Flight Behavior Read online

  "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

  On 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 motherin-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 motherin-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 a
way 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 motherin-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.

  She knew it would take only minutes for Luther to finish the lamb he'd taken next, ahead of its mother, so she ran back to fetch that soft dove-gray fleece and was careful to keep it separate. The wool from these lambs' first and only shearing was finer and more valuable than regular wool. Hester could get an astounding fifty bucks apiece for virgin fleeces on the Internet, selling to hand spinners, and last year recouped the cost of her new computer in one season. Th
e lambs' flesh was already contracted to a grocery chain and would be consumed by Christmas, but their wool would go on keeping people warm for years.

  Dellarobia slid back into her place at the skirting table in time to hear the end of one of the world's unnumbered tales that share the same conclusion: Can you believe the nerve? The guilty party was evidently some friend of Crystal's, but the details were hazy. The friend had come to visit and somehow suffered damage from Crystal's kids.

  "They're just horsing around like always, right?" Crystal's voice rose to a question mark at the end of every declarative sentence. "Shooting water pistols? So Jazon's trying to get away from his brother? And she's trying to get away from both of them I guess? So that's when Mical slams it. She's all, like, You boys are going to wreck my coat! And then wham, boo-hoo. She was worried about the water on her silk jacket, which she should not have wore to my house, I mean, hello, I have children?"

  Dellarobia was accustomed to Crystal's question-mark oratory and her everlasting train wreck of the past and present tense, but couldn't quite pick up the thread. She looked from Crystal to the two Norwoods, slightly overripe ladies whose dyed-black hair was identically parted down the middle by a stripe of white roots.

  "Slammed what?" she asked, when none present offered to pony it up.

  "The car door on her hand," Crystal replied tiredly in a descending singsong. She seemed weary of the tale, yet told it with such enthusiasm.

  "Oh. Ouch."

  "The thing of it is," Crystal maintained, "I am sorry Brenda broke her fingers. But accidents happen. The same could have happened without my kids being there."

  "Brenda's asking Crystal to pay her doctor bills, and Crystal don't want to," one of the Norwoods explained in a lowered voice, filling in Dellarobia on the plot as if she were a moviegoer who'd slipped in late.

  "You know Brenda, her and her mother does the Sunday school," said the other. One of these Norwoods was married to Peanut and the other was his sister, so how did they look just alike? It was that half-grown-out dye job, a weirdly permanent fixture. Secretly Dellarobia thought of them as the Skunkwoods.