Flight Behavior

by Barbara Kingsolver

  She and Hester passed through the upper pasture gate with its empty donation bucket nailed to the post. If someone could find the time to watch this gate, it would help. Maybe pass out leaflets, like Leighton Akins. Dellarobia considered what she would put on her questionnaire: How 'bout this weather? Do you know the difference between correlation and causation? Do you have thoughts of shooting your horse?

  "Do you ever find yourself just thinking about the sun?" she asked aloud. It was not a Hester kind of question, so she didn't expect an answer. Her mother-in-law had agreed to help her look for nectar flowers that might be blooming the last week of February. Both struck Dellarobia as long shots: winter flowers, and Hester's cooperation. But she'd promised, and now here they were on the High Road, with no idea how to talk to one another. After a minute Hester paused on the gravel, turning this way and that.

  "Yes," she finally answered emphatically.

  "About the sun?" Dellarobia asked.

  "Yes," Hester confirmed, now striking downhill away from the traveled road. To Dellarobia's surprise they were on a path, faint and steep and not at all well maintained but definitely a path. She'd never noticed it, in all her days up here.

  "They say this might be permanent," Dellarobia said, and then corrected herself. "Scientists say that. The weather will just get all wild instead of settling down."

  Hester walked ahead of her in the path and made no response. The tail of her red kerchief bobbed with every step.

  "Some places it's gone dry," Dellarobia plowed on. "Where they had to abandon farms, I guess, for the drought. Like Texas. One big fire sale. I don't know what's worse, to burn up or drown."

  "Burn up," Hester said decisively. "That'd be worse."

  "But look at all the crops here that molded on the vine. And us, having to buy hay for our sheep. You have to wonder, you know. Who's going to feed who?"

  "What do they say is doing it?" Hester asked.

  Dellarobia considered possible answers. There was no easy way to talk about the known world unraveling into fire and flood. She came up with a reliable word. "Pollution," she said. "You pollute the sky long enough, and it turns bad on you."

  "Stands to reason," Hester said.

  "Where are we headed?"

  "There's a bottom over south that gets more sun, where Cub and I used to go hunt chicken of the woods when he was little. I've seen the harbinger flowers out there. Not at the same time, though. Chicken of the woods is in fall time."

  "What is that, chicken of the woods?"

  "It's a mushroom you eat. It's good. Like chicken."

  Dellarobia recalled Hester collecting bark and such for her dyes, years ago, before everyone's tastes ran to the bright, fake colors. But she couldn't picture the young mother taking her boy on scavenger hunts. "Where'd you learn all this woodsy stuff?"

  "My old mommy," was all she said, an answer Dellarobia had heard before. She knew little of Hester's family. They were poor, they'd died off. One brother and a slew of cousins remained over in Henshaw, but Hester had cleaved to Bear's family and left her own behind, it seemed. The sky grew a notch brighter. They passed through a stand of walnut trees with branches angled like elbows, still hanging on to last year's walnuts. Like skeletons fixing to play ball, she thought. The steep ground was eroded everywhere from the rains. Leaf-lined troughs ran down the mountain, parting the soil between banks of detritus they'd carried along the forest floor. Among the clumps of leaves were dead monarchs, not so thick as at the study site.

  Dellarobia was startled to see a woman approaching them through the trees. Two women, carrying armloads of sticks. "Hallo!" they called.

  She knew who they were, or what, though she had not met these two in particular. The young one had on men's coveralls with sweatpants sticking out the bottom and two layers of sweaters at least. The elder wore a more normal coat, but her hair hung in two white braids, not a style you saw every day in the senior set. Both sported stiff woolen hats that stood gnomishly on their heads. Dellarobia stepped forward to shake hands, but instead clapped both in a friendly way on their coat sleeves, since their hands were full. "I'm Dellarobia Turnbow," she said. "This is Hester Turnbow, my mother-in-law."

  "Brilliant!" said the younger one, shuffling her bundle of sticks into one arm, pumping Dellarobia's hand and Hester's. "This is my mum too! Myrtle, and I'm Nelda. We came over here for firewood, hope that's okay. Our little valley has got picked over."

  Both women wore neat fingerless gloves, probably of their own making, but what hooked Dellarobia was the accent. "Li-ul valley, picked o-vah." She could listen to this girl all day, like a radio station. "You all must be freezing," she said. "All this rain."

  Nelda laughed in a burst. "Drenched!" she cried. "We're drowned rats! And now it's gone a bit parky, hasn't it?"

  Dellarobia didn't know the answer to that. She wondered what Hester made of these women who claimed to be knitting the earth together, one unraveled sweater at a time. Maybe they weren't all from England anymore. They seemed to be multiplying up here. She'd discussed the basics of their arrangement with Hester when they'd asked for permission to camp, and had set up a post-office box for the orange sweaters, which were coming in now by the bushel. There were cash donations, too. The women paid for their P.O. box and a modest weekly fee for camping.

  "Hester knits," Dellarobia offered. "You should see some of the sweaters she's made for my husband. She does all those cables and things."

  "What do you think of our little fellows, then?" Myrtle set down her firewood and dug in her colorful shoulder bag that was knitted in concentric diamonds of red, yellow, and green. At length she extracted a complicated little mess of orange and black yarn on wooden needles like oversize toothpicks. "Well, here," she added, pulling out a whole knitted butterfly, actual size. "Here's the final product. He's a bit better looking."

  Hester turned over the work in her hands. Dellarobia noticed that both Nelda and Myrtle wore old leather shoes, not the high-tech boots that outdoorsy folks seemed to favor. Every single thing secondhand. That must be the point, she realized, feeling slow on the uptake: their fashion statement was to wear nothing they'd bought new. They were second-time-arounders. Not unlike her family, only prouder of it.

  "You use double points and carry the second color across," Hester observed.

  "Yes!" both women answered, with identical enthusiasm. Dellarobia had seen these knitted butterflies by the hundreds hung up in the trees, but hadn't taken note of the effort involved. It was made all of a piece, wings and body, the black veins knitted right in. She thought of Mako's story of folding all those paper birds in grade school for world peace. The impulse to keep the hands moving, feeding tiny answers to vast demands. Like spooning peas into a child who would still be hungry for decades. It wasn't wrong.

  "You use black yarn too," she said. "I never saw mention of black sweaters."

  "We've got loads," Nelda said.

  "Too much of the black, never enough orange," Myrtle agreed. Dellarobia noted they were not a perfect physical match: Nelda plump and rosy-cheeked, her mother fine-boned. The resemblance blazed in their wide brown eyes and the way they nodded, the gnomy caps bobbing. Mother-daughter adventurers. She felt a pang of longing, as she often did in church. Everybody had a mother and a God; those were standard-issue.

  Hester handed the object back. "I don't see how it works," she said.

  "People are chuffed to bits on it!" Nelda said. "You should see the messages we get. Look at this." She pulled a phone from her bag and touched its screen with her fingerless-gloved hand, reading aloud, " 'Go knitters, stop global madness, we love you.' That's from Australia, it came this morning. Here's another, 'Go ladies, green and clean, from Betty in Staten Island.' There's loads. You want to see?" She scrolled down and showed them countless messages in blue type, along with some of the same pictures Dovey had found, of the masses of knitted butterflies hanging in trees. The forest-dwelling women appeared in the photos too, arms around each other, flas
hing peace signs, citizens of their own cheerful universe despite their full awareness of its unraveling. The fact of the phone itself struck Dellarobia, though. There had to be someone at home to pay that bill. Fathers or husbands.

  Hester still seemed perplexed. "I don't see how you'd get them on," she said.

  "On what?" Myrtle asked.

  "On the King Billies," Hester said.

  In the small hush, Dellarobia felt a wave of protectiveness. Fierce, sturdy Hester should not be mocked. She could have made the same mistake herself. "They're for show," she explained gently. "Like little stuffed animals. They're not to keep the butterflies warm."

  Hester's eyes found Dellarobia's and lit briefly there.

  "Icons," Nelda chimed in. "Or symbols, yeah? So people all over the world will know about the monarchs' plight."

  Hester's features shifted. "You all are getting as drowned out as the butterflies. I ought to knit some little hippie girls so they'll know about your plight."

  "You should!" sang Nelda, and she and Myrtle laughed the same bright laugh, another likeness. No one was offended. It broadened Dellarobia's unspecified hopes, like a hole in the clouds. "Cheers, then," Nelda said after a moment's pause, picking up her bundle of sticks, and the two sets of women walked their separate ways.

  Dellarobia carried a canvas bag containing empty cottage-cheese cartons and a hand trowel. Something in there was making a hollow little rattle with every step. If she found flowers, she was to dig some up and bring them to the lab to test their potential as butterfly resources. She remembered Ovid calling this place "poor in winter flowers," one long-ago day. She'd taken offense, at the time. As if one mountain had to have everything. What a mindset.

  "Do you ever think what will happen when all this goes away?" she asked Hester.

  "You mean the people or the butterflies or what?"

  Dellarobia wasn't sure what she'd meant, beyond the impossible idea of returning to her previous self. The person who'd lit out one day to shed an existence that felt about the size of one of those plastic eggs that pantyhose came in. From that day on, week by week, the size of her life had doubled out. The question was how to refold all that back into one package, size zero. "The butterflies might die," she said finally. "That's out of our hands. But maybe they wouldn't. I'm saying, what if?"

  It struck her now that probably it would happen, the folding back in. She was no longer world-famous or a national event. As of late, she wasn't even all that town-famous. People forgot so quickly, or moved on. Her influence, if any, was now limited to the family domain. Her marriage. That was about the size of it. She could easily end up back where all this started, launching her heart on some risky solo flight after a man.

  "Is Bear going back to those logging men, at the end of March?" she asked.

  "That's about to get settled," Hester said.

  "How do you mean?"

  "We're having a prayer meeting on it. With Pastor Ogle, after the service."

  "Tomorrow?"

  "No. Tomorrow is dinner on the ground. Sunday next."

  Dinner on the ground meant a potluck meal after church, not necessarily on blankets outdoors if the weather was bad. The fellowship hall had tables. "Who's we?"

  "Anybody in the family that wants to come. You and Cub come on."

  "Bear's agreed to this?"

  Hester didn't answer directly. "Our place has been raised up by this," she said.

  "You could do a lot, if they came back. You know Lupe, that keeps my kids?"

  No answer came. Rattle, rattle, went the cartons in Dellarobia's bag. Hester knew very well who Lupe was. Dellarobia persisted. "She and her husband used to do this kind of business in Mexico. They say it's better to keep people back from the roost site and take them up on horses. Make a little program for people, and they'll behave."

  Hester seemed to take this in. "That'd be something to ask Rick Baker at the insurance. Horses. I expect he'd say no to that."

  "Well, you'd have to get some kind of a rider. You would charge an admission. There could be enough in it to hire some people. There's even a thing where you can get money to leave your woods standing."

  "Says who?"

  Dellarobia didn't answer that. Who else? "It's some business deal. Companies wanting to junk up the air will pay you to keep standing trees, to clean it back out."

  "Pie in the sky," Hester said. "Sounds like."

  "Well, it is that," Dellarobia said, smiling. She liked bowling over Hester. "It pertains to the sky."

  They were stopped by a fallen tree that lay at a slant across the trail. Hester left Dellarobia on the trail and walked twenty paces to the tree's lower end and sat down on it, facing back the way they'd come. "I've got to take a breather," Hester said, holding up her pack of Camel Lights like a flash card. "You quit, didn't you?"

  "Lead us not into temptation," Dellarobia said, covering her eyes.

  Hester lit up and blew smoke at the sky. "I knew you would."

  "Would quit? How do you figure? I didn't know I would."

  "That's just you. You make up your mind on something, and it's done." A little wind scuttled across the forest floor and rattled the beige leaves that clung to the slim trees all around them. Hester added, "Not like some in your house. That has about one idea in a year, and gets so worn out from it he has to go lie down."

  Dellarobia almost smiled, but didn't. The man had no defenders. "Why do you always treat Cub that way?"

  "Like what?"

  "Like a child."

  "Because he's my child. Why do you?"

  The downed trunk angled across the trail at chest height to Dellarobia. She folded her arms and leaned in, as if bellying up to some rodeo. Hester was out of her line of sight, off to the left in her own little cloud. "Cub has his good points," she told Hester. "But a wife sees a man for what he is. You're the mother, that's different. You're supposed to be blind to his faults."

  "Can you not see your kids for what they are?"

  She considered this. Cordelia was reckless, cheerful, physically striking in a way that would get noticed, self-centered in a way that might persist. Preston was thrillingly quick to understand facts, a little dweeby about people. In time he might grow secretive. "I can," she conceded. "They're human. I know that. But I'd lay down my life for my kids, Hester. I would."

  "So you would," she said. "So I would."

  How dare she, Dellarobia thought. Pretending she'd die for anyone. She would probably light a fire with her own kin if she got too cold. Certainly she had no use for her grandchildren.

  Hester spoke again from her little grove of trees. "A child doesn't have to walk on water for you. But a husband does."

  "What's that supposed to mean?"

  "Children are born so small. But yet you love them that way, all dumb and helpless, so you keep on. With a husband you don't get that chance. Him you've got to look up to."

  "I'm five-foot-nothing, Hester. I look up to everybody."

  "No, you don't. Not Cub. You never did."

  Dellarobia felt socked. The vision that ambushed her was of Crystal in the dollar store that day. How she'd looked, talking to Cub. Craving, yes, but also admiring, cherishing. By any measure, looking up. How much more of a man Cub would be if he'd married some sweet, average-minded girl who thought Cub Turnbow hung the moon. Dellarobia felt loss as wide as a river. For what she'd taken from him.

  "You two were no match," Hester said. "I told Bear that from day one. You wait, I told him. That smart gal will not stick around."

  "But I did!" Dellarobia marched through the thicket of little trees to face down Hester where she sat. "Am I not standing here?"

  "Yes!" Hester said back. "But it wasn't something to count on."

  "What in the hell. Sorry for the language, Hester. I'm just a little shocked." Dellarobia stomped back to the trail, crunching through the leaves, canvas bag rattling. She threw the bag on the ground. There was nothing breakable in there anyway. She wished there had been. She was in th
e mood to break something into a hundred pieces.

  "So I wasn't good enough for your son. Is that what you're saying?"

  "You know it isn't." Hester's voice had grown quiet. She spoke straight out through the upright trunks of the bare grove as if having a prison visit with God.

  "Well, why, in the name of . . . Well, Jesus, Hester. You never saw fit to mention this before? Like after we lost that baby? We could have called it quits right there after six weeks of marriage and gone our ways. If you thought I was so unsuitable."

  "Wasn't my place."

  Dellarobia said nothing to that. They'd just tried to do the right thing. For the sake of Cub's parents as much as anyone. The breeze made a large and continuous shushing sound in the leafless forest, under the low winter sky.

  "But I never made up a feather bed for you either," Hester said. "If you noticed."

  "Oh, I noticed." Dellarobia took off her gloves, fished a tissue out of her pocket, and blew her nose. She contemplated walking over there to snatch Hester's cigarettes and smoke the whole pack.

  "If you were going, you were going, I figured. Taking those babies with you."

  "Preston and Cordie?" Dellarobia turned to stare. Could any of this be true? That Hester expected to lose them, all this time? The woman had practically pronounced the marriage vows herself, she and Bear, and thrown together that house before the ink was dry. Built, though not paid for. "You built us a house," she said.

  "It's what we owed our son."

  "And you think I've had one foot out the door. All along."

  "Have you not?"

  "No!" Dellarobia drew the vowel out into two syllables as in, No, stupid. She made herself breathe slowly, feeling numb. It was an earthquake, an upheaval of buried surfaces in which nothing was added or taken away. Her family was still her family, an alliance of people at odds, surviving like any other by turning the everyday blind eye. But someone had seen the whole thing.