"I see there's a tree in your den," Hester said, as though remarking that an alpaca had been seen in the bathroom.
"It's looking like Christmas around here, isn't it? Preston and his daddy cut that little cedar out of the fencerow yesterday. We had to move the TV to get it set up in there." Dellarobia was layering on the cheer too intensely, thanks to nerves. But her kids had never had a Christmas tree in their own house, not once. Only the one at Hester's. They did everything over there, including Santa Claus. This year Preston had asked why Santa didn't like their house, and that settled it. She'd made an executive decision.
"We don't have any ornaments, though," she added, hoping Hester might pick up on the hint. Hester had boxes and boxes, so many they could never fit everything on their tree. Weren't grandparents supposed to share such things? Dellarobia had no family left, so the heritage business was one long wild guess where she was concerned. She wished she still had the hand-turned wooden toys of her childhood, things her father made in his shop, a simplicity she only recognized as poverty in retrospect, after he died. She'd been too young at the time to covet the Christmases other kids had, with batteries. She turned on the coffeemaker with an authoritative snap, then realized she'd set the carafe into it full of water, rather than pouring the water into the machine.
"The bottom pasture's full of standing water," Hester said.
Okay, thought Dellarobia, end of the Christmas tree subject. She reorganized and started the coffee again, correctly this time.
"I've got all the breeding ewes down there now," Hester continued, "but I don't like it. It's no good for them."
"Well, the rain can't keep going on this way, can it?"
"They say it could," Hester replied. "That bottomland's good for them usually, the grass down there is good. But not this year."
Cordie's ratcheting phone went on and on. Whoever designed toys, in Dellarobia's opinion, at their earliest convenience, should be smacked. She counted the seconds until the coffee started to pour through. Whatever it was that had brought Hester into this house, it wasn't sheep. "You could put them over here on this field, above us," she offered. "If that's what you want to do. I mean, it's all your land."
"I know it is. But they need to get their CDT shots here soon, and next thing you know they'll start lambing. I like the ewes where I can keep an eye."
"We could keep an eye for you. Preston loves the lambs. I do too, I've always liked that part the best. Seeing the lambs born."
"It's not child's play," Hester said. "You've got to know what you're doing."
Dellarobia made a face, standing at the coffeemaker with her back turned to her mother-in-law. Everything Hester did, she likened to rocket science. But as far as Dellarobia had seen, lambing season mostly involved walking out to the barn each morning to see who'd delivered twins. She said nothing. Hester got up to peer over the half-curtain on the kitchen window, presumably assessing the high pasture for her almighty ewes. Instead she asked bluntly, "Is he in that thing now?"
"Is who in what? I thought we were discussing sheep."
"You know who."
"Dr. Byron? I don't know. He doesn't clear his schedule with me."
The camper's windows had pleated curtains that were yellowed like old newspaper, and usually closed on this side. Hester wouldn't be able to see much. She returned to the table and Dellarobia sat down with two mugs of coffee, sliding one over along with the sugar bowl. She watched Hester shovel in one heaping spoonful after another. Where she deposited those calories was a mystery of the universe. And the sweetness, where did that go?
"He looks foreign," Hester pronounced. "Is he even Christian? He could be anything. And you in here with the children. Bear and I are a hundred percent on the fence about him being here."
Dellarobia put on her poker face. If Hester wanted to play a round, she was ready. "I doubt the man's going to rob us. He's paying us two hundred dollars a month in rent."
"He's paying rent?"
"Long ago decided, Hester. Didn't Cub mention it?" She knew Cub hadn't; he was afraid to bring it up. Dellarobia took a long, scalding swallow of her coffee, making Hester wait. "It was Dr. Byron's idea. He's got a government grant that pays his way when he's doing his research, so we get a certain amount from that. It's called pear diem. That's money that can go toward Bear's loan payment, I guess."
She watched Hester's frown deepen. "He's working for the government?"
"Not straight out. It's a little bit complicated. He works for a college, and this kind of thing is part of his job. I guess the government pays for people to do research."
Hester snorted. "There's a job. Watching butterflies."
Dellarobia blew across her cup. "As opposed to watching sheep, you mean."
"Sheep put food on the table and clothes on your back."
"Well, I guess God made butterflies for some reason, and He sure put a truckload of them down on us. Maybe we just need to pray about it." Dellarobia felt thrilled by her moxie. She drank her coffee in silence, squelching a grin.
Cordie had begun stalking around the room, saying, "Wow wow wow," still gripping the receiver and dragging the plastic telephone by its cord. Taking her doggie for a walk. Every few seconds she looked back to make sure it was following her. It had no wheels, being a telephone, and made a pitiful pull toy. It kept flipping over onto its rounded side and lolling like a turtle on its back, being dragged by the neck until dead.
Dellarobia was startled when she looked back at Hester to see tears welling in her eyes. "Hester, what's wrong?"
Hester quickly turned her face aside. Possibly she hadn't known she was revealing emotion. When she spoke, her voice was raspy and thick. "I am praying about it. And I still don't know what to do."
Dellarobia put out a hand to quiet Cordie, who had now discovered she could lift the phone by its cord and bounce it against the floor like a yo-yo. In the gentlest voice she could muster, she asked, "Do about what?"
Hester's face was the customary knot of anger and disapproval, but the gray eyes seemed to be coming from somewhere else, two pools of expectation. Dellarobia glimpsed a younger person in there, someone who could have hoped for things and fallen in love. The girl who wore those clothes to the hoedowns for which they were intended.
"Bear's signed the contract," Hester finally said. "With those Money Tree men. He says he's going ahead with it, rain or shine. King Billies or no King Billies. Now see, I don't know why they couldn't wait a month or two and see what happens. I pray about it every day. The Lord says attend to His glory. You were the first one of us to pay attention."
Dellarobia utterly lost her bearings, sputtering inside herself like a car out of gas. Without the vexation between them, her relationship with Hester had no traction. She stood up from the table, lifting Cordelia onto her hip. She needed a diaper change. Should she leave the room at a time like this? She sat down again, with Cordie on her lap warbling, "Free-too, free-four." Preston had been teaching her to count.
Hester looked at Dellarobia, unguarded. "Cub stood up for you," she said. "First I didn't see the good in that. But see, that was good of him, a good husband. The boy's got a pure heart. But his daddy is not going to let up on him till this is all over."
"So Bear won't budge, on the logging." Dellarobia's own thoughts about the butterflies were so unsettling she'd begun to ration them, like something sweet and scarce. The valley of lights, the boughs of orange flame. She would never be able to tell anyone how it was. That she'd been there first. Already that first day seemed untrue. Hester let her breath out slowly, and Dellarobia could hear a racking tremble in it, as if the woman were bearing up to terrible pain. Sometimes the ewes breathed like that during lambing. A frightening thought. She was still waiting for the birth, whatever monstrous thing her mother-in-law had come to deliver in her kitchen.
"He and Peanut Norwood won't give an inch," Hester said. "I don't think it's just the money. I mean, it is the money. But to be in such a rush over it, not listenin
g to anybody. I think they've put each other up to that. A man-to-man kind of thing."
Dellarobia's mind had pretty well finished beating itself senseless, and now went empty of normal thoughts. For some reason she thought of Honors English, the great themes: man against man, man against himself. Could man ever be for anything?
Hester avoided looking at her directly. "I think Cub would stand up to them, if you backed him up."
Dellarobia saw it all then in a flash: Hester weighing the moral choices, swallowing her vast and considerable pride. To do the right thing she needed Dellarobia, mark the date. "Hester," she said, "you look like you could use a cigarette."
Hester's face fell slack with gratitude, like the faces of the women they'd seen on TV last week when their men were finally saved from a mine disaster. Salvation in all forms registered about the same way. With Cordie still on her lap, Dellarobia reached to open the kitchen drawer that hid her ashtray. She slid it across to Hester, along with her own pack of smokes. The wrong brand, but for once Hester might not find fault.
"I need to go change a diaper," Dellarobia said, "I'm sorry. You just make yourself at home, and I'll be back in a minute. I'm going to see if I can put this one down for a little N-A-P before lunch."
Cordie ignored the n-word, busily tapping the yellow head of her telephone receiver against the edge of the table. She frowned in concentration, directing the blows, tap-tap-tap. Using it as a hammer, Dellarobia realized. Driving nails, as she'd seen her father do last night when he replaced the weather stripping.
Hester almost smiled. "That child surely has ideas about what to do with a telephone. Everything but talk on it."
Dellarobia studied the toy--bulky body, cord, receiver, dial--and realized it did not resemble any telephone that existed in Cordelia's lifetime. Phones lived in people's pockets, they slid open, they certainly had no dials.
"Why would she talk into it? She doesn't know it's a telephone."
Hester wouldn't get this, of course. In her eyes it was a phone, and that was that. Dellarobia could barely get it herself. She'd seen something so plainly in this toy that was fully invisible to her child, two realities existing side by side. It floored her to be one of the people seeing the world as it used to be. While the kids shoved on.
When the storm broke, the world was changed. Flat rocks dotted the pasture with their damp shine, scattered on a hillside that looked like a mud finger painting. The receding waters left great silted curves swaggering down the length of the hill, pulled from side to side by a current that followed its incomprehensible rules. Washed in the blood of the lamb were words that came to mind when Dellarobia ventured out, though it wasn't blood that had washed this farm but the full contents of the sky, more water than seemed possible from the ceiling of any one county. At the tail end of the storm the electricity had flickered off briefly, so she'd hiked out to the camper to be sure everyone was okay. It felt strange to knock on the tinny door of a camper home, but they'd welcomed her in boisterously, like shipwreck survivors, Ovid and the students all sitting in that dim space around the cramped dinette. They were working with calculators in the glow of a battery-powered lantern. What she'd really noticed were the mounds of wet clothes piled everywhere in that dank little den, from all the days they'd worked in the rain before lightning bolts drove them indoors. Dellarobia tried to imagine loving to do something so much, she would get that miserable doing it. When she'd offered to run a few loads through her washer and dryer, the kids had genuinely cheered, handing over armloads. Mako pulled off his boots and gave her the socks off his feet, which were wet enough to wring out. And later when she returned their laundry, clean and folded, they urged her to sit and chat awhile. This was how she got herself invited to go with them up the mountain. Barring a tornado, they meant to get back to work.
And so they did, on a muddy, after-the-flood kind of morning that brought Noah to mind. Where was their rainbow? As they slogged up the High Road, she was surprised to see how much man-made flotsam had washed down from above, given that no one lived up there: a flat-sided plastic bottle, bright yellow under its ancient patina of dirt. White shreds of plastic grocery bags. A large, rumpled panel of corrugated tin. Old fence posts tangled with barbed wire, from some upland boundary that was surely no longer relevant. Cigarette butts, also traces of some personal past, possibly hers.
Pete hiked in front, talking quietly with Ovid in what seemed to be a foreign language she almost knew: moderated micro-something, ratios, congregation, something-pause. It was the girl, Bonnie, who was most attentive to Dellarobia, hanging back to walk with her and ask about her kids, whether she had grown up here, things on that order. It was a conversation that emptied out pretty quickly, but Dellarobia appreciated the effort. She had never been around people from out of state, and was wildly anxious. Really she'd hardly been around people at all since she quit waiting tables, before Preston was born. As silly as it seemed, she had worried even about what to wear today. Her old, leather-soled farm boots seemed redneck-poor compared with these kids' high-tech boots, which had mesh panels and candy-striped laces and rubber lug soles that looked like astronaut wear. They were like kids on TV shows, whose so-called ordinary families were provisioned by fashion designers and never wore the same thing twice. Farm boots and jeans, however, were what Dellarobia had. She'd noticed that Bonnie usually wore a bandanna on her head, tied in the back under her ponytail, so Dellarobia did the same.
"Do both your kids go to preschool?" Bonnie asked.
"Preston's in kindergarten, half-day, so he gets home at noon. But Cordelia's just eighteen months, so she's a full-time handful. My husband didn't have to go to work today. He's babysitting." Cub hadn't been keen on it, but didn't have other plans, having worked only two full shifts in the last two weeks. Gravel deliveries were the last thing anybody wanted in a downpour. These were facts she did not mention to Bonnie. She wanted to make conversation, but hardly knew how to begin. And she wanted a cigarette so badly her gums ached. People looked down on smokers nowadays, or these people would, she suspected, so she'd decided to go cold turkey for today's adventure. To improve the odds of keeping her vow, she had not brought any cigarettes. Now, all of fifteen minutes in, she recognized the insanity of the plan and was ready to jump out of her hair. Like the day she'd first hiked up here, in secret. Then, too, she'd felt ready to explode from the combined forces of fear and excitement.
She alone, and no one else in her family, had played penny poker with scientists and done their laundry and gotten invited to see what they were doing here. Hester was dying to know. She'd confessed as much, insofar as Hester ever tipped her hand. She complained that Dr. Byron barely spoke to say hello, when she crossed his path with her tour groups up there, saying little and keeping to his work. Dellarobia thought of the night he'd come to supper, so modest about his expertise they'd nearly missed it. "You kind of have to draw him out. Did you ask him any questions?" she'd asked, knowing Hester wouldn't have, endowed as she was with the glory of knowing it all. The students were also standoffish, in Hester's opinion. Dellarobia would have said the same at first, but could hardly do so now that she'd folded their underwear. That was an icebreaker.
A new creek had insinuated itself on the High Road. For a while they managed to jump the puddles and rivulets, but soon their path was swamped by a brown torrent. A tree had been torn from the ground and pinned sideways, backing up the flow. Pete and Dr. Byron went ahead to find a place where they could safely cross or get around the water. Pete seemed to have seniority over the other two students. And Mako seemed youngest, maybe because of his dense black hair that stood up all over his head like a child's. He had lovely, exotic features, Japanese she would have guessed; California is what he told her. Actually none of the helpers was all that young, probably close to her own age. Pete might even be older. But Cub referred to them as "those kids," and it didn't seem wrong. Because they were childless, she supposed. Free to look at bugs all day.
It was cold
out today, she could see her breath. Hunting-jacket weather. She and Mako and Bonnie waited in silence by the washout, staring at the rugged brown roar. Unseen objects under the rushing water made peaks and swales, hinting at the shapes of what lay underneath. She thought of the day she and Cub stood in the flow of butterflies, objects in motion drawing lines around standing bodies. This water was fierce and dark. Clots of foam clung at the banks like dirty dishwater suds. A tattered ribbon of vivid orange flailed in the current, snagged on a twig, and it took her a minute to recognize it as flagging tape from the area meant for logging. That was a shock. From way up there it had traveled to here, this was the path of the flow. Next stop: her house. She'd done some looking on the Internet about the town in Mexico where Preston's little friend and her family lost their home, and logging was a part of it. They had clear-cut the mountainside above the town, and that was said to have caused the mudslide and floods when a hard rain came. The horrifying photos showed houses and the twisted metal of cars all flattened together like sandwiches in the mud. Utility poles snapped like kindling. She'd had to shut off the computer before Preston completely figured out what they were seeing. She told him not to worry, that was a long way from here.
Pete now reappeared and was calling them, showing the way around. The moving water drowned out voices, to a surprising extent. They left the trail and then came back to it higher up the valley, in a place where two separate rivulets came together. Pete pointed out to her how the two different streams merged, one yellowish and silty from the road cut, the other one clear, from the forested side, the dark and light waters running parallel for several yards before they blended. The forest protected against erosion, was Pete's point, but this one felt a little wrecked. Shattered sticks lay all over the drenched leaf carpet. Running water made leaf-banked runnels that scoured the forest floor down to gravel and bedrock. How strange, she thought, to see the forest floor laid bare that way. It gave an impression of the earth as basically just a rock, thinly clothed.