Flight Behavior (49 page)

Over the next mile or so of silence, Dellarobia replayed the words, studied them out, and wished she could eat those last ones. “I’m sorry,” she said. “You’re saying you were pregnant, and the baby wasn’t Bear’s.”

Another mile came and went, with Dellarobia feeling very strange at the helm of this woman-stuff car, as if the road might abruptly lift them into some other plane. Maybe she should have gone to look at the wood splitter. She was not sure she was ready to hear about Hester’s wild side, Hester’s other life. She must have been a pistol, with that flair of hers, those handmade fashion statements and whirlwind energy. Bear must have been smitten. A bright-eyed girl from a dilapidated trailer on the back side of a mountain. A man with a house and a farm. What Dellarobia was not ready for, she realized then, was Hester’s legitimate claim on her sympathies. Just going on the basics, a person would think she and Hester had lived the same story line.

“Did you ever find out who adopted it or anything?” she brought herself to ask quietly. “This baby, was it a boy or girl?”

“A boy.”

“Does Bear know?”

“Just that it happened. He said we’d marry if there was nary a word said of it. So that’s how it is. The ones that adopted him never knew who I was, I don’t think. If they did, they took it to their grave.”

“All this time. Gosh. He’d be, what, like in his thirties now?”

“There was a home for unwed girls in Knoxville.”

“You went there?”

“I should have. Mommy said I ought to go away, but I was pigheaded and stayed with my cousin Mary in Henshaw and gave the baby up to some church folks over there. I was thinking of myself. Staying near friends and Mommy and all.”

“And some fellow, whoever he was. The father.”

“He’s long gone. Dead.”

“I’m sorry. So you gave up the baby in Henshaw.”

“See, I wasn’t thinking. A city would have been the thing. Hereabouts you never know how something will keep turning up.”

“Isn’t that the truth. I’ve seen suits of clothes my mother made twenty years ago hanging on the rack at Second Time Around. I always feel kind of proud, you know? That they’re that well made.” She glanced at Hester and shut off her babble. The woman was miserable.

“Hester, are you okay?” she asked after a minute. “Have you
seen
him? I mean, is he around? Does he know who you are?”

She shook her head deliberately. “He doesn’t, nor Bear. They can’t any of them know. And I can’t do a thing in this wide world but live with it.”

Dellarobia glanced in the rearview again. Cordie was still asleep. A ten-mile nap, and out poured this. When they rounded the bend and Hester’s mailbox came into view, Dellarobia exhaled a deep relief. They were finished. End of story.

“A person could think about doing away with herself,” Hester said. “I’d not tell you any of this, except I fear for you. You make your bed, but you can’t always keep lying in it. Getting older is no help, Dellarobia. You might forget whether you took your pressure pill ten minutes ago. But there’s your regrets of thirty year ago, still just sitting there. A-looking you in the eye.”

“I don’t even know what you’re telling me, Hester. It’s a lot to take in. You had a son. You did your best. I’m sure he’s had a good life somewhere.”

She turned into the driveway, bypassing the mailbox and the dreadful swan planter, a remembrance of unkindnesses past. The ties that bind, Dellarobia thought, and follow us to the sweet by and by. But there stood Roy and Charlie waiting in the yard, the winter-killed flower beds, the house with its empty upstairs windows, work to be done, disagreements settled. Not such a terrible bed for Hester to lie in, surely. And then it hit, with such unexpected clarity she slammed the brakes.

“Oh, dear God, Hester. It’s Bobby.”

14

Perfect Female

A
t some unmeasured moment the temperature fell through the floor and the rain turned crystalline, descending noiselessly in the dark and stunning Dellarobia the following morning when she let Roy out the front door.
Snow
. Roy bounded wolfishly through the white deep, nosing into drifts, leaving a tangled line of tracks as he hurried to put his small yellow tags on all of the yard’s most notable points. The dog version of Post-its.

The cedars in the Cooks’ front yard were flocked with white, and their holly tree was enveloped in ice, giving the effect of a commemorative Christmas plate. The big maple on the property line was less enchanting as it dropped limbs onto the driveway at steady intervals, crash, crash, like an angry drunk. Needless to say, school was canceled. Dovey called around eight to report she hadn’t even gotten halfway to Cash Club before she had to turn around. The way she described the cars sliding around on Highway 7 sounded like a slow-motion automotive ballet.

“This is so wack!” Dovey said. “Who ever heard of a winter like this?”

“Nobody,” Dellarobia replied.

She couldn’t stay away from the front window. Everything looked so clean and transformed, so fresh-start. All ramshackle aspects of the neighborhood’s houses and barns had disappeared under white roofs against white fields. The mailbox sported a white toupee. Icicles fringed their entire roofline, the massive one down at the end unfortunately suggesting a backed-up gutter. It was three feet long and curved slightly outward like a movie villain’s sword, just dangling. The icicle of Damocles. “Don’t you walk under that thing,” she warned Preston.

From the couch Preston shot back a look that said,
No chance
. He and Cordie were snuggled under blankets in their pajamas, watching cartoons. They’d waited all winter for this. A snow day was not to be wasted.

Dellarobia moved to the kitchen windows to stare out in a new direction while she made hot chocolate for the kids. Despite the biological treachery of this snow, its beauty moved her. Even a field of mud and sheep droppings could be rewritten as a clean slate. She admired the white-edged bristle of the hedgerows along the pasture, and the way the trunks of the big trees were visibly cut off from the ground, so they appeared to be standing on top of the snow like elephant’s feet rather than rooted beneath it. The distant mountains had the fuzzy, off-white color of a plush toy that’s been around a while. For the whole of the morning she wondered if any butterfly could survive this. Now she also wondered, in a different manner from days past, with uncomplicated sadness, if Ovid was already climbing the mountain to find out. She had come to terms with the idea of Ovid and Juliet, not that she had a choice, given that they were having their marriage here on her back forty. Certain ramshackle aspects of Dellarobia had also gone undercover, it seemed, just like the snow-covered barns. Some defects lurked, but for now her way seemed clear. She’d made plans.

She stood watching the sheep, which seemed undismayed by the dazzling ground, maybe forearmed with ancestral memories of Iceland. Cub had made a brief early trudge to the barn to feed hay, and now they wandered out over the white land to chew their cuds. Their pointed feet broke through the crust, and they lurched along dragging broad, pregnant bellies, leaving the oddest imprint on the snow, like the trail of a dragged sandbag punctuated with holes. Their wool colors stood out sharply, the blacks and moorits especially. But even the white sheep against the blazing snow looked yellowish, the color of actual rather than commercial teeth. Most of the sheep were standing, she discerned, though their legs were invisible. But a few had knelt down into little snow-bowls to rest placidly in the glare of a new kind of day. Very high up on the hill, one coal-black ewe was lying down oddly, with her nose up. Like a seal balancing a ball: that color and that posture, her nose sticking straight up in the air.

“Cub!” Dellarobia called. “Come here a minute.”

Cub padded into the room in his socks, agreeable and in no hurry. He was watching cartoons with the kids. “What?”

“Take a look at that ewe up near the fence. That black one that keeps arching her neck. You see her?”

After a moment Cub did.

“I think she’s in labor.”

“It’s too early,” Cub said.

“I know it is. But she’s acting weird.” As they watched, she struggled to her feet and shook the snow off her wool, an impressive muscular shudder even from a distance. She turned several times in a small circle like a dog preparing to lie down, and then lay down. Once again her nose lifted in a great, arcing sweep like a circus seal. Like an exercise video for livestock. An unconventional move, by any standard.

“It’s too early,” Cub repeated. “And it’s colder than heck out there.”

Dellarobia blew out air through her lips. “I’m not asking if this is
convenient
.” She turned off the burner under the pan of milk, which had scalded while she wasn’t looking. “Fix the kids some hot chocolate and give them breakfast. I’m going up there.”

She rushed to pull on warm layers and waterproof layers and lace up her boots, noting that Cub had ignored instructions and gone back to watching
The Backyardigans
with a blanket pulled around everything but his face, just like the kids. Dellarobia stomped out the back door and was amazed once again by the made-over world. It was abnormally quiet outside, as if sound itself had been blanketed and extinguished. Some sound-absorbing property of the snow, she gathered. Under her boots it made a squeaky crunch. She took the hill at an angle because straight up was out of the question, she discovered, after slipping several times onto her knees. She set her feet perpendicular to the grade and made broad switchbacks up the pasture.

The black ewe, when Dellarobia attained her altitude, was lying in the same spot. From the looks of the wallow she’d made in the snow, she had been at this project for a while, whatever it might be. She looked glassy-eyed and bored, staring ahead, only mildly perturbed by Dellarobia’s sudden arrival.

“So what’s up, lady?”

The dark lady turned her nose away, checking out Dellarobia through the horizontal pupil of one pale amber eye. Her breath clouded the air in quick, visible puffs.

“You’re not making my day here, you know that?”

After two or three minutes Dellarobia felt ridiculous. The ewe uttered a low, productive belch and began to chew her second-time-around breakfast in the most normal fashion known to sheep. Dellarobia backed off ten paces down the hill, then ten more, in case the ewe was faking her out. She should have called Hester first, for a consult. The cold caught up to Dellarobia when she stood still, racking her with hard shivers that rattled her teeth. “You couldn’t do this in the barn, could you?” she asked.

The sheep did nothing helpful. She even stopped chewing. Dellarobia’s eyes wandered up the mountain to the flocked forest, the hummocks of branches and glittery, ice-enclosed twigs like glass straws. This was no country for insects. The real grief of this day came to her in waves, like dry heaves, throbbing against her initial good spirits. It couldn’t even be called a freak storm. Probably there was no such thing, in a freak new world of weather. Three days ago it had been fifty degrees. The springtime smell of mud was a clear memory. She’d been so sure this winter was over and they’d made it. Even Ovid thought so, with the end of diapause. Now, from her vantage point in the snowy field, she saw a trail of tracks leading from Ovid’s trailer up to the gate. So he was up there already, maybe both of them. His wife supporting him in grief. The High Road was now a shadowy lane, narrowed to a tunnel by snowy overhanging boughs.

Dellarobia also noticed the crisscrossed paths of animal tracks faintly traced over the hillside: deer, rabbit. Strange to think what a small fraction of the comings and goings out here they’d ever know about. The ewe called her attention back with a strange, high grunt and pointed her nose again. She was on the small side, this ewe, maybe a first-timer. Probably clueless and going into panic mode, just because it seemed a truck might have parked on her stomach and bladder. Dellarobia remembered the feeling. The ewe stood up, shuddered, took a couple of steps forward, and out dropped something from her backside. A dark liquid puddle, really it had poured out. Fluid or blood. Dellarobia felt a restriction of vessels in her chest as she scuttled back up the hill, scrambling to recall words from the vet book she and Preston had lately neglected. Amniotic sac, placenta. She dropped to her knees in the snow and bellowed to see a lamb. Black, strangely flat against the snow, unmoving inside its translucent sac: a tiny sheep child. The ewe walked away from it and nosed into the snow, looking for graze.

Yelling for Cub, Dellarobia ran and slid down the hill in a direct path for the back door. Amazingly, he appeared there. She sat on her cold bottom, panting, still fifty feet or more from the house. “Get up here!” she yelped. “Get that bucket in the barn, the emergency stuff. No, bring towels and hot water. Bring that hot milk on the stove.”

“What’s going on?” he asked.

“Damn it, Cub, just do it.” She rolled onto her knees and clambered back up the slick path she’d just compressed, a perfect sledding route. Without ever fully gaining her feet she made it back to the puddle of lamb, swearing at the mother that stood blandly chewing now, some distance away from this thing that had definitely not happened to her. Dellarobia flung off her gloves and touched the dark creature. Its heat shocked her, the warmth of the place it slid out of one minute ago. She unwound her wool scarf and scrubbed the lamb out of the milky caul, then cleared its eyes and nostrils, but it was not breathing. It was limp as a rag when she lifted it, legs dangling. Dellarobia shut her eyes tightly so tears wouldn’t freeze in them. It looked like a toy, with big Yoda ears, the legs and tender hooves perfectly formed, the body covered with glossy black curls.

She’d never known Cub could move so fast. Huffing loudly he came, with kitchen towels slung over his shoulder, hustling sideways up the hill carrying her Revere Ware pot by its handle, the milk. By some miracle he stayed upright with that. She ran the last few paces to meet him and grab the pan and towels. The milk was still very warm. What other man, ever again, would just do as she commanded, no questions asked? She felt overwhelmed with love and loss and nostalgia for this bond that was not even yet in her past, while she sopped a towel in the warm milk and watched Cub see the lamb. Watched his face fall open like a glove compartment, helplessness and sorrow jammed inside. She could lose her nerve again. She always did.

“I don’t know, Cub, I don’t know,” she kept repeating. Hester had predicted she would fail at this. She rubbed the little ringlet-covered body, scrubbing hard, like shining up the kids after their baths, warming this corpse with the soaked towel and then with her own breath. She blew into its tiny damp nose, then compressed the small belly, feeling for life, but felt nothing and nothing. The small head lolled, no hint of resistance. The body was already starting to go cold.

“Don’t you
dare
die on me. Damn it!” She wound a dry towel around the hind legs for a grip, it was so very slippery, and staggered to her feet. “Okay,” she said to Cub. “Okay, watch out, stand back.” She stomped out a tiny arena in the snow and spread her boots wide and began to turn, gaining traction as she could, swinging the lamb in a circle. By the third revolution it flung out like a girl’s ponytail on the merry-go-round, she felt liftoff. Its small weight pulled as she turned and kept turning, mindless of her own voice as she thrummed out a pulse of curses:
Breathe, damn it, damn it, damn it, come on, breathe!

When she fell on the ground, the world kiltered on its axis. The boughs of the forest behind her lurched, blackish and mossy looking. The sun creeping up behind them was a crystalline brightness popping and shimmying through the glass branches.

“Dellarobia, what in the hell?” Cub asked finally. Or she finally understood what he was asking. He was beside her on his knees. She sat up.

“Here, put it against your skin. To warm it up.”

Cub unzipped his jacket and thrust the lamb under his sweatshirt, wincing only slightly at its slimy chill. He held it there.

“Oh, my God, Cub. Where are the kids?”

“They’re fine. The stove’s off. They’re watching TV.”

“Did you tell them not to get off the couch? Was Cordie eating anything?”

“They’re fine,” he repeated.

Dellarobia fell back against the snow. A snow angel, waiting for the crazy world to give her an all-clear for landing. Shortly she sat up again.

“Let me see it,” she said. He extracted the limp thing, and she held it close to her face, watching. “Cub. Its heart is beating, I swear to God.” Faint and fast, a pulse fluttered through the damp curved belly against her cold hand. No muscle tone, no flicker of eyelids, no sign of life, but that pulse. She stuck her index finger down its throat and scooped at a viscous phlegm that completely filled the narrow, serrated shaft of the little gullet. She felt the sandpaper texture of its tongue. Faintly it pulled against her finger, suckling. Dellarobia exhaled a loud cry that could have passed either for pain or laughter. She rewrapped the hind legs in the towel and got up to swing it again.

This time they both shouted, Cub begging her to stop. But she didn’t, even though this flinging felt murderous to a mother who’d cradled feeble infant necks and sheltered soft fontanelles. Dellarobia felt reckless, turning and turning, swinging that child until she lost her feet again. She lay panting. Cub looked both outraged and deeply anxious, basically positive that she’d lost her mind.

“Go call Hester,” she said. “Ask her what to do if a lamb’s born not breathing.”

“Jesus, Dellarobia. What are you doing?”

“I don’t
know
what I’m doing. Just go!” she screamed.

Cub fled. Dellarobia massaged the little body again, noticing it was a female, then tucked it under her shirt and lay back down until the worst of her dizziness passed. It seemed fully possible she might kill something here. She sat up and cradled it in both hands, watching. Faintly it moved,
moved
, the narrow head lifting at an angle, tilting the outsize ears. She listened to its belly and could faintly hear breathing, not wheezy like a croup but stuffy, like a head cold. She blew into the nostrils and pressed the belly again, again, compelled by the near sensation of breath. She rubbed and massaged and warmed it until Cub returned and collapsed beside her.