admire the Lego enterprise he had going with Chad or Jad, an older boy she didn’t recognize. This boy snarked his nose in a constant, repeating sniffle, and bore the marks of an encounter with a bag of Cheetos. The orange crumbs glowed on his hands and clothing and every Lego he’d touched, like fingerprint dust. Dellarobia made a mental note to scrub Preston before he touched food, and scooted to Bobby’s office, where the rest of the family was already seated. Still in cemetery order, she noted, realizing she had no idea where the baby would fit in, even though it was the only one of them already buried. She stood a moment in the doorway, wowed by the tall windows rising behind Bobby’s desk. They showed a whole lot more of God’s mountains than she ever got to see from her house.

When she slid into the empty chair facing Bobby’s deep oak desk, she registered with surprise that it was Cub speaking. “There’s the well water,” he said, counting off points on his fingers, “and there’s mudslides. That is a fact, Dad, about mudslides. I can show you where they logged over by the Food King and it brought the whole mountain down. In all this rain. What if we have another wet year again?”