Flight Behavior (48 page)

“We won’t,” Bear said, sounding utterly sure of this.

“Well, they say it could,” Cub said quietly.

Dellarobia understood she had missed something significant. Cub was already up to four fingers, and Bear looked wary and mad, as if he’d been gut-punched. Certainly he would not have expected this from his son’s corner.

“That right there is all he needs to do,” Hester said to Bobby with some finality, leaning forward to hand a stack of papers across the desk. The logging contract possibly, though some of those pages had come out of Hester’s printer; Dellarobia recognized the weird black-to-blue fading ink color. She always waited too long to put in a new cartridge. Bobby turned slowly through the pages, giving careful attention to each, while Bear intermittently erupted in a legal-sounding phrase. “In perpetuity not to be breached,” or words of that nature. Bear’s black suit jacket pulled in horizontal creases across his shoulders and his white shirt collar bit into the meat of his neck. He looked like a pit bull on a short chain.

Cub examined his fingernails. Hester kept glancing at the framed photo on Bobby’s desk, probably wishing her own family had turned out that well. It was a dated picture, Winnie Ogle wore a ponytail in a scrunchy, and the twins were just toddlers. Dellarobia had lately seen those girls helping out in the nursery, preteens now, both a bit burdened by the look of too much metal around the face: braces, glasses, loopy earrings. But sweet girls, responsible kids. Dellarobia’s eyes wandered around the office. It was no-fuss, like Bobby, with a simple cross on the wall and one of those colossal Bibles on a stand, the type that would break bones if dropped. He had a less menacing New American translation on his desk, she noted, pressed between a pair of weird, crudely made ceramic bookends that looked like fists. As if some superhero were trying to squeeze scripture juice out of that thing. A congregant must have made the bookends. This in fact she observed to be a theme of Bobby’s decor: the Kleenex box wore a brown and pink crocheted cozy, and three hand-carved wooden wise men marched alongside his open desk calendar, carrying paper clips, Sharpies, and a yellow cube of Post-it notes. Dellarobia couldn’t decide if that was tacky or astute. If born to the present day, what would the Savior find handier than Post-its?

At length Bobby laid the pages down on his desk and folded his hands together. “There’s nothing in that contract to hurt you,” he said, looking Bear directly in the eye. “Hester is right. You return that earnest money, and you’re clear. She’s got it worked out on the spreadsheet there, with the balloon paid off by your extra income this winter and the rest of the loan refinanced. I’d consider your son’s advice about selling off some of that equipment, too, to keep your machine shop going. There are folks in this congregation who’d be happy to send work your way. Contractors and so on.”

Dellarobia could see this rankled Bear, who would not want his working life in any way the concern of this flock. Bobby apparently saw this too, and subtly shifted gears. “Your financial concerns can be met. I think that’s clear. That land has value to your family the way it is.”

She was impressed with Bobby’s acuity in negotiating these rocky shoals. But he still sounded a lot like a guy at the bank turning you down for a loan: overly benevolent, in a manner intrinsically related to the fact that he’s about to sock you. Bear sat on the front of his chair with his big-knuckled hands on his knees and his elbows out, essentially in a crouch, ready to stand at any moment, if not lunge. Everything about Bobby Ogle must infuriate him right now. The new beard, the bank-manager demeanor, the undeviating spell cast over Hester.

“Well, sir,” Bear said, “I’m not aiming to return that money. Not when there’s trees standing that could be trees laying down. All due respect, Bobby, that’s money in the bank and it’s my call.”

Bobby nodded, leaned back, folded his hands behind his head. “What I hear you saying is you want to log that mountain because it’s yours, and because you can. And my job here I think is to warn you about the sin of pride.”

Cub’s head came up suddenly as if someone had grabbed him by the chin. “That’s true, Dad. When a man is greedy and gets too big for his britches, he pays for that. You’ve seen that.”

“You pay with your health and your peace of mind,” Hester agreed. “You heard Cub about the well water. If you can’t live by the laws the Lord God made for this world, they’ll go into effect regardless.”

“My name’s on the deed of that land too, Dad. My family’s house.”

“That land was bestowed on us for a purpose,” Hester said. “And I don’t think it was to end up looking like a pile of trash.”

For a moment Bobby’s and Dellarobia’s eyes met, as bystanders to the family arbitration. To all appearances, they could just as well have fought it out in their own living room, but Bobby probably did this all the time. Witnesses changed the stakes. Not just the pastor but this setting, those mountains in the window, the mondo Bible containing thirty pounds of higher laws. And Bear in his Sunday suit, this was no small part of it either. He was an older and smaller man here than at home in his work clothes, without access to his ordinary tools of contempt. It crossed Dellarobia’s mind that he would be buried in that suit. Bobby now advised him that strength did not come from laying down his own law on the land. Strength came from elsewhere. Bear, apparently at the end of his argument rope, responded by calling Bobby a tree hugger.

Bobby looked amused. “Well now, what are you, Burley, a tree puncher? What have you got against the Lord’s trees?”

In a sense the meeting went like the faked wrestling matches on TV, Dellarobia thought, where the winner is called abruptly for no discernible reason. Suddenly Bear was defeated and Bobby was beaming, congratulatory, leading the family in prayer. Hester seemed swollen with admiration, the nearest thing to maternity she’d ever seen in her mother-in-law. Too bad it was not her son but Bobby in those high beams, and too bad Bobby didn’t notice. His eyes were already sneaking toward the big open calendar on his desk, where the squares of his days were jammed with little handwritten notes in various inks. Maybe Dellarobia was mistaken about his distraction. But she did not imagine the condescending way he patted Hester’s shoulder when they left. Doing his best, she knew. Bobby’s flock was needy and his duties large.

Dellarobia went to collect the kids and brought them out to the empty parking lot, where her station wagon and Bear’s red pickup sat together like family dogs. Bear had one hand on the roof of his truck and was slicing the air with the other as he spoke to Cub, regaling him with the specs on some piece of equipment. A wood splitter. Cub and his father had been selling firewood, spoils of all the downed timber after the winter’s floods. Bear now explained that this fellow he knew was selling the splitter for next to nothing because it needed a little work, one of those fools who’d throw out something rather than fix it. Bear’s voice had a pit-bull growl underneath the dimensions of this bargain, and his blood pressure was still measurable in his face. Dellarobia knew they probably had not seen the last of his arguments about the logging. She watched the three of them: accusatory father, contrite son, mother standing ten feet away ignoring the grandkids, absorbed in untwisting the strap of her yellow purse. As if everything that had just happened to this family had not happened. What was
with
these people?

It was decided somehow that they needed to go look at the kindling splitter right now, Bear and Cub together, in case he bought it and needed to load it. The place was out toward Cleary, in the opposite direction from their farm. It made no sense for them to take their wives home and come back.

“I’ll take Hester,” Dellarobia told Cub. “You go on with your Dad.”

“You think?” Cub asked. “He still seems pretty pissed off.”

“Just wear something bulletproof,” she advised. This was a fairly recent habit, talking this way in plain sight of Bear. The old man’s hearing was shot. All those years of power tools and a disdain for ear protection.

“Why don’t I take Preston?” Cub asked. “To keep things rated PG.”

“Sure, go for it, Preston. Man stuff!” she urged, pretending for the sake of others present that her son was that kind of kid. “Don’t you want to go with Dad and Pappaw to check out the wood splitter?”

Preston behaved as if she’d suggested he go watch a public hanging. He moved slowly toward the man-stuff truck, dragging his feet so dramatically they turned upside down, scraping the tops of his toes on the pavement.

“You’ll be fine,” Dellarobia told him, while his writhing sister wrestled against submission to her car seat. Hester required similar help getting into the passenger seat, seeming vaguely to disapprove of the shoulder belt, as if it were different from any other one. If baby- and in-law wrangling was woman stuff, somebody else could take a shift, Dellarobia thought, sighing as she turned the wheel hard, angling her station wagon out onto Highway 7. “That was something today,” she said to Hester. “That meeting. You must be proud of Cub. I know I am.”

Cordie fell asleep in her car seat almost instantly, as Dellarobia had known she would. The fit she’d just pitched was standard, the storm before the calm. Hester looked narrow-eyed and dreamy, like the sandman might be hitting on her too.

“You’ve got a job on your hands now, I guess,” Dellarobia proposed. “Looking after things up on that mountain. Turning it into an enterprise.”

Hester remained inscrutable, but that was Hester. The appearance of happiness to be avoided at all costs. Dellarobia remembered she had a different bone to pick, and had better pick it now before Cordie regained consciousness. Sensitive material. “So Cub says you saw me on the news a while back,” she said.

“Everybody and his dog saw you on the news a while back,” Hester replied.

“Right. Well, he said you saw something about me wanting to take my life.”

Hester looked awake now.

“Don’t worry,” Dellarobia hurried to say. “I just want to let you know that’s not true at all. I’ve had a lot of things going on these last couple months, there’s no doubt. But that wasn’t one of them. You can’t believe everything they put on TV.”

“It was you saying it,” Hester parried. “They showed you talking.”

“I know. The interviewer tricked me. They did stuff with the film, editing I guess. Okay? I’m just telling you.”

With a doubtful countenance, Hester said nothing.

“So you’re arguing? Wouldn’t I kind of be the
expert
?” Dellarobia started to raise her voice but checked it, glancing at Cordie in the rearview mirror. “Wouldn’t I be the expert,” she asked quietly, “on whether I intended to kill myself?”

“Maybe you wouldn’t,” Hester said, infuriating Dellarobia. The woman had issues with authority. After a silence Hester added, “I’m not just talking about the last couple months.”

“What in the heck is that supposed to mean?”

In silence they drove through outer residential Feathertown, where cement birdbaths had been emptied and overturned and tipped against their stands for the winter. Forlorn dogs lay gazing at their chains in small front yards. Dellarobia envisioned swerving into a tree, just to get a rise out of her mother-in-law. “Wouldn’t you just accept me as family,” she finally said, “after ten years? I mean, what would have convinced you I was going to stick around?”

“Wasn’t my business to be convinced.”

“Cub and I weren’t a match made in heaven, I’ll grant you. But people make do.”

“Wouldn’t I know it.”

Dellarobia chuckled. “You and Bear? You guys nursing a lot of regrets?”

Hester narrowed her eyes strangely. “You don’t know anything.”

“Okay, I don’t,” Dellarobia said, chastened. “Tell me something, and then I will.”

Hester did not oblige. They were now on Main Street, stuck waiting for a line of pedestrian Baptists a mile long to move out of the crosswalk in front of the church. Where were all those saved souls headed? There must have been an auxiliary parking lot.

“Well, I know this much. You and Bear didn’t get married for the same reason we did. You all celebrated your thirtieth a while back, and Cub’s not thirty. So you were sure-enough married before he came along.” Dellarobia only knew of their anniversary because it was in the bulletin at church, the full extent of their celebration.

“So we were,” Hester said. “So you were. Before Preston.”

“Yeah, but—” She saw a break in the Baptists coming up, but stole a quick glance at Hester’s face. “What, you’re saying you lost one too? Before Cub?”

They cleared the crosswalk at last, but then had to wait through Feathertown’s one stoplight. They were out near the Dairy Prince before Hester answered. “Didn’t lose one. Gave one up.”

“Whoah. You had a baby you gave up for adoption? Why in the world?”

“I had my reasons.”

“Well, gosh, Hester. Can I ask what they were?”

“Bear was away in the service.”

“That would have been hard. But still. Bear was coming back.” She tried to imagine a young Hester left on her own, waiting. Dellarobia put the dates together, and again they didn’t add up. “You all weren’t married yet, when Bear was in ’Nam.”

They drove past the house that famously kept its elaborate blaze of Christmas lights up all year. And then, conveniently located next door to it, the volunteer fire department.

“I was still debating about marrying him when he went off to the service. My folks said I’d better go on. He had the farm and the house. You know. He was all set up. I just didn’t . . .”

Dellarobia said, “Just didn’t love him.” She nodded with each word, her full sympathy stretched across that sentence.

“Well,” Hester said, “I didn’t know if I did. We’d hardly said words, he was so standoffish. I didn’t know if I would love him or if I wouldn’t.”

Dellarobia laughed a little. “Sounds like you’d had more than words. If you were cooking a little bun in the oven while he was away.”

“No.”

“No, you weren’t pregnant?”

“No, we hadn’t been together.”

“So how does
that
happen, exactly?”