Flight Behavior

by Barbara Kingsolver

  Each morning by daylight she crossed the same distance from her kitchen door to Ovid's camper, pausing there on her way to the lab to record the previous day's high and low temperatures. He used these to estimate the rates at which butterflies were using up their fat reserves when they stayed quiet in the trees, versus warm days when they flew around. Too warm was just as dangerous as too cold, he said. Dellarobia felt like an accessory to the crime as she plotted the numbers each day, but it was one of her tasks. A special thermometer was attached to the camper by means of a metal arm extending from the passenger's side window. She pressed the mechanism's tiny buttons to reveal the day's readings and then zero them out, a small thing to master but it pleased her to do it, like Preston with his watch. Ovid showed her how to make a graph from the two lines of dots, showing the high and low temperatures marching across the month with the survival zone for monarchs pressed narrowly between them.

  It was the wavering pencil line on graph paper that first made her think of a high-wire act, and again now she pictured the man in a bowler hat with a white-painted face, expressionless, raising and lowering black-slippered feet in slow motion along his wire. Life in the balance. She couldn't say where she had seen him, but it must have been on television, probably just a glimpse as Cub cruised past on his way to more conventional entertainments. The image was in her mind as she approached the camper. She was not on her way to work this morning, Ovid did not expect her to be in the lab on Saturdays, though he and Pete usually were. Today she'd pulled on her boots and coat in order to help Cub walk the fence line behind their house, at Hester's request. She had decided to move the pregnant ewes over here. Cub had already taken Cordie and Preston over for his mother to babysit while they worked on the fence, but now he sat procrastinating in the kitchen, drinking a third cup of coffee and listening to Johnny Midgeon's morning show while gathering his gumption for a hefty hike in the cold. Dellarobia felt agitated as always with her husband's balky progress. To defuse her impatience, she went outside to take the morning's temperature reading for her notebook, and that was when she saw Ovid Byron naked.

  Just a glance. Not his face, it was from armpits to thighs, approximately. She turned away so quickly she nearly fell down in the mud, scarlet with embarrassment, heart pounding. How was she supposed to know he was in there? He was always up at dawn. The camper's pleated curtains with their snap closures stayed permanently closed on the side facing her house. She'd grown used to his durable privacy, never noticing that the other side facing the mountains might be open. Of course he would want that view of the high ridge, which she took for granted. She stumbled toward the house, feeling faint. Feeling vile. A Peeping Tom. Had he seen her? It seemed unlikely. The thought was excruciating. Going to work, ever, seemed undoable if it involved any possibility of looking him in the eye again. His eyes were no part of the snapshot, only the long-waisted torso she could not erase, burned onto her retina. The coffee-colored skin, the surprisingly sculpted abdomen, the shadow line of tightly curled hair like a funnel cloud down the center of his chest, nearly touching down on the dark pubic ground. She wondered how she could have seen so much in a millisecond. She'd turned away before registering anything more than movement and a change of light on the smooth planes she only understood after the fact to be a body. Truly, she hadn't seen what she'd seen. She was sure Cub would see guilt on her face when she entered the back door, scraping her boots, looking at the doorsill.

  "Okay, let's get this over with," Cub said, not even looking at her. He rose from the table and pulled the olive-drab dead weight of his farm coat from the back of a chair. She felt unaccountably emptied out. Even this did not matter, then, that she had seen a man so important to her in his nakedness, a biblical act. She felt invisible.

  She had failed to record the temperature, obviously. The notebook was still in her hand as they stepped out the kitchen door. She slid it quickly onto the junk table next to a flowerpot jammed with cigarette butts, a still life of her sins, before descending the two steps down from the back porch. What she wouldn't give for a smoke right now. But that was the regular formula, wasn't it? People always gave their lives for a smoke. Cub shivered copiously inside his coat and reset the cap on his head, not one of the countless woolen ones knitted for him by Hester but a baseball cap, a poor choice for such a cold morning. Dellarobia said nothing. She was tired of telling people to put on clothes. If her children and husband couldn't figure out it was winter, the world would still turn.

  The temperature must have dropped this morning in the early hours. Frost lay on the ground in patterns, a white powder so dry and fine it flew up in tiny storms of confetti-frost ahead of their boots as they walked. They followed the path of the creek up the left side of the pasture, wordlessly agreeing to climb to the top and work their way across and down. The dusting of frost outlined a zone of temperature differential along both sides of the creek where the water had held in warmth overnight. She thought the words thermal mass, picturing the solid pelt of butterflies clinging to the great columnar trunks of the firs, which Ovid had described as giant water bottles. Watercress she had never noticed grew up through the surface of this creek, frozen to blackness in the air above but still green underwater, and also alive in a narrow zone an inch above the surface of the moving creek. She had heard him say the word thermocline, and now she could see that too. She had begrudged the clubbish vocabulary at first, but realized now she had crossed some unexpected divide. Words were just words, describing things a person could see. Even if most did not. Maybe they had to know a thing first, to see it.

  The vision of Ovid's body, forgotten for a few blessed seconds, returned to agitate her. Men she had seen, in life and in the movies of course, nakedness was everywhere anymore. But not this one. Her boss, the one man whose good opinion she worked hardest to earn. Who scrutinized her routinely from behind the safety of rubber goggles. She envied forgetfulness, and simpler minds than the one she inhabited. She was desperate for Cub to say anything at all, but he was too busy breathing.

  "How come Hester finally decided to move the ewes over here?" she asked him.

  "I don't know." He added after a beat, "Too wet over there." It would be a conversation of short sentences, then.

  "That bottomland is too wet for them now? As in what, hoof rot?"

  "Yeah, I guess." He puffed. "And she thinks they'll get wormy."

  She was careful of her footing on the slope. The white frost accentuated details of the ground, its ridges and stippled dead grass, the lay of the land. This didn't look good for the butterflies. It felt strange not to know the damage. Someone should go up there.

  "You know what?" she said to Cub. "I talked with Hester about that, the day she came over to our house. Before Christmas, that would have been."

  "About the ewes? What'd she say?"

  "She didn't trust us to keep an eye on them. When the lambs started coming."

  "She said that?"

  "As good as." Dellarobia panted a little herself with the climb, watching each white breath materialize in the cold air. Her glasses fogged, so she took them off and slipped them in her pocket. Along the top of the pasture bare trees stood upright like bars of a prison, throwing vertical shadows down the length of the hill. All the world enclosed her in black and white. "I told her we could help out when the lambs were born. Preston and I would like it. Hester just kind of pulled up her nose at that."

  "But we could," Cub said. "She's got books. You could read up on the lambing."

  He'd been reaching up with one arm, maybe to get a book from the shelf. His camper's tiny kitchen cupboards were all crammed full of his books, he'd taken the doors off them. He might have turned toward the window in time to see her scuttling away. Dellarobia struggled for an even conversational keel. "Okay. Borrow me one of those books from Hester," she said. "So I'd know what to do if a lamb came early."

  "Boil water," Cub said, and she laughed. Coming from Cub, that was funny. It softened her present distress.
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  "How were your folks this morning?"

  "Mother was fit to be tied. Bobby Ogle's coming over later."

  "Really. While she's got the kids?"

  "Probably not till after we pick up the kids. But the conniption has begun."

  Dellarobia wasn't surprised. It was maybe the minister's third or fourth visit since all this began, and each had launched Hester into a new orbit of anxiety. If spiritual comfort was the goal, things were not going that way. "Why do you think your mother's so nervous around Bobby?"

  "Well, you know. He's the pastor."

  "Well, yeah. She loves to admire him across a crowded room. But why get so bent out of shape with the one-on-one?"

  "I don't know. Dad said she's been vacuuming since the crack of dawn. He was going out to his shop so she wouldn't vacuum him. She had her stuff thrown all over the furniture."

  "What do you mean?" Dellarobia envisioned a food fight, but that was her life, not Hester's.

  "You know, those lacy things. Covers, I guess."

  "Those crochet things she puts on the arms of the sofa, to cover the worn spots?"

  "Yeah, all that. She was baking something. It smelled good." He chuckled. "Cordie pooped on the way over. I walked in there with a loaded baby, and Mother about lost it. She said to get upstairs and change that child before she stank up the place. She made me bring the diaper home with me."

  "Nice," Dellarobia said. But despite herself, she was moved by the breach in Hester's armor. Someone still had the power to make Hester feel house-poor and embarrassed. Vacuuming up dog hair, throwing slipcovers over a threadbare household, Dellarobia certainly knew the drill.

  At the top of the field they found the gate to the High Road standing open. No real surprise there, strangers came through constantly. Hester's tour service was no longer needed, since people just walked or drove themselves to the butterfly site. People with binoculars, butterfly nets, telescopes, expensive-looking cameras, all or none of the above; they were not scientists or news teams now, but mostly tourists. One morning while she and Preston waited for the bus, a young couple wearing bright, matching Spandex pants had walked right past them through the yard, speaking a foreign language. When Dellarobia spoke up, they'd stared at her in stunned surprise, as if they'd been hailed by a groundhog. People even carried tents up there and camped out, including some polite kids from the Cleary environment club and a trio of young men from California who'd knocked and explained to Dellarobia they were from some international group with a number for a name. Something-dot-org. Dr. Byron was keeping these kids busy with simple tasks, counting and measuring, probably not the nature show they'd come looking for, but they submitted happily to being useful. The three California boys, especially. She'd asked how in the world they found this place, and they showed her a computer program that drew a map directly to her house. All they had to do was type in her address on their little flat screen, and open sesame, there it was. Her address was public knowledge, they said, and so was the photograph taken from the sky, apparently, showing the gray rectangle of their roof and Cub's truck and her Taurus sitting slightly askew in the drive. Not Ovid's trailer. She'd asked about that, and the young men said the satellite photo would have been taken some time back. Before anyone cared, in other words. The Internet had information in storage, waiting at anyone's beck and call. It made her feel helpless to defend herself. That little gray rectangle was all the shelter she had.

  These Californians at least had introduced themselves, and she appreciated that, since most did not. All the work Cub and Bear had done to make the High Road passable was probably a mistake. It was being taken as an invitation. And fairly enough, she thought, for that was the way of the world. A road was to be driven upon. The candy in the dish was there to be eaten, money in the bank got spent, people claimed whatever they could get their hands on. Wasn't that more or less automatic? For a human being to do any less seemed impossible. She waited while Cub dragged the fence closed.

  "We've got to get a chain and a padlock for this gate," he said.

  "I was thinking that. Hester's ewes will wander off into the wild blue yonder if we can't keep this closed." She wondered if the lock would get cut, and knew Cub was thinking the same. He felt all the trespassers were basically the same brand of hoodlum, unwilling to respect private property, but Dellarobia was not so sure. Maybe they thought it was some kind of nature park. The butterflies had now been on the news so many times she'd lost count, which made it seem like anyone's business, just as the Internet gave away their address simply for the asking. Free was free.

  She and Cub followed the fence along the top of the pasture, looking closely for breaches in the perimeter. Downed trees lay across the fence in several places, having fallen over from the woods on the other side. As husband and wife they worked together well, exchanging few words as they hefted dead wood from the wire, freeing the fence from the tangle, reattaching wire to post. No livestock had been in this field since early November, before the fall shearing. Dellarobia had a vivid recall of marching up the hill that day and taking her last look back down that hill, like Lot's wife, before heading into a new place. This new place was the last thing she'd expected.

  Ovid Byron's body in the dimness caught up to her again, and she wished she could scrub her own eyes out. No, not that. But hated how she kept running and her mind still dragged it along, shoving the memory forward, daring her to taste its thrill. It felt acute, like tooth pain, like falling. Not again, this losing her mind to a man. She'd thought surely something had changed, for all the strange fortune those butterflies had brought her. She'd thought she could be free.

  A flock of sparrows flushed up from the dead brush with a startling rush of wings. They all disappeared into the woods, save one. This odd loner darted ahead, lighting on one fence post and then the next as Cub and Dellarobia walked along in its direction. "Flying from pillar to post," her mother used to say, when Dellarobia jumped from one infatuation to another in high school. She hadn't thought of those words in years.

  Cub stopped to study a long section of fence along a washed-out gully that would have to be restrung. She dug in her pockets for her gloves, found her glasses there, and touched the nub of a pencil, one he'd given her in the lab. If only she had not gone out there this morning. If Cub had been ready for once. She couldn't fathom how tomorrow would go. If she couldn't face him she'd have to quit. The loss hit her like a death.

  "Hey, do you want to hear something funny?" Cub asked, and she said yes, she did. She pulled the panel of woven wire toward the post so Cub could nail it. Though she leaned with her whole body, her full weight was barely sufficient.

  "When I saw Dad this morning, he told me he caught Peanut trying to get the butterflies to come over on him." Cub paused to finish pounding the topmost U-nail, taking some of the pressure from Dellarobia.

  "How do you mean?"

  "He's trying to lure them in, I guess. Over the property line onto his land. Dad said he got these hummingbird things, where you put sugar water in them."

  She laughed aloud, one small bark, at the idea of Peanut Norwood creeping around with a bird feeder. "Why on earth?" she asked.

  "He wants a piece of the action. Dad says there's guys in town talking about making it a Disneyland kind of thing."

  "A theme park. That's crazy. Don't they know that's--" She sought some kinder word than stupid. "It's useless," she finally said. "The butterflies are all going to die, as soon as the temperature goes down into the teens. This could be it already, they might be dying now."

  "Well, but maybe next year."

  Dellarobia felt dragged to her knees by the hopelessness of getting from A to B here. It wasn't just Cub; much of the town was in on this nonconversation. "There won't be a next year. It gets too cold, they die, and then it's over. No next generation."

  "Tell that to Jack Stell and them," Cub said. "They've got it figured like supply-side economics. The Good Lord supplies the butterflies, and Feathertown gets the
economics."

  "Really. Just like that, Jesus hands out the butterflies?"

  "Why wouldn't our town deserve to get lucky for once?" Cub asked.

  Dellarobia recognized the same naive thinking she had heartily shared in the beginning. If anything, she'd been more selfish, wanting the butterflies to be hers alone. She saw them first. She'd been reluctant to surrender her flight of fancy to the scientists' prior claim. "We do deserve it, Cub," she said. "I'm not saying we don't. But luck is just throwing dice. You can't build some kind of industry on just hoping they'll come back. That's what screws people up. Flying blind like that."

  They finished pulling the bottom strand, and Cub took the time to yank long, leathery tentacles of invading vines from the wire. Honeysuckle was widely despised for taking over fields and entangling machinery, and it was all over this fence. The leaves had a bruised, purple cast in the cold, but the plant persisted. The sheep wouldn't touch it. Ovid had told her some animals did eat honeysuckle in Japan, where this foreign plant belonged, but they didn't travel with it. No natural predators here, to keep it in check.

  "It's not just Dad and them," Cub argued. "The whole state is pushing the natural thing now. For tourists." He clapped his gloved hands together, trying to warm them, and she did the same, the two of them saluting the cold morning with a muffled applause. She knew the "Natural State" campaigns he meant, to which she'd never given a dime's worth of thought before Natural landed in her backyard. Only to find out this so-called phenomenon was unnatural in the extreme. She owed it to Cub to explain this, but hardly knew where to begin. It was like telling a story of childhood damage, backing up to the unhappy parents, then the unhappy grandparents, trying to find the whole truth.

  "The trouble with that," she said finally, "with what those guys are saying about the butterflies, is that it's all centered around what they want. They need things to be a certain way, financially, so they think nature will organize itself around what suits them."