Flight Behavior (3 page)

She cupped her hands over her face and tried to
think. She was miles from her kids. Cordie with her thumb in her mouth, Preston
with his long-lashed eyes cast down, soaking up guilt like a sponge even when
he’d done no wrong. She knew what their lives would become if something happened
to her here. On a mission of sin. Hester would rain shame on them for all time.
Or worse, what if they thought their mother had just run away and left them?
Nobody knew to look for her here. Her thoughts clotted with the vocabulary of
news reports: dental records, next of kin, sifting through the ash.

And Jimmy. She made herself think his name: a
person, not just a destination. Jimmy, who might be up there already. And in a
single second that worry lifted from her like a flake of ash as she saw for the
first time the truth of this day. For her, the end of all previous comfort and
safety. And for him, something else entirely, a kind of game. Nothing to change
his life.
We’ll strike out together
, she’d told
herself, and into what, his mother’s mobile home? Somehow it had come to pass
that this man was her whole world, and she had failed to take his measure.
Neither child nor father, he knew how to climb telephone poles, and he knew how
to disappear. The minute he breathed trouble, he would slip down the back side
of the mountain and go on home. Nothing could be more certain. He had the
instincts of the young. He would be back at work before anyone knew he’d called
in sick. If she turned up in the news as charred remains, he would keep their
story quiet, to protect her family. Or so he’d tell himself. Look what she’d
nearly done. She paled at the size her foolishness had attained, how large and
crowded and devoid of any structural beams. It could be flattened like a circus
tent.

She was on her own here, staring at glowing trees.
Fascination curled itself around her fright. This was no forest fire. She was
pressed by the quiet elation of escape and knowing better and seeing straight
through to the back of herself, in solitude. She couldn’t remember when she’d
had such room for being. This was not just another fake thing in her life’s
cheap chain of events, leading up to this day of sneaking around in someone’s
thrown-away boots. Here that ended. Unearthly beauty had appeared to her, a
vision of glory to stop her in the road. For her alone these orange boughs
lifted, these long shadows became a brightness rising. It looked like the inside
of joy, if a person could see that. A valley of lights, an ethereal wind. It had
to mean something.

She could save herself. Herself and her children
with their soft cheeks and milky breath who believed in what they had, even if
their whole goodness and mercy was a mother distracted out of her mind. It was
not too late to undo this mess. Walk down the mountain, pick up those kids. The
burning trees were put here to save her. It was the strangest conviction she’d
ever known, and still she felt sure of it. She had no use for superstition, had
walked unlucky roads until she’d just as soon walk under any ladder as go around
it, and considered herself unexceptional. By no means was she important enough
for God to conjure signs and wonders on her account. What had set her apart,
briefly, was an outsize and hellish obsession. To stop a thing like that would
require a burning bush, a fighting of fire with fire.

Her eyes still signaled warning to her brain, like
a car alarm gone off somewhere in an empty parking lot. She failed to heed it,
understanding for the moment some formula for living that transcended fear and
safety. She only wondered how long she could watch the spectacle before turning
away. It was a lake of fire, something far more fierce and wondrous than either
of those elements alone. The impossible.

T
he
roof of her house when she saw it again still harbored its dark patches of
damaged shingles, and there sat her car in the drive where she’d parked it. With
her mind aflame and her heels unsteady from what she’d seen, she tried to look
at the vinyl-sided ranch house in some born-again way. Whatever had gained
purchase on her vision up there felt violent, like a flood, strong enough to
buckle the dark roof and square white corners of home and safety. But no, it was
all still there. The life she had recently left for dead was still waiting. The
sheep remained at their posts, huddled in twos and threes. The neighbors’ peach
orchard still rotted in place on its perfect grid, exposing another family’s
bled-out luck. Not a thing on God’s green earth had changed, only everything
had. Or she was dreaming. She’d come down the mountain in less than half the
time it took to climb, and that was long enough for her to doubt the whole of
this day: what she’d planned to do, what she had seen, and what she’d left
undone. Each of these was enormous. If they added up to nothing, then what? A
life measured in half dollars and clipped coupons and culled hopes flattened
between uninsulated walls. She’d gone for loss and wreckage as the alternative,
but there might be others. A lake of fire had brought her back here to
something.

To what? A yard strewn with weathered plastic toys
and straggling grass, devoid of topsoil, thanks to her father-in-law’s hasty job
of bulldozing the pad for the house. One neglected rosebush by the porch, a
Mother’s Day present from Cub, who’d forgotten roses made her sad. The silver
Taurus wagon in the drive, crookedly parked in haste, the keys in the ignition
where she always left them, as if anybody around here would drive it away. The
faint metal sound like a pipe dropped on its end when she put the car into gear.
It could not be more tedious or familiar, any of it. Sadness filled her like
water as she turned out onto the highway and clicked on the radio. Kenny Chesney
was waiting there to pounce, crooning in his molasses voice that he wanted to
know what forever felt like, urging her to gallop away. She clicked Kenny right
off. She turned up the drive to her in-laws’ place and their old farmhouse came
into view with its two uncurtained windows upstairs that made her think of eye
sockets in a skull. Hester’s flower beds had melted under the summer’s endless
rain, and so had the garden. They’d finished tomato canning almost before they
started. Hester’s prized rose beds were reduced to thorny outposts clotted with
fists of mildew. It was Hester who loved roses. For Dellarobia their cloying
scent and falling-apart flowerheads opened a door straight into the memory of
her parents’ funerals.

When she got out of the car she noticed one bright
spot of color in the whole front yard, a tiny acid-green sock on the stone step
where she must have dropped it this morning when she brought the kids. She
swiped it up and pocketed it on her way up the steps, abashed to confront the
woman she’d been a few hours ago, dying of a sickness. She opened the door
without knocking.

Cramped indoor odors met her: dog, carpet, spilled
milk. And the sight of her kids, the heart-pounding relief of that, like the
aftermath of a car accident narrowly avoided. The two of them sat close together
on the living room floor in a tableau of brave abandonment. Preston had his arms
around Cordie and his chin nested on her fuzzy head while holding a picture book
open in front of her. The collies stretched on either side in alert recline, a
pair of protective sphinxes. All eyes flew up to her as she entered, keen for
rescue, the grandmother nowhere in sight. Preston’s dark, plaintive eyebrows
were identical to his father’s, aligned across his forehead as if drawn there by
a ruler. Cordelia reached both hands toward Dellarobia and burst into tears, her
mouth downturned in a bawl so intense it showed her bottom teeth. The TV drone
in the kitchen died abruptly, and Hester appeared in the doorway, still in her
bathrobe, her long gray hair coiled around pink foam curlers. On her children’s
behalf Dellarobia gave her an injured look, probably just a slightly less toothy
version of Cordie’s. It wasn’t as if she asked her mother-in-law to watch the
kids every day of the week. Not even once a month.

Hester crossed her arms. “The way you run around, I
wasn’t expecting you back so soon.”

“Well. I thank you for keeping an eye on them,
Hester.”

“I wasn’t in there but a minute,” she pressed,
tilting her head back toward the kitchen.

“Okay, you weren’t. It’s fine.” Dellarobia knew any
tone she took with Hester would be the wrong one. These conversations wore her
out before they began.

“I was fixing to heat up some chicken fried steak
and greens for lunch.”

For
whose
lunch,
Dellarobia wondered. It sounded like one that would require more than baby
teeth, not to mention some table knife skills. She said nothing. They both
watched Cordelia stand up precariously, red-faced and howling. She was wet, and
probably had been all morning. The diaper bulge inside her yellow footie pajamas
was like a big round pumpkin. No wonder the child couldn’t balance. Dellarobia
took a drag on her almost-finished cigarette, trying to decide whether to change
Cordie here or just get out of Dodge.

“You shouldn’t smoke when you’re around them kids,”
her mother-in-law declared in a gravel voice. A woman who’d probably blown smoke
in Cub’s little red face the minute he was born.

“Oh, my goodness, I would
never
do that. I only smoke when I’m lying out getting a suntan on
the Riviera.”

Hester looked stunned, meeting Dellarobia’s gaze,
eyeing the boots and the chenille scarf. “Look at you. What’s got into you?”

Dellarobia wondered if she looked as she felt, like
a woman fleeing a fire.

“Preston, honey, say bye-bye to your Mammaw.” She
clenched the filter of her cigarette lightly between her teeth so she could lift
Cordelia to her hip, take Preston’s hand, and steer her family toward something
better than this.

2

Family Territory

O
n shearing day the weather turned cool and fine. On the strength of that and nothing more, just a few degrees of temperature, the gray clouds scurried away to parts unknown like a fleet of barn cats. The chore of turning ninety ewes and their uncountable half-grown lambs through the shearing stall became a day’s good work instead of the misery expected by all. As far as Dellarobia could remember, no autumn shearing had been so pleasant. After all the months of dampness, the air inside the barn now seemed unnaturally dry. Stray motes of fleece flecked the beams of light streaming from the high windows, and the day smelled mostly of lanolin rather than urine and mud. The shorn fleeces were dry enough to be skirted while still warm off the sheep. Dellarobia stood across from her mother-in-law at the skirting table where they worked with four other women, picking over the white fleece spread out between them. The six of them surrounded the table evenly like numbers on a clock, but with more hands, all reaching inward rather than out.

There was no denying the clear sky was fortuitous. If the sheep had stood in rain and mud all morning waiting to be shorn, some of the wool would have been too fouled for sale. A lot of income turned on a few points of humidity. But good luck was too simple for Hester, who now declared that God had taken a hand in the weather. Dellarobia felt provoked by the self-congratulation. “So you’re thinking God made the rain stop last night, just for us?” she asked.

“Know that the Lord God is mighty,” replied Hester, who likely could live her whole life as a string of Bible quotes. She looked daunting in a red-checked blouse with pearl snaps and white piping on the yoke. Everyone else wore old work clothes, but Hester nearly always dressed as if she might later be headed out for a square dance. The festivities never materialized.

“Okay, then, he must hate the Cooks.” Dellarobia’s insolence gave her a rush, like a second beer on an empty stomach. If Hester was suggesting God as a coconspirator in farming gains and losses, she should own up to it. The neighbors’ tomato crop had melted to liquid stench on the vine under the summer’s nonstop rains, and their orchard grew a gray, fungal caul that was smothering the fruit and trees together.

Valia Estep and her big-haired daughter Crystal both looked at their hands, and so did the two Norwood ladies. They combed the white fleece for burrs and bits of straw as if the world turned on rooting out these imperfections. Neighbors always came on shearing day, starting with ham biscuits and coffee at six a.m. Not the unfortunate Cooks, of course, who had failed to gain Hester’s sanction in the five years since they’d moved here. But the Norwoods’ farm abutted the Turnbows’ on the other side of the ridge, going back several generations, and they were also sheep farmers, so this help would be returned at their own shearing. Valia and Crystal were motivated only by friendship, it seemed, unless there was some vague unmentioned debt. They all attended Hester’s church, which Dellarobia viewed as a complicated pyramid scheme of moral debt and credit resting ultimately on the shoulders of the Lord, but rife with middle managers.

“I didn’t say word one about those Cook people,” Hester said, not letting it go. “Valia, did you hear me say word one about the Cooks?”

“I don’t think you did,” replied mousy Valia. Dellarobia knew her mother-in-law could command unlimited agreement from these women. Hester’s confidence in her own rectitude was frankly unwomanly. She never doubted a thing about herself, not even her wardrobe. Hester owned cowboy boots in many colors, including a round-toed pair in lime green lizard. But at the moment it was the self-interested logic that irked Dellarobia: if Hester and Bear had bad luck, like the winter of terrible chest colds they’d suffered last year, they blamed the repairman who failed to fix the furnace and charged them anyway. But when the Cooks’ little boy was diagnosed with cancer the same winter, Hester implied God was a party to the outcome. Dellarobia had let this kind of talk slide for years, showing no more backbone really than Valia or any other toad in Hester’s choir.

Until now. “Well, it just seemed like that was your meaning,” she said. “That God stopped the rain for us, but not the Cooks. So he must like us better.”

“Something’s got into you, miss, and it is not good. You’d do well to consult your maker on respecting your elders.” Hester spoke down her nose. She lorded her height over others in a way that her tall son did not, even though Cub had a good fifteen inches on Dellarobia. Only Hester could cut her daughter-in-law down to her actual size: a person who bought her sweatshirts in the boys’ department, to save money.

“The Cooks are older than me,” Dellarobia said quietly. “And I feel for them.”

Something had gotten into her, yes. The arguments she’d always swallowed like a daily ration of pebbles had begun coming into her mouth and leaping out like frogs. Her strange turnaround on the mountain had acted on her like some kind of shock therapy. She’d told her best friend Dovey she was seeing someone that day, but not even Dovey knew what she’d been called out to witness. A mighty blaze rising from ordinary forest, she had no name for that. No words to put on a tablet as Moses had when he marched down his mountain. But like Moses she’d come home rattled and impatient with the pettiness of people’s everyday affairs. She felt shamed by her made-up passion and the injuries she’d been ready to inflict. Hester wasn’t the only one living in fantasyland with righteousness on her side; people just did that, this family and maybe all others. They built their tidy houses of self-importance and special blessing and went inside and slammed the door, unaware the mountain behind them was aflame. Dellarobia felt herself flung from complacency as if from a car crash, walking away from that vale of fire feeling powerful and bereft. It was worse even than years ago when the stillborn baby sent her home with complicated injuries she could not mention. Both then and now, Hester was not one to ask about personal troubles. She seemed unacquainted with that school of thought.

Valia piped up, “Did you all see that one on
Jackass
where they tried water-skiing on a froze lake? The Jeep busted through and sank!” Esteps could be relied on to change the thread of any conversation.

“I can’t get over that they let people go on TV for that stuff,” said Valia’s daughter Crystal, shaking her stockpile of curls. “My boys ought to be famous.”

Crystal was a high-school dropout with two kids, no history of a husband, and a well-known drinking problem, but she got to start over with a clean slate when saved by AA and the Mountain Fellowship church. Now she always kept her bottom lip clenched in her teeth, as if she were about an inch away from punching someone’s lights out. Salvation had its tradeoffs, evidently.

Hester reached back, divided her thin gray ponytail in half, and gave both sides a hard, simultaneous yank to tighten it. This was one of about five thousand personal habits that drove Dellarobia nuts. Why not just get a tighter ponytail band? Her mother-in-law seemed to use hair-yanking as a signal: I’ll yank
you
. If Dellarobia meant to live out her natural life in this family, the new policy of speaking her mind was going to be a bite in the butt. It had the effect of setting everyone in a room on edge and looking for the door, herself included. But it didn’t feel like a choice. Something had opened in her and she felt herself calamitously tilting in, like that Jeep on the ice. Jimmy was just gone, as others had come and gone before him, she had to admit. She’d never been unfaithful to Cub, not technically, but in her married lifetime she had quit these hard crushes on other men the way people quit smoking, over and over. So the standard joke applied: she should be good at it by now. She’d stopped answering Jimmy’s calls, and Jimmy had failed to be persistent. And she still lay awake at night, no longer watching a nearly touchable lover behind her eyelids but now seeing flame in patterns that swirled and rippled. A lake of fire.

Dellarobia inhaled the lanolin-scented air, clearing fire and flood from her head. She was holding up the pace here. It was her job to leave the skirting table every few minutes to fetch a new fleece from the other side of the barn. She bypassed the wooden crate she’d set up as a playpen for Cordie, lightly touching her daughter’s fluffy head, and then booked it over to the men’s domain. At one door of the brightly lit shearing stall her husband had a grip on both horns of a big white ewe, waiting to deliver it into the hands of the shearer, while their skinny neighbor Peanut Norwood stood at the opposite door ready to escort out the newly shorn. She smiled at the sight of her tall husband in a pink flannel shirt. In many years of laundry days she’d watched that thing fade from burgundy to a plain, loud flamingo, but he still called it his red shirt, and must have seen it so. Cub was not a man to wear pink on purpose.

He motioned her over, giving her a quick one-armed hug that might have been a maneuver to get her out of the shearer’s way. There was no making small talk over the racket of nervous bleating, but she stood for a minute getting an eyeful of the shearer, Luther Holly. Not that Luther was eye candy in any ordinary sense. He was a wife-and-grandkids, former-high-school-wrestler type, late fifties or maybe sixty, short and freckled with slightly bowed legs. But when he took up shears, his moves could make a woman think certain thoughts. He took the woolly ewe from Cub and she struggled for five seconds before surrendering with a sheepish sigh as Luther sat her rump down on the shearing mat. He wrapped his left arm arm across her breast in a chokehold while his right hand pushed the vibrating blade gently from throat to belly in long strokes, as careful as a man shaving his own face. The electric shearing rig looked antique, with its trembling steel cylinder and clipper head hanging from a tall tripod, but in Luther’s hands it was an instrument of finesse.

She noticed how each ewe came through the chute to face her duty by first pausing at the entrance, lowering her hindquarters and urinating, giving herself a long moment to size up the scene before walking through that door. Watch and learn, Dellarobia thought, feeling an unaccustomed sympathy for the animals, whose dumb helplessness generally aggrieved her. Today they struck her as cannier than the people. If the forest behind them burned, these sheep would come to terms with their fate in no time flat. Flee or cower, they’d make their best call and fill up their bellies with grass to hedge their bets. In every way more realistic about their circumstances. And the border collies too. They would watch, ears up, forepaws planted, patiently bearing with the mess made by undisciplined humans as the world fell down around them.

Her father-in-law was keeping his distance from Luther’s commanding presence, staying near the barn door where he trimmed hooves and conspicuously inspected each shorn animal for razor nicks before sending it out with a slap on the rump. Luther was too skillful to cut up the animals, but she saw Bear make a show of opening the big iodine bottle and swabbing a wound, or the suspicion of one. Bear Turnbow had a talent for attentiveness to minor insults. The collies Roy and Charlie moved in dutiful orbits around the men, perpetually alert to the flow of stock and the men’s wishes. At a whistle from Bear, both dogs melted into a black-and-white gush of canine authority, pushing the flock through the maze of stock panels and narrow head gates like sand through an hourglass. Hester wanted them ordered by color, first the whites, then the silver badgerfaces, the brown moorits, and last the black, for ease of sorting the wool. Icelandics came in every shade of a bad mood, Cub liked to say, but Dellarobia liked their patchwork look in a field and the animals’ own disregard of color. Brown ewes gave birth to white lambs or the reverse, sometimes even twins of different hues, devoid of scandal. The white ewe Cub brought in now had a big dove-gray lamb tagging along, still trying to nurse at six months of age. The worst hangers-on were the little rams, insatiable boys. Preston had been the same, still begging to nurse when his sister was born, howling to see an impostor baby. She felt permanently caved in from those years she’d spent with one child keening to draw milk out of her and another one fully monopolizing her surface. Effectively deep-mined and strip-mined simultaneously. These little boy lambs would be spared the fight with their successors, as they were scheduled at the slaughterhouse in ten days. Their mothers had to be dried up before the siring rams came in, and the boys couldn’t stay in a communal pasture without benefit of castration. So the slaughterhouse had its attractions, all things considered.

Luther nodded at Dellarobia as he kicked a cloud of belly wool from his mat to be discarded, a nod meaning “Howdy Mrs. Turnbow” or “Sweep up!” or both. She grabbed the broom and swept the waste-wool into a rising pile in the corner of the stall. Having removed the unusable portion, Luther flipped over the ewe to shear the rest of her coat all in one piece, from neck to tail and shank to shank, moving himself and his paired opponent through what looked like a series of wrestling moves. That forward-bent posture would make ordinary men weep, but he did this all day, and made it look easy.

A woman’s place, however, was not standing in her barn shoes gawking at Luther. Dellarobia gathered up the armload of waste wool and carried it out of Luther’s way, dumping it in the big wooden crate she’d set up for Cordie. “Hey baby girl, here you go,” she sang, sifting bits of fleece over her daughter like snow. She remembered as a child thinking this was what snow
should
be: soft and lovely, instead of the cold, wet truth. Cordie was thrilled, grasping handfuls of fuzz and tossing them in the air with such force she fell on her bottom, over and over.

Dellarobia hustled back to the shearing stall to get the fleece Luther had finished, which she rolled up like a big bath mat to carry to the skirting table. Before this day’s end they would pick over some two hundred fleeces, pulling out bits of straw and the tag ends left from second cuts. The women flew through the work, flinging out each new fleece on the table and falling on it like worried animals grooming their young for fleas. They threw the waste onto the barn floor, a parti-colored fall accumulating in drifts around their legs. This was the second shearing of the year. Luther also came in the springtime after lambing to relieve the ewes of their coats that had grown felted and filthy over the winter months, so the precious summer fleece would grow in clean. This one, the late fall wool crop, gave the payoff. Once these fleeces were skirted clean, bagged, and stacked in great piles in the front of the barn, Cub and Bear would crate them to be shipped off to the spinning mill.