Flight Behavior

by Barbara Kingsolver

  She instantly regretted the "whole other world," which they might take the wrong way, but it was too late, the little girl was already passing it on. They smiled and nodded, seemingly uninsulted. Dellarobia was coming to understand that these parents did not speak a word of English. They must be living in Feathertown if they had a child enrolled in school. But whatever their situation, they were evidently doing it with a kindergartner as their ambassador. Did she go with them to do their shopping and banking? She couldn't imagine. And could not have been more floored by what the child said next.

  "My mother and father wants to see the butterflies."

  "You're kidding me!"

  The girl began to translate, but Dellarobia stopped her. "No, don't say that. Tell me how they know about the butterflies."

  "We know about them a lot," Josefina said, this time without consulting her parents. "They are mariposas monarcas. They come from Mexico." She pronounced it Meheecu, a small, quick slide back to the mother tongue.

  "Okay," Dellarobia said, astonished.

  "The monarcas are from Michoacan, and we are from Michoacan." Josefina flashed a mouthful of white teeth, gaining poise by the minute. She was a little taller than Preston, and seemed much older. They might have had to enroll an older child in kindergarten, to learn the language, Dellarobia supposed. Or maybe she'd just seen twice as much of life as the kids around here. It seemed probable.

  "Monarchs," Dellarobia said. "Now see, I've heard that name before." She racked her memory. Animal Planet, maybe.

  "Monarch-es," the girl repeated, shifting the emphasis around so it was English, or the next thing to it.

  "Are you saying they used to be down there, and now they're all coming up here to live?" Dellarobia recognized a familiar ring to those words, which people often said about immigrants themselves, and again she worried about causing accidental offense. But the girl was focused on the butterfly issue.

  "No," she said. "They like to live in Michoacan. On the trees. They live in big, big . . ." She drew a wide shape with her hands, struggling for a word, then said, "Racimos. Like uvas. Sorry, like grapes."

  Dellarobia could have dropped her teeth. "Yes, exactly. Like big bunches of grapes hanging from the trees. You've seen that?"

  The girl nodded. She said something rapidly to her parents that made them nod vigorously as well.

  "My mother, somebody tells her they are coming here like that. Her friend read in the newspaper. We went to another house to ask for seeing the monarcas. And that lady sayed us to pay money to see them, so we don't go."

  "My mother-in-law, Hester, you mean. A lady with a long gray ponytail?" Dellarobia signaled a line from the back of her head.

  Josefina nodded. "Yes."

  "She was going to charge you money to see the butterflies? When was this?"

  "A long time."

  "Around Thanksgiving?"

  The girl asked her mother a question, who answered with a word that sounded like November. "It was November," Josefina replied.

  That witch, thought Dellarobia. Free of charge for churchy locals only. Leave it to Hester to hoard the miracle. "How did you know to come here?"

  "Today Preston comes on the bus, and I know you are a nice lady here."

  "Well, thank you. You all can go up there and look at the butterflies any day you want to. No charge. That lady you talked to doesn't own them."

  The girl translated, and they all smiled. Dellarobia wondered if they meant now.

  "The only thing is, I've got a baby here napping, so it's not a good time right this minute. We can go later this week, if you want. Could I get a phone number, to call you?" She tore a page from Preston's drawing pad and handed it to the little girl, who handed it to her father with instructions. He removed a pencil from his pocket, wrote a phone number, and handed it back: ten digits, local area code, but the tidy numbers were foreign-looking. He crossed his sevens, like t's.

  "So," she said, folding the paper in quarters. "You've already seen this, back where you come from? Where the butterflies all gang up together?"

  "In Michoacan my father is a guia for the mariposas monarcas." The girl was warming up, bouncing just perceptibly on the sofa and speaking a little breathlessly. "He takes the peoples on horses in the forest to see the monarcas, he is explaining the peoples, and counting the mariposas and other things for the, for the cientificos. And my mother makes tamales for the lot of peoples."

  Dellarobia cupped Preston's head gently in her hand, turning his face upward. "Did you all talk about this at school? The butterflies?"

  "Miss Rose said something to Miss Hunt, but not to us," he said. "Josefina asked me if I ever saw the butterflies before, because she did. She said they make the big things all over the trees." He glanced from Josefina to Dellarobia, looking as usual as if he feared he had done something wrong. "That's why I wanted to see them too."

  "Shoot! I can't believe this," Dellarobia said, hardly knowing where to start with her questions. "Do you have these butterflies all the time in Mexico? Or do they just show up sometimes?"

  "Winter times," the girl said. "In summer days the monarca flies around everywhere drinking the flowers, she flies to here to your country. And in winter she all comes home to Angangueo. My town. Every year the same time coming."

  "And that's how your parents make their living? From working with the butterflies, and the people coming to see them?"

  "They come, they did came . . ." Josefina paused a moment, her eyes fixed on the middle distance while she worked out words in her mind. "The peoples came from every places. Every countries."

  "You mean tourists from all over the world? Like how many were there, a hundred?" She wondered whether a child so young could possibly know the difference between dozens and hundreds.

  "Thousands of peoples. One hundred millions butterflies." That answered that.

  "How do you know how many butterflies there are?"

  The girl looked a little annoyed. "My father is a guia. I help him riding the horses."

  "You can ride a horse?" Preston asked in a reverent whisper. He must think she was the second coming of the Powerpuff Girls.

  "If you don't mind my asking, why didn't you stay there?" Dellarobia asked.

  "No more. It's gone."

  Dellarobia leaned forward, hands pressed between her knees, strangely dreading what might come next. Miracle or not, this thing on the mountain was a gift. To herself in particular, she'd dared to imagine. Not once had she considered it might have been stolen from someone else. "Do you mean the butterflies stopped coming?" she asked. "Or just the tourists stopped coming?"

  "Everything is gone!" the girl cried, in obvious distress. "The water was coming and the mud was coming on everything. . . . Un diluvio." She looked at her parents, asking several questions, which they answered, but she did not say more.

  "A flood?" Dellarobia asked gently. She thought of the landslide in Great Lick that had taken out a section of Highway 60 in September. On the news they'd called it a maelstrom, the whole valley filled with boulders and mud and splintered trees. She made a downward tumbling motion with her hands. "A landslide?"

  Josefina nodded soberly, her body shrinking into the sofa. "Corrimiento de tierras." The mother lifted the girl onto her lap, folding both arms around her protectively. The whole family now looked close to tears.

  "I'm sorry," Dellarobia said.

  The father spoke quietly in Spanish, and then Josefina said simply, "Everything was gone."

  "What was gone?"

  "The houses. The school. The peoples."

  "You lost your own house?"

  "Yes," the girl said. "Everything. The mountain. And the monarcas also."

  "That must have been so terrible."

  "Terrible, yes. Some childrens did die."

  Dear God, she thought. Terrible was a word with many meanings. The landslide at Great Lick had taken a stretch of highway and nothing else. No school, no lives.

  "When was this?" she thought to
ask. "What year?"

  The girl asked a question, and the mother replied with a word that sounded nearly like February. Josefina repeated, "February."

  "Of this past winter? So you remember all this? It just happened, what, ten months ago? So you all came here to Feathertown after that, in the spring?"

  She nodded. "My cousins and my uncle is working here already a long time."

  "Oh, I see. Working the tobacco," Dellarobia said.

  "Tabaco," both parents repeated. The man pointed to himself and said, "Tabaco," and something else. He must have been following the conversation to some extent. Her sense of the family kept shifting. They'd had a home they preferred to this, and jobs, scientific things of some type to assist. Now he was evidently hustling for day labor. She felt abashed for the huge things she didn't know. Mountains collapsing on people. Tonight she and Preston would go over to Hester's and get on the computer together.

  She handed back the folded piece of paper and asked, "Would you mind writing down the name of your town for me, where you came from? So I can . . ." What was she going to tell them, that she'd Google it? It sounded ghoulish, like voyeurism. Which, to be honest, was what the daily news amounted to. You could feel more decent watching it when the victims weren't sitting on your sofa.

  "So I can learn about your home," she finally said.

  The man returned the paper with several words written under the telephone number: Reynaldo Delgado. Angangueo, Michoacan. The last name she'd forgotten, the town that was no more.

  They all sat quietly for a long time. Dellarobia had ridden out prayer meetings aplenty, but had no idea what to say to a family that had lost their world, including the mountain under their feet and the butterflies of the air.

  5

  National Proportions

  The man arrived in a Beetle. His car was in the long train of Monday-morning unfortunates stuck behind the school bus, whom Dellarobia now pitied only halfheartedly as she put Preston on the bus. Gunning their engines, weaving, all these drivers needed to settle down and accept their fate. "Late for work, sucks to be you!" she mouthed cheerfully at the drivers as the bus chuffed its brake-release sound and grumbled away at a snail's pace. She made sure to wave at the square pane of glass that contained Preston's small face like a picture frame.

  She was a little mortified, then, when the orange VW pulled out of the line and onto the shoulder directly across from her. Had that guy seen her taunting him? She reached into her coat pocket to touch her phone, which was pointless. She could easily bolt the twenty paces to her front door, in a pinch. She watched an unbelievably tall, thin man get out of the small car, unfolding himself like a contractor's ruler.

  "I am looking for the Turnbow farm," he said with a fascinating accent, tilting the words this way and that. Turnbow, he'd said, as in "Turn around, take a bow." She had the wildest urge to do that.

  "I'm Dellarobia Turnbow," she called back, but it came out too fast, a solid unbroken string of syllables that caused the man to laugh.

  "Really," he said. "All that?"

  "Not even. I didn't give you the middle and the maiden. Catie, Causey."

  "Well, then," he said, crossing the road with great long strides to grasp her hand and shake it. "Ovid Byron, a crazy name as well. You might be the first to upstage that."

  Creezy neem . . . ope-stage dot--he sounded like a reggae singer. She took note of both names and tilted her neck to stare at the upshot of all that. She was accustomed to men of measure, but this one had a few inches even on the Turnbow men, and it went on from there. Tall, dark, and handsome, but extra tall, extra dark. Okay, extra all three. He was so many things, this Mr. Byron, that he constituted something of an audience, driving her to invent a performance on the spot.

  "You're named for poets. Ovid was that ancient one, right? And Lord Byron." She was casting her net wide here, Honors English was a lot of water under the bridge, but his look said she'd nailed it. "Better than me--I'm named after a wreath made out of nature junk." She made a little curtsy.

  "That name again, please?"

  "Dellarobia." She ran a hand through her hair, for which the color of his car was a pretty good match: University of Tennessee orange. Maybe he was a UT fan, but she wouldn't ask. He might just like the color, as arbitrarily as she'd been born with that hair. Which had yet to meet a comb that morning. She wore gray plaid pajamas under her coat, and unlaced boots. Meeting the bus each morning was a scramble that left her feeling punch-drunk.

  Luckily, this guy seemed unobservant of the pj's. He repeated her name carefully, dividing it in two: Della Robbia. He crinkled his brow in concentration, as if momentarily considering the possibilities. "Also an artist," he declared. "I'm pretty sure of that, an Italian Renaissance painter. Della Robbia. Maybe a sculptor. Of the still life, I'm pretty sure. Nature junk, as you call it."

  "Shut the front door! Are you kidding me?"

  "No. But I might be entirely wrong." He laughed. "You should look into it, woman. It's your name."

  The candor of this stranger took her breath away. Woman! And the idea of being named for an artist. A person could be reborn on the strength of that. It pounded in her head while she completed their outlandish conversation and waited for him to retrieve his camera and backpack from his car. She walked him around to the back and pointed out the High Road to the astonishing Ovid Byron, whose accent she finally placed. He sounded just like that crab character who sang "Under the Sea" in The Little Mermaid.

  The minute he'd hiked out of sight, her impulse was to run to Hester's and get on the computer. She'd never thought to Google her own name. She lit a cigarette instead, and confronted the sight of her back porch with its still life of muddy boots, cardboard boxes, and a miniature Big Wheels bike lying on its side, looking comatose. Cub would be leaving for work in ten minutes, Cordie would want breakfast. Dellarobia exercised the only option generally available to her in times of personal upheaval. She walked to the side of the house where she couldn't be seen out a window, and dialed Dovey.

  "Hold your horses, what's his name again?" Dovey asked, after Dellarobia had described nearly every facet of the encounter in a run-on sentence.

  "What I'm trying to tell you is, how could a person be so g-d stupid?" Dellarobia said, not quite finished yet with the initial testimony. "Walking around my whole life thinking I'm named after some Martha Stewart thing, and it's an Italian artist."

  "So maybe he made it up. It could be a pickup line. Who is this guy?"

  Dellarobia was short on details, where that question was concerned. He'd come all the way across the country to see the butterflies. He'd said New Mexico. The state, not Mexico the country. He was American. Someone had forwarded him the Cleary Courier article, over the Internet. He'd called the reporter to verify the specifics of what she had seen, and the location. Then flew into Knoxville and rented a car from there. "He's driving a VW Beetle, did I mention? I think he was kind of embarrassed about the car. He said he'd reserved a Prius but instead they gave him the Volkswagen. What kind of company rents out Volkswagens?"

  "Wait a sec," Dovey said. "He flew across a whole damn country and drove to your place, to see butterflies?"

  "That is correct."

  "Did he seem, I don't know, insane?"

  "How would I know? I spend my life with people that want to eat thumbtacks off the floor."

  "How old a person are we discussing here?"

  "Older than us, but not old. I don't know, forty?"

  "What kind of a grown-up takes off on a regular weekday and pays cash money for an airplane ticket, to look at butterflies?"

  "You tell me, Dovey. You think I could make this up? I showed him where the road starts and told him to be my guest, go on up. I'm not about to let Hester get hold of him. She'd probably charge him double as a person of color."

  "Okay, what color? What's this guy look like?"

  "Like, not from around here, right? Six and a half feet tall, skinny as a rail, African American, but not t
otally. I mean, sort of on the lighter side of that. And the way he talks is unreal. Silky smooth."

  "Shoot, girl! That was Barack Obama."

  Dellarobia laughed. "Maybe. Traveling undercover."

  "But there'd be more Volkswagens in your driveway," Dovey said. "He'd have his Secret Service guys."

  "That's true. No Secret Service guys."

  Dovey affected a television voice: "In a scandal of national proportions, the president was seen flirting today with a sexy Tennessee woman wearing pajamas outside the home."

  National proportions, that part struck her as true somehow. "Who says I'm still in my pajamas?"

  "The Tennessee temptress, a married mother of two, denies everything."

  "So, guess what else."

  "Believe me, I cannot."

  "He's coming ba-ack!" Dellarobia sang.

  "Well, I should hope so. He's not going to go live on the mountain."

  "No, I mean here. To our house." Dellarobia kept an eye on the front porch, but no one was coming or going as yet. "I didn't even ask Cub first. I just invited this guy flat out to come have supper with us."

  "You are the bomb. You don't know this guy from Adam, and you, like, acquire him."

  Dovey's admiration animated her. "I know. It's crazy, right? He told me he's staying at the Wayside, and I guess that put me in rescue mode. That's a scary place, Dovey, you have to admit. Have you been down there lately?"

  "You mean, other than when I was looking for some meth or a hooker?"

  "Exactly. I mean, the poor guy, traveling all this way, and he winds up there. I told him he could not eat the food at that restaurant. It might be fatal."

  "So you're cooking for him."

  "Oh, jeez. I'll have to figure something out. What should I make?"

  "I don't know. That Mexican chicken thing you make with the corn, that's good."

  "Well, but what if it turns out he's from Mexico? I think that's a fake recipe."

  "Another Mexican knocking at your door? I thought you said he was more--"

  "Yeah, more black. I think. Kind of. Or, what's Bob Marley?"