Flight Behavior

  Dellarobia wondered how many others in this room felt he was reading off their personal resume. If Bobby had a suggestion, she was all ears.

  "There is no use in focusing on a bad thought and trying to chase it away," he said. "Really that just won't work. You'll see nothing in your mind's eye except the one thing you want to shut out. The hunter sees naught but that which he pursues. Do you hear me? You do. There is a different way to go. Philippians counsels us to replace a wrong thought with a good one. 'Brethren, fix your thoughts on what is true. Whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. And peace will be with you.' "

  Dellarobia was impressed with his construction of a persuasive paragraph and use of relevant references. She wondered if he'd taken Honors English in high school, rather than the Jock English they'd set up for football players, which basically required a pulse for a passing grade. She'd bet anything Bobby had taken Honors from Mrs. Lake, as she had, in which case he knew the difference between Homer's Ulysses and the one by James Joyce, and how to get down to business with a metaphor. Principles she had tried and failed to apply in Blanchie's Bible class. But here at least was a form of salvation Dellarobia could appreciate: a once-weekly respite from hearing grown-ups say "Lay down" and "Where at" and "Them things there."

  Except that Bobby used covenant as a verb, and that really irked her. She'd noticed it before, and he was doing it right now. "Do you see what the Savior is trying to help us do? Can you covenant with me now to appreciate the wisdom of His advice?"

  For crying out loud, she thought, how hard was it to say, "Enter into a covenant?" But Mrs. Lake had passed away, maybe the last one to care. The crowd was working up a lather now, calling out, "Yes, Brother Bobby, we do!"

  In the cafe you got to skip the audience participation. She shrank into her green turtleneck. But Pastor Ogle wouldn't embarrass anyone, she knew. He worked the crowd's enthusiasm, encouraging people to share the burden of the hateful things that occupied their minds. No one was going out on a limb. "I have skirmished with evil business," was about as explicit as it went, and "I have trucked with falsehood." She could well imagine the skirmishes under discussion, the porno tapes these men were trying to throw away, the nips of whisky the women wished they didn't crave every afternoon, the minute they got the kids down for a nap. The whole crowd had don't-think-about-it blimps above their heads, which Bobby sweetly ignored.

  "You've spoken honestly of the things that have hold of your mind," he said. "But what I want to ask you right now is, What do you love?" He nudged the question again and again, the way Roy and Charlie herded the sheep, gently prodding a wildly disjointed group toward a collective decision to move in a new direction. "What has the good Lord bestowed on your home and family that has brought grace to your life?"

  Someone spilled out, "My little grandbaby Haylee!"

  A long silence ensued, with many congratulating themselves, no doubt, on being less impulsive than the besotted grandmother. Some ruckus was also going on outside the doors, in the entry hall. Women shouting, barely audible, definitely not congenial.

  Bobby covered the awkward moment, congratulating the gushing grandmother and putting her at ease. "Blessed are the little children," he said, "and it's a beautiful thing that you hold your little Haylee first in your heart. I want everyone here to covenant with Sister Rachel and proclaim her a beacon. I want you to tell it."

  They told it. "Blessed be, Sister Rachel." The crowd was starting to warm. Dellarobia had rarely paid much attention to the shining of the beacons. But it was touching. An old man with a narrow chest in a big white shirt pulled himself to his feet. "Our daughter Jill has done got over the cancer and her hair grew back pretty. I praise the Lord for Jill's pretty yellow hair."

  Dellarobia found herself joining in the blessing of Sister Jill's hair, feeling a startled gratitude she actually feared might lead to tears. There was no knowing what people held dear, it was one surprise after another as they called out the beautiful things: a new porch deck on a trailer home with a view of the sunset. The wedding of a disabled cousin. A pure white calf. Suddenly Cub was on his feet beside her, speaking up. Dellarobia felt unsteadied by his loud voice, almost singing. A beautiful thing like a heavenly host had come on their mountain, he said, and it was butterflies. "You all just can't imagine, it's like a world all to itself. I wish you all would come and partake of it."

  "Brother Turnbow, I thank you for that invitation," Bobby said. "Truly I have to say it sounds like a miracle, what you're telling us."

  "Praise the Lord," a few agreed, tepidly, in the same way people said, "Have a nice day," when they didn't care if you did. They seemed less convinced than Bobby that a miracle had transpired on the Turnbow property.

  Cub went a little defensive. "You'd have to see it to understand," he said. "My dad and mother can tell you. It's like nothing you ever saw. And she foretold of it, is the thing. My wife here foretold of it." He pulled Dellarobia to her feet, to her profound dismay. "My wife had like a vision or something. She said we all needed to open up our eyes and have a look before we started logging up there. She had this feeling something real major was going to happen on our property."

  Dellarobia wasn't sure how public Bear wanted to go with the logging plan, and wondered if he was catching this now in Men's Fellowship, or just reading Field and Stream. The outburst was so unexpected, she was losing her footing. Bobby stood perfectly still, studying the family with his wide-set eyes. His gaze settled on Hester. "Sister Turnbow, tell me it's so," he said gently. "That your family has been blessed."

  Dellarobia had never seen Hester so subdued. She would not want to disappoint Bobby. "It's true," she said in a soft growl, needing to clear her throat. "My daughter-in-law was the one that told us. I guess she foretold of it."

  Dellarobia felt queasy. Cub gripped her around the shoulders hard, as if she might otherwise slide to the floor, which wasn't out of the question. His conviction floored her, and once again she wondered if he could be making a cruel joke to punish her. But these were guilty thoughts, the falsehoods of a poorly directed mind, as Bobby said, luring her from the truth. Cub was as trusting as a child, incapable of cruelty in church or anywhere else. And if that alone did not a marriage make, it still was worth something.

  Escalating voices interrupted Cub's moment. Crystal and Brenda, it had to be, having it out in the hallway outside the sanctuary. "Don't you talk to my boys thataway!" one of them cried, and the other shrieked: "I'll slap those kids walleyed if they get up in my face again."

  All eyes fixed on Cub, as if his earnest bulk might steady them against the storm outside the door. He stayed determinedly on track, his brow crumpled. "It's got us to thinking where the Lord must be taking a hand in things up there," he said. "We're supposed to be logging that mountain, but we're in a quandary now."

  Dellarobia felt the doubtful stares. She'd been sitting it out every week in the cafe, drinking coffee and making her grocery list, in no way deserving of a miracle. And yet a small shatter of applause broke out, like a handful of gravel on a tin shed. Someone very close to them shouted: "Heaven be praised, Sister Turnbow has seen the wonders!" It was the man who'd come in late, with the sporty sunglasses on his head. And here she thought he'd been checking her out. Grace comes, motion and light from nowhere on that mountain in her darkest hour. She felt the dizziness coming back. It didn't help anything that she'd skipped breakfast. Cub slipped his arms under hers from behind, which may have looked like some unusual form of affection, but it was all that kept her vertical. The last thing she wanted this morning or ever was to be a display model on the floor of a church, but Cub walked her gently to the end of the pew and posted her in the center aisle, like a holy statue.

  "Sister Turnbow," Bobby said, "your family has received special grace. Friends, are you with me? Sister Hester, will you covenant with us?"

  It seemed like a dare. Hester looked like she'd swallowed a
chicken bone. She was accustomed to special favor in all things church, and taking second fiddle to Dellarobia was not on the program. But there would be no slugging it out here. She conceded, "I will."

  Pastor Ogle beamed first at Hester, then Dellarobia, as if lifting a big bouquet from the arms of one to the other. Welcome to the fold. He asked all those present to covenant with him in celebrating a beautiful vision of our Lord's abundant garden.

  The doors at the back of the sanctuary flew open, admitting Brenda and Crystal in their own raucous packet of atmosphere. Actually it was Crystal versus Brenda's whole family, broken fingers and all. The mother led the pack, trailed by Brenda and the other two daughters, then Crystal, her hellion boys, and a slew of kids from the nursery swarming around the adults like sweat bees.

  "I'm sorry for the interruption, Bobby," Brenda's mother said, cocking one hand on her hip, doing a poor job of looking sorry. That family reminded Dellarobia of the Judds, with the mother trying to out-pretty and out-skinny her daughters. Her hairdo was a fright, however. The battle must have come to blows. Pastor Ogle's hands came together as his mouth made a little O.

  "I beg your pardon," she repeated, "but me and my daughters need to leave immediately for Brenda's personal safety, and we have got to return these children to their parents." She glanced around and made a defiant little side-to-side move with her head, like the saucy girls in music videos. "I'm sorry. If you all were about done."

  The children charged down the aisle with Preston leading, headed for Dellarobia. He grabbed the hem of her sweater and pulled hard, as if he meant to climb her like a tree, and Cordie followed, wailing, with her arms upstretched. Other kids followed like panicked cats, and within seconds were hanging on Dellarobia too. Cub held on hard, keeping her upright. She felt like the pole in that famous statue of soldiers grappling the flag at Iwo Jima.

  "Suffer the little children to come unto me," said Pastor Ogle with an appealing little chuckle, recovering his calm. "My friends, I want you to celebrate with all these little ones. I think they must know our sister here has received the grace."

  Brenda's mother marched out one hip at a time, exiting with her entourage. The heavy double doors folded closed behind them as if in silent prayer. All eyes circled back from the rear of the sanctuary to the front, wheeling like a great flock of blackbirds flushed up from one place and settling down on another: the spectacle of Sister Turnbow. And it wasn't Hester. The family had a new beacon.

  4

  Talk of a Town

  Hester called the butterflies "King Billies." She seemed to think each one should be addressed as the king himself. "There he goes, King Billy," she would say.

  She said it now, in her kitchen. Dellarobia glanced up from her work but from where she sat with her back to the window, she couldn't see it. Instead she watched the butterfly pass in a reflected way as Hester, Crystal, and Valia all faced the morning-lit window and followed the motion with their eyes. Even the collies stood up, ears pricked, alert to the unusual human attention. If someone asked her later, Dellarobia realized, she might think she'd seen that butterfly herself. False witness was so easy to bear.

  Seeing King Billy down here around Hester's house was becoming an everyday thing. On Thanksgiving Day, while Cub and the male Turnbow cousins were in the yard reliving their football days, Dellarobia and Preston had sat on the porch steps and counted the passing of eleven butterflies. She suspected they'd been sneaking up the valley to their convention all summer long. Possibly even for years. Everyone could have missed them, given the tendency for all eyes to remain glued to the road ahead and last month's bills. Bear's theory was that the insects had suddenly hatched and crawled out of the trees, which Dellarobia knew was ignorant. If they'd hatched, something had to go up there first and lay an egg. Even miracles were somehow part of a package deal.

  "Where'd that name come from, King Billy?" Valia asked. She was fiddling with wet skeins of rainbow-colored wool that hung from an old wooden laundry rack and dripped onto a tarp spread underneath. She poofed and lifted the loops of yarn like a hairdresser working on a punked-out client.

  "It's just something I learned from my old mommy," Hester said. "Valia, honey, you need to quit fussing with those skeins or they'll get felted together."

  Valia pulled her hands back as if scorched. Hester was poking at her dye pots and didn't notice. She was looking particularly witchy today in her most ruined cowgirl boots and stained apron, with three enormous cauldrons boiling on her old monster of a stove. Witchy with a country-western motif. This was one of Hester's winter projects, dyeing all the yarn that remained unsold when the summer farm market in Feathertown closed for the season. The natural colors did okay, but people reached their limits on gray and brown. Hester's solution was to perk it up with color, and her instinct about that was right, every spring when the booth reopened, the customers were so fed up with winter they'd reach for anything bright. Like zombies stalking a heartbeat.

  Dellarobia sat at the table preparing skeins for dyeing, with Cordelia close by in the wooden high chair that had once held her father and maybe her grandfather. This house was stuffed with Turnbow antiques, of the half-their-screws-loose variety. Dellarobia unfailingly checked the legs on that chair before inserting any child of her own, and had furthermore tied Cordie in with a dishtowel because there was no strap. The chair pre-dated the whole notion of child safety. Cordie was eating applesauce and occupying herself obligingly with the toy she called Ammafarm, a red plastic barn with levers that made animals come out and bleat their sounds. A city child would get a sorry education from a toy like this, as the cow, horse, dog, and chicken were approximately equal in size and all uttered the same asthmatic wheeze. None of that bothered Cordelia. "Moooo!" she cried into the face of the petite cow that emerged from its flimsy door.

  Dellarobia had asked Hester the same question about the name King Billy. Her mother-in-law had evidently paid some attention to butterflies in her time. She'd mentioned some others by name: swallowtails, tigers, the cabbage eaters. And King Billy, who had lately come to reign over their property.

  "I didn't mind when it was just people from church coming up," Hester complained to Valia, "but now everybody and his dog wants the grand tour. After it came out in the paper. It was about thirty of them up here the Friday after Thanksgiving. I want to tell you! That's not normal, for the day after Thanksgiving."

  "No, it isn't," Valia agreed. "People should be at the mall."

  "Dog says wow wow wow!" Cordie announced, bobbing her head. Dellarobia had managed to corral her fleecy hair into two wild blond poofs, with a center part so crooked it could get you a DUI, and that was the sum total of grooming the child would presently allow. Dellarobia harbored a secret fondness for that wild streak, something she herself had swallowed down long before her daughter was born, only to see it erupt again in Cordie like a wet-weather spring.

  "That article in the paper was good, wasn't it?" Valia said. "I cut it out and saved you an extra copy. Help me remember that, Crystal, it's in my purse."

  Crystal, being in Crystal-zone, scowled deeply into her cell phone. She was supposed to be helping with the wool, but had yet to pick up a skein.

  Dellarobia knew what Hester had thought of the newspaper article. The reporter was a girl from Cleary, a town fifteen miles down the road where people went to college so they could regard people in Feathertown as hicks. When she'd shown up here in pressed slacks and pointy-toed shoes, Hester had driven her up the mountain in the ATV to see the butterflies, but the reporter only wanted to discuss Dellarobia. Not actual Dellarobia, but the one who'd had a vision, who could see the future, who probably peed on dead flowers and made them bloom. Dellarobia had no idea the talk had gone so crazy. She'd barely adjusted to her place in the center of a family controversy before being thrust into the limelight of a church congregation. And now this, the talk of a town. The reporter made Hester come straight back down to Dellarobia's house for a highly unfortunate thirty minute
s. The girl had a camera. Dellarobia wore sweatpants and the universal whale-spout hairdo of exhausted mothers. Cordie had skipped her nap and was tromping around the living room with her boots half off, emitting a volcanic eruption of demands, spit, and tears. It was not an environment conducive to journalism. All Dellarobia wanted was to escape the newspaper girl's weird line of questions.

  Cub had puffed up like a rooster when the article came out, taking it in to show the guys at the gravel company. He was impressed with all celebrity in equal measure, the type of kid who had cut out pictures of football players, Jesus, and America's Most Wanted to tape on his bedroom wall. He'd confessed to having cried in sixth grade when he learned that superheroes weren't real. Dellarobia was his Wonder Woman. But Hester seemed incensed by the article, which referred to Dellarobia as Our Lady of the Butterflies. Among other complaints, Hester said it made them sound Catholic.

  The day darkened outside and thunder rumbled, an unusual sound for the first of December. Rain began to slash at the window, giving the kitchen a closed-in feeling that did not help Dellarobia's prickly impatience. She put no stock in the sainthood business, but what if this winter was meant to be her one chance at something huge, and she spent the whole thing tying yarn in loops and listening to the Hester channel? She noticed that Cordie had changed the subject of her monologue from "moo" to "poopoo."

  "My sentiments exactly," Dellarobia griped quietly, pouting at the armload of skeins Valia was bringing over to plop down on the table between herself and Crystal. The mound of grayish yarn in front of her was already gigantic. She felt like a picky-eating toddler having a spaghetti nightmare. They'd ended this year with more unsold goods than usual, which stood to reason, given the economy. Her job in today's production was to tie each drab skein in a loose figure eight so it wouldn't tangle up in the dye bath, and put it in the sink to soak in Synthrapol while awaiting its makeover. Hester mixed the dye powders based on the weight of goods, and tended the cauldrons. Valia weighed the skeins prior to processing, and Crystal did nothing whatsoever.