Flight Behavior (29 page)

“Is the parasite sapping the monarch’s strength and preventing a long migration?” Ovid asked. “We don’t know. We are seeing a big increase in these parasite infestations. And we have recorded rising average temperatures throughout the range. Is the warmer climate giving the parasite an advantage? It’s tempting to say this, but again, we don’t know for sure. Not unless we can create experimental conditions that hold everything steady except for temperature. We cannot jump to conclusions. All we can do is measure and count. That is the task of science.”

It seemed to Dellarobia that the task of science was a good deal larger than that. Someone had to explain things. If men like Ovid Byron were holding back, the Tina Ultners of this world were going to take their shots.

She stayed a while longer at the microscope slides before she was released again to Pete’s elbow to record his sample weights. She was getting better at the Mettler balance and dispatched the pans quickly, sometimes having to wait for Pete to catch up. It thrilled her that Ovid felt she was ready for something more complicated than writing numbers in a book. She thought of Valia weighing skeins of yarn and recording her crabbed columns of numbers in Hester’s kitchen, on that long-ago day when they’d dyed the yarn. Two months ago. Impossible. Her world had been the size of a kitchen then. Now she had a life in which she might not see Hester for over a week. Working left her with so little time, her evenings with the kids were a whirlwind of preparation and catch-up. She’d skipped church two Sundays in a row, first for the chance to hose down the milking parlor before Ovid and Pete arrived, and the next week doing more or less the same in her own home, which she’d had no chance to clean. If neither of these qualified in Hester’s mind as valid church-excused emergencies, Dellarobia begged to differ.

She wondered how the environment club was making out right now at Bear and Hester’s, if they even managed to find their way over there. They’d seemed disoriented, in more ways than one. They should probably be told the logging was on hold for now. And that evidently it was not the worst thing likely to happen to the monarchs. Ovid was keeping track as the temperatures crept to freezing, miserably watching the downward march. After decades of chasing monarchs and their beautiful mysteries, he would now be with them at the end, for reasons he had never in his whole life foreseen. She wished he could explain this to those kids who’d been in her yard. Some deep and terrible trouble had sent the monarchs to the wrong address, like the protesters themselves. The butterflies had no choice but to trust in their world of signs, the sun’s angle set against a turn of the seasons, and something inside all that had betrayed them.

And what could any person do to protest the likes of that? Bear Turnbow’s business plan was stoppable in theory, but you couldn’t stand up and rail against the weather. That was exactly the point of so many stories. Jack London and Ernest Hemingway, confidence swaggering into the storm: Man against Nature. Of all the possible conflicts, that was the one that was hopeless. Even a slim education had taught her this much: Man loses.

10

Natural State

J
anuary made its way like a high-wire walker, placing one foot, then another, on the freezing line. It wavered, rising to forty, dipping to thirty, but never plunged. A small, nervous audience watched. On some nights Dellarobia could not sleep for thoughts of cold air creeping down along the ridgelines. It would fill the forest secretively like a poisonous gas and surround the butterflies in the quarters where they crowded close, riveted to their family trees, lulled into a dormancy from which they would not wake. One crystal clear night it would happen.

No one close to her shared her dread. Dovey wouldn’t hear it; her methods of self-preservation were fierce. And Cub was protected in his own way, unable to believe that this outpost of life that had landed in their custody was irreplaceable. She feared Preston would be the opposite, that he would feel the multitude of deaths too deeply, so she didn’t tell him everything. He brought home pictures of monkeys and tree frogs cut from magazines at school and taped them to his bedroom wall in elaborate collages, much like those his father had once assembled with pictures of Captain Fantastic and Jesus. With all his might Preston wanted to be a scientist and study animals. But in the lab Dellarobia listened to Ovid and Pete speaking hopelessly about so many things. The elephants in drought-stricken Africa, the polar bears on the melting ice, were “as good as gone,” they said with infuriating resignation as they worked through what seemed to be an early autopsy on another doomed creature.
Gone
, as if those elephants on the sun-bleached plain were merely slogging out the last leg of a tired journey. The final stages of grief. Dellarobia felt an entirely new form of panic as she watched her son love nature so expectantly, wondering if he might be racing toward a future like some complicated sand castle that was crumbling under the tide. She didn’t know how scientists bore such knowledge. People had to manage terrible truths. As she lay awake she imagined Ovid doing the same in his parallel bed, not so far away across the darkness, joined with her in the vigil against the cold. Because of him, she wasn’t alone.

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.

“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.