Flight Behavior

by Barbara Kingsolver

  Preston crossed his arms on the table and rested his chin there, scrutinizing Ovid for sincerity. "You mean like heads and legs?"

  "Those, and more," Ovid said. "All the inside parts too. So they don't need helpers or auxiliaries to function, the way worker bees do, or soldier ants. A perfect female is the lady that can go out and start a new colony by herself."

  Preston accepted this and moved on. "Just a sec," he commanded, dashing from the room.

  "Excuse me please!" Dellarobia called after him.

  "May-I-please-be-excused!" he yelled from the end of the house, and reappeared in a flash, sliding to a halt in his sock feet. He plopped a yellow book on the table: Encyclopedia of Animals, volume 15. "This says monarchs go to Florida in the winter."

  "Florida and the Gulf," Dellarobia corroborated. She'd read him the monarch entry so often the sight of the page depressed her. It was a deeply unsatisfactory account.

  Ovid took the book and found the publication date, nodding. "This was the definitive version of the story in 1952. The monarchs were already a subject of scientific curiosity then. No one knew yet where they went in winter."

  "Not true!" Juliet said. "Woodcutters in Michoacan knew."

  "Outside of a mountain range in Michoacan," Ovid corrected, "no one knew where. And inside that range, no one knew where they summered."

  "That's true," Juliet agreed. "They thought they came there to die."

  "With my wife's permission, I will put it this way. At the time your book was written, the full story of the monarch migration was unknown to humanity."

  "When did they find it out?" Preston asked.

  The answer, to Dellarobia's astonishment, was within Ovid's lifetime. He had been just a bit older than Preston when the discovery was announced in the National Geographic, in 1976. A Canadian scientist chased the mystery his whole life, devising a tag that would stick to butterfly wings, recruiting volunteers to help track them, losing the trail many times. And then one winter's day, as an old man on shaky legs, he climbed a mountain in Michoacan to see what must have looked like his dream of heaven. Dellarobia listened to all this while she finished scraping the roast pan and crammed the leftovers into plastic boxes wedged into the refrigerator. Ovid could still quote passages of the article from memory: They carpeted the ground in their tremulous legions. He said he remembered exactly where he was when he read that article, and how he felt. She left the dishes in the sink and sat back down.

  "Where were you?"

  "Outside the post office, sitting on a lobster crate. I spent a lot of Saturdays there. My mother let me read the magazines before they went to their subscribers. I was so excited by the photos in that article, I ran all the way down Crown Street, all the way to West End and out a sandy road called Fortuna to the sea. I must have picked up a stick somewhere, because I remember jumping up and whacking every branch I passed, leaving a trail of flying leaves. When I got to the sea I didn't know what to do, so I threw the stick in Perseverance Bay and ran back. It was the happiest day of my life."

  Dellarobia wanted, of course, to know why.

  "Why," he repeated, thinking about it. "I was just like any schoolboy. I thought everything in the world was already discovered. Already in my books. A lot of dead stuff that put me to sleep. That was the day I understood the world is still living."

  Juliet reached across the table to pour an inch of Riesling in everyone's glass. Ovid tapped the yellow volume with his thumb. "The books get rewritten every year, Preston. Someone has to do that."

  "The monarchs are coming out of diapause," Dellarobia thought to announce.

  "We saw them having their family life," Preston said. "In the road."

  "Really," Ovid said, with convincing enthusiasm. But Juliet revealed that he already knew, he'd noticed it first thing when they drove in this morning. She claimed he was more excited about the butterflies than about seeing his wife.

  It was so easy for her to say a thing like that, with full enthusiasm for the eccentric coordinates of her man. At some point in the evening Dellarobia had stopped being amazed that Ovid had turned into someone new, and understood he had become himself, in the presence of his wife. With the sense of a great weight settling, she recognized marriage. Not the precarious risk she'd balanced for years against forbidden fruits, something easily lost in a brittle moment by flying away or jumping a train to ride off on someone else's steam. She was not about to lose it. She'd never had it.

  First Bear, then Hester, then Cub and Dellarobia: the four of them, it struck her, were arranged on this pew exactly as they were to be laid in the cemetery, according to a burial plan they'd paid money down on eleven years ago. Bear sitting in the sanctuary with his wife, rather than smoking it out in Men's Fellowship, was no ordinary event, probably part of the family negotiation Hester had mentioned a while ago. Right after this service, in Bobby Ogle's office, they would settle the question of the logging contract. Once she remembered this agenda, Dellarobia saw hints of it everywhere. The choir sang, "Oh this earth is a garden, the garden of my Lord, and He walks in His garden in the cool of the day." Maybe it was coincidence. But it also seemed possible that Bear was being set up.

  Cub sat holding both Dellarobia's hands, not in the casual way he normally laid claim to her, but imploringly, his big fingers threaded tightly through all of hers. It felt like having both hands jammed through a wrought-iron gate. She abided captivity, for the complicated chain of trespasses that had gotten her stuck this way. Her detachment from Cub the previous evening seemed this morning to explode the minute the shades came up. The sight of his eyes in the mirror as he brushed his teeth, this immense sad man in his boxers, wrenched her stomach and made her turn from the light. This morning she was doomed to nurse Cub like a hangover.

  "My Lord He said unto me, do you like my garden so fair?" the choir members sang earnestly, their many possible differences disguised beneath the words of a song. "You may live in this garden if you keep the grasses green, and I'll return in the cool of the day." In his sermon Bobby warned against losing gratitude for the miracle of life. If God is in everything, he asked, how could we tear Him down? A love for our Creator means we love His creation. "What part of love," he paused, searching his audience, "do we not understand? The Bible says God owns these hills. It tells us arrogance is a sin. How is it not arrogance to see the flesh of creation as mere wealth, to be scraped bare for our use?" Dellarobia recognized a possible opening round aimed at Bear, though it might also be a metaphor for credit card debt. Living within your means was a major theme of Bobby's.

  She was surprised to see Bobby had sprouted a beard since last Sunday, or the outline of one: no mustache, just a dark fringe that encircled his face like a basket handle, emphasizing its roundness. He looked to be aiming for millennial-generation today, wearing jeans and a long-tailed maroon shirt and plain black sneakers, the cheap kind she bought for her kids. Their white soles blinked as he paced around on the darkened stage.

  "He'll speak to us if we let him. Little old raggedy us. We all know what it's like to come up short. We are southerners. We understand that macaroni and cheese is a vegetable." Bobby chuckled at the assent that came back to him from the darkened room. "And we are Americans." Assent came again. Bobby often spoke with his cupped hands, scooping the air toward him to emphasize his points. "We want the things we want, and we want them now. But that is not a reason to rob Peter to pay Paul."

  Okay, credit card debt, Dellarobia thought, but in his closing prayer, Bobby requested of the Lord that they experience the blessing of His creation and share that with others. "May we look to these mountains that are Your home and see You are in everything. The earth is the Lord in the fullness thereof." So it could go either way.

  The rest of her family headed for Bobby's office afterward, in the slow-moving way of animals maneuvering through a herd, but Dellarobia detoured through the Sunday-school building to make sure someone would still be there to watch the kids. She steered clear of Brenda's s
cary mother but got waylaid by Preston, who wanted her to admire the Lego enterprise he had going with Chad or Jad, an older boy she didn't recognize. This boy snarked his nose in a constant, repeating sniffle, and bore the marks of an encounter with a bag of Cheetos. The orange crumbs glowed on his hands and clothing and every Lego he'd touched, like fingerprint dust. Dellarobia made a mental note to scrub Preston before he touched food, and scooted to Bobby's office, where the rest of the family was already seated. Still in cemetery order, she noted, realizing she had no idea where the baby would fit in, even though it was the only one of them already buried. She stood a moment in the doorway, wowed by the tall windows rising behind Bobby's desk. They showed a whole lot more of God's mountains than she ever got to see from her house.

  When she slid into the empty chair facing Bobby's deep oak desk, she registered with surprise that it was Cub speaking. "There's the well water," he said, counting off points on his fingers, "and there's mudslides. That is a fact, Dad, about mudslides. I can show you where they logged over by the Food King and it brought the whole mountain down. In all this rain. What if we have another wet year again?"

  "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 th
e 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."