Cordie fell asleep in her car seat almost instantly, as Dellarobia had known she would. The fit she'd just pitched was standard, the storm before the calm. Hester looked narrow-eyed and dreamy, like the sandman might be hitting on her too.
"You've got a job on your hands now, I guess," Dellarobia proposed. "Looking after things up on that mountain. Turning it into an enterprise."
Hester remained inscrutable, but that was Hester. The appearance of happiness to be avoided at all costs. Dellarobia remembered she had a different bone to pick, and had better pick it now before Cordie regained consciousness. Sensitive material. "So Cub says you saw me on the news a while back," she said.
"Everybody and his dog saw you on the news a while back," Hester replied.
"Right. Well, he said you saw something about me wanting to take my life."
Hester looked awake now.
"Don't worry," Dellarobia hurried to say. "I just want to let you know that's not true at all. I've had a lot of things going on these last couple months, there's no doubt. But that wasn't one of them. You can't believe everything they put on TV."
"It was you saying it," Hester parried. "They showed you talking."
"I know. The interviewer tricked me. They did stuff with the film, editing I guess. Okay? I'm just telling you."
With a doubtful countenance, Hester said nothing.
"So you're arguing? Wouldn't I kind of be the expert?" Dellarobia started to raise her voice but checked it, glancing at Cordie in the rearview mirror. "Wouldn't I be the expert," she asked quietly, "on whether I intended to kill myself?"
"Maybe you wouldn't," Hester said, infuriating Dellarobia. The woman had issues with authority. After a silence Hester added, "I'm not just talking about the last couple months."
"What in the heck is that supposed to mean?"
In silence they drove through outer residential Feathertown, where cement birdbaths had been emptied and overturned and tipped against their stands for the winter. Forlorn dogs lay gazing at their chains in small front yards. Dellarobia envisioned swerving into a tree, just to get a rise out of her mother-in-law. "Wouldn't you just accept me as family," she finally said, "after ten years? I mean, what would have convinced you I was going to stick around?"
"Wasn't my business to be convinced."
"Cub and I weren't a match made in heaven, I'll grant you. But people make do."
"Wouldn't I know it."
Dellarobia chuckled. "You and Bear? You guys nursing a lot of regrets?"
Hester narrowed her eyes strangely. "You don't know anything."
"Okay, I don't," Dellarobia said, chastened. "Tell me something, and then I will."
Hester did not oblige. They were now on Main Street, stuck waiting for a line of pedestrian Baptists a mile long to move out of the crosswalk in front of the church. Where were all those saved souls headed? There must have been an auxiliary parking lot.
"Well, I know this much. You and Bear didn't get married for the same reason we did. You all celebrated your thirtieth a while back, and Cub's not thirty. So you were sure-enough married before he came along." Dellarobia only knew of their anniversary because it was in the bulletin at church, the full extent of their celebration.
"So we were," Hester said. "So you were. Before Preston."
"Yeah, but--" She saw a break in the Baptists coming up, but stole a quick glance at Hester's face. "What, you're saying you lost one too? Before Cub?"
They cleared the crosswalk at last, but then had to wait through Feathertown's one stoplight. They were out near the Dairy Prince before Hester answered. "Didn't lose one. Gave one up."
"Whoah. You had a baby you gave up for adoption? Why in the world?"
"I had my reasons."
"Well, gosh, Hester. Can I ask what they were?"
"Bear was away in the service."
"That would have been hard. But still. Bear was coming back." She tried to imagine a young Hester left on her own, waiting. Dellarobia put the dates together, and again they didn't add up. "You all weren't married yet, when Bear was in 'Nam."
They drove past the house that famously kept its elaborate blaze of Christmas lights up all year. And then, conveniently located next door to it, the volunteer fire department.
"I was still debating about marrying him when he went off to the service. My folks said I'd better go on. He had the farm and the house. You know. He was all set up. I just didn't . . ."
Dellarobia said, "Just didn't love him." She nodded with each word, her full sympathy stretched across that sentence.
"Well," Hester said, "I didn't know if I did. We'd hardly said words, he was so standoffish. I didn't know if I would love him or if I wouldn't."
Dellarobia laughed a little. "Sounds like you'd had more than words. If you were cooking a little bun in the oven while he was away."
"No."
"No, you weren't pregnant?"
"No, we hadn't been together."
"So how does that happen, exactly?"
Over the next mile or so of silence, Dellarobia replayed the words, studied them out, and wished she could eat those last ones. "I'm sorry," she said. "You're saying you were pregnant, and the baby wasn't Bear's."
Another mile came and went, with Dellarobia feeling very strange at the helm of this woman-stuff car, as if the road might abruptly lift them into some other plane. Maybe she should have gone to look at the wood splitter. She was not sure she was ready to hear about Hester's wild side, Hester's other life. She must have been a pistol, with that flair of hers, those handmade fashion statements and whirlwind energy. Bear must have been smitten. A bright-eyed girl from a dilapidated trailer on the back side of a mountain. A man with a house and a farm. What Dellarobia was not ready for, she realized then, was Hester's legitimate claim on her sympathies. Just going on the basics, a person would think she and Hester had lived the same story line.
"Did you ever find out who adopted it or anything?" she brought herself to ask quietly. "This baby, was it a boy or girl?"
"A boy."
"Does Bear know?"
"Just that it happened. He said we'd marry if there was nary a word said of it. So that's how it is. The ones that adopted him never knew who I was, I don't think. If they did, they took it to their grave."
"All this time. Gosh. He'd be, what, like in his thirties now?"
"There was a home for unwed girls in Knoxville."
"You went there?"
"I should have. Mommy said I ought to go away, but I was pigheaded and stayed with my cousin Mary in Henshaw and gave the baby up to some church folks over there. I was thinking of myself. Staying near friends and Mommy and all."
"And some fellow, whoever he was. The father."
"He's long gone. Dead."
"I'm sorry. So you gave up the baby in Henshaw."
"See, I wasn't thinking. A city would have been the thing. Hereabouts you never know how something will keep turning up."
"Isn't that the truth. I've seen suits of clothes my mother made twenty years ago hanging on the rack at Second Time Around. I always feel kind of proud, you know? That they're that well made." She glanced at Hester and shut off her babble. The woman was miserable.
"Hester, are you okay?" she asked after a minute. "Have you seen him? I mean, is he around? Does he know who you are?"
She shook her head deliberately. "He doesn't, nor Bear. They can't any of them know. And I can't do a thing in this wide world but live with it."
Dellarobia glanced in the rearview again. Cordie was still asleep. A ten-mile nap, and out poured this. When they rounded the bend and Hester's mailbox came into view, Dellarobia exhaled a deep relief. They were finished. End of story.
"A person could think about doing away with herself," Hester said. "I'd not tell you any of this, except I fear for you. You make your bed, but you can't always keep lying in it. Getting older is no help, Dellarobia. You might forget whether you took your pressure pill ten minutes ago. But there's your regrets of thirty ye
ar ago, still just sitting there. A-looking you in the eye."
"I don't even know what you're telling me, Hester. It's a lot to take in. You had a son. You did your best. I'm sure he's had a good life somewhere."
She turned into the driveway, bypassing the mailbox and the dreadful swan planter, a remembrance of unkindnesses past. The ties that bind, Dellarobia thought, and follow us to the sweet by and by. But there stood Roy and Charlie waiting in the yard, the winter-killed flower beds, the house with its empty upstairs windows, work to be done, disagreements settled. Not such a terrible bed for Hester to lie in, surely. And then it hit, with such unexpected clarity she slammed the brakes.
"Oh, dear God, Hester. It's Bobby."
14
Perfect Female
At some unmeasured moment the temperature fell through the floor and the rain turned crystalline, descending noiselessly in the dark and stunning Dellarobia the following morning when she let Roy out the front door. Snow. Roy bounded wolfishly through the white deep, nosing into drifts, leaving a tangled line of tracks as he hurried to put his small yellow tags on all of the yard's most notable points. The dog version of Post-its.
The cedars in the Cooks' front yard were flocked with white, and their holly tree was enveloped in ice, giving the effect of a commemorative Christmas plate. The big maple on the property line was less enchanting as it dropped limbs onto the driveway at steady intervals, crash, crash, like an angry drunk. Needless to say, school was canceled. Dovey called around eight to report she hadn't even gotten halfway to Cash Club before she had to turn around. The way she described the cars sliding around on Highway 7 sounded like a slow-motion automotive ballet.
"This is so wack!" Dovey said. "Who ever heard of a winter like this?"
"Nobody," Dellarobia replied.
She couldn't stay away from the front window. Everything looked so clean and transformed, so fresh-start. All ramshackle aspects of the neighborhood's houses and barns had disappeared under white roofs against white fields. The mailbox sported a white toupee. Icicles fringed their entire roofline, the massive one down at the end unfortunately suggesting a backed-up gutter. It was three feet long and curved slightly outward like a movie villain's sword, just dangling. The icicle of Damocles. "Don't you walk under that thing," she warned Preston.
From the couch Preston shot back a look that said, No chance. He and Cordie were snuggled under blankets in their pajamas, watching cartoons. They'd waited all winter for this. A snow day was not to be wasted.
Dellarobia moved to the kitchen windows to stare out in a new direction while she made hot chocolate for the kids. Despite the biological treachery of this snow, its beauty moved her. Even a field of mud and sheep droppings could be rewritten as a clean slate. She admired the white-edged bristle of the hedgerows along the pasture, and the way the trunks of the big trees were visibly cut off from the ground, so they appeared to be standing on top of the snow like elephant's feet rather than rooted beneath it. The distant mountains had the fuzzy, off-white color of a plush toy that's been around a while. For the whole of the morning she wondered if any butterfly could survive this. Now she also wondered, in a different manner from days past, with uncomplicated sadness, if Ovid was already climbing the mountain to find out. She had come to terms with the idea of Ovid and Juliet, not that she had a choice, given that they were having their marriage here on her back forty. Certain ramshackle aspects of Dellarobia had also gone undercover, it seemed, just like the snow-covered barns. Some defects lurked, but for now her way seemed clear. She'd made plans.
She stood watching the sheep, which seemed undismayed by the dazzling ground, maybe forearmed with ancestral memories of Iceland. Cub had made a brief early trudge to the barn to feed hay, and now they wandered out over the white land to chew their cuds. Their pointed feet broke through the crust, and they lurched along dragging broad, pregnant bellies, leaving the oddest imprint on the snow, like the trail of a dragged sandbag punctuated with holes. Their wool colors stood out sharply, the blacks and moorits especially. But even the white sheep against the blazing snow looked yellowish, the color of actual rather than commercial teeth. Most of the sheep were standing, she discerned, though their legs were invisible. But a few had knelt down into little snow-bowls to rest placidly in the glare of a new kind of day. Very high up on the hill, one coal-black ewe was lying down oddly, with her nose up. Like a seal balancing a ball: that color and that posture, her nose sticking straight up in the air.
"Cub!" Dellarobia called. "Come here a minute."
Cub padded into the room in his socks, agreeable and in no hurry. He was watching cartoons with the kids. "What?"
"Take a look at that ewe up near the fence. That black one that keeps arching her neck. You see her?"
After a moment Cub did.
"I think she's in labor."
"It's too early," Cub said.
"I know it is. But she's acting weird." As they watched, she struggled to her feet and shook the snow off her wool, an impressive muscular shudder even from a distance. She turned several times in a small circle like a dog preparing to lie down, and then lay down. Once again her nose lifted in a great, arcing sweep like a circus seal. Like an exercise video for livestock. An unconventional move, by any standard.
"It's too early," Cub repeated. "And it's colder than heck out there."
Dellarobia blew out air through her lips. "I'm not asking if this is convenient." She turned off the burner under the pan of milk, which had scalded while she wasn't looking. "Fix the kids some hot chocolate and give them breakfast. I'm going up there."
She rushed to pull on warm layers and waterproof layers and lace up her boots, noting that Cub had ignored instructions and gone back to watching The Backyardigans with a blanket pulled around everything but his face, just like the kids. Dellarobia stomped out the back door and was amazed once again by the made-over world. It was abnormally quiet outside, as if sound itself had been blanketed and extinguished. Some sound-absorbing property of the snow, she gathered. Under her boots it made a squeaky crunch. She took the hill at an angle because straight up was out of the question, she discovered, after slipping several times onto her knees. She set her feet perpendicular to the grade and made broad switchbacks up the pasture.
The black ewe, when Dellarobia attained her altitude, was lying in the same spot. From the looks of the wallow she'd made in the snow, she had been at this project for a while, whatever it might be. She looked glassy-eyed and bored, staring ahead, only mildly perturbed by Dellarobia's sudden arrival.
"So what's up, lady?"
The dark lady turned her nose away, checking out Dellarobia through the horizontal pupil of one pale amber eye. Her breath clouded the air in quick, visible puffs.
"You're not making my day here, you know that?"
After two or three minutes Dellarobia felt ridiculous. The ewe uttered a low, productive belch and began to chew her second-time-around breakfast in the most normal fashion known to sheep. Dellarobia backed off ten paces down the hill, then ten more, in case the ewe was faking her out. She should have called Hester first, for a consult. The cold caught up to Dellarobia when she stood still, racking her with hard shivers that rattled her teeth. "You couldn't do this in the barn, could you?" she asked.
The sheep did nothing helpful. She even stopped chewing. Dellarobia's eyes wandered up the mountain to the flocked forest, the hummocks of branches and glittery, ice-enclosed twigs like glass straws. This was no country for insects. The real grief of this day came to her in waves, like dry heaves, throbbing against her initial good spirits. It couldn't even be called a freak storm. Probably there was no such thing, in a freak new world of weather. Three days ago it had been fifty degrees. The springtime smell of mud was a clear memory. She'd been so sure this winter was over and they'd made it. Even Ovid thought so, with the end of diapause. Now, from her vantage point in the snowy field, she saw a trail of tracks leading from Ovid's trailer up to the gate. So he was up there already,
maybe both of them. His wife supporting him in grief. The High Road was now a shadowy lane, narrowed to a tunnel by snowy overhanging boughs.
Dellarobia also noticed the crisscrossed paths of animal tracks faintly traced over the hillside: deer, rabbit. Strange to think what a small fraction of the comings and goings out here they'd ever know about. The ewe called her attention back with a strange, high grunt and pointed her nose again. She was on the small side, this ewe, maybe a first-timer. Probably clueless and going into panic mode, just because it seemed a truck might have parked on her stomach and bladder. Dellarobia remembered the feeling. The ewe stood up, shuddered, took a couple of steps forward, and out dropped something from her backside. A dark liquid puddle, really it had poured out. Fluid or blood. Dellarobia felt a restriction of vessels in her chest as she scuttled back up the hill, scrambling to recall words from the vet book she and Preston had lately neglected. Amniotic sac, placenta. She dropped to her knees in the snow and bellowed to see a lamb. Black, strangely flat against the snow, unmoving inside its translucent sac: a tiny sheep child. The ewe walked away from it and nosed into the snow, looking for graze.
Yelling for Cub, Dellarobia ran and slid down the hill in a direct path for the back door. Amazingly, he appeared there. She sat on her cold bottom, panting, still fifty feet or more from the house. "Get up here!" she yelped. "Get that bucket in the barn, the emergency stuff. No, bring towels and hot water. Bring that hot milk on the stove."
"What's going on?" he asked.
"Damn it, Cub, just do it." She rolled onto her knees and clambered back up the slick path she'd just compressed, a perfect sledding route. Without ever fully gaining her feet she made it back to the puddle of lamb, swearing at the mother that stood blandly chewing now, some distance away from this thing that had definitely not happened to her. Dellarobia flung off her gloves and touched the dark creature. Its heat shocked her, the warmth of the place it slid out of one minute ago. She unwound her wool scarf and scrubbed the lamb out of the milky caul, then cleared its eyes and nostrils, but it was not breathing. It was limp as a rag when she lifted it, legs dangling. Dellarobia shut her eyes tightly so tears wouldn't freeze in them. It looked like a toy, with big Yoda ears, the legs and tender hooves perfectly formed, the body covered with glossy black curls.