"Let me get this straight, Crystal," she said. "You're thinking if Mical hadn't been there, Brenda would have slammed the door on her own hand?"
"Accidents happen," Crystal repeated with a more strenuous intonation.
"Oh, they do. And many among us have got the kids to prove it."
Hester threw Dellarobia a look, still simmering from the earlier exchange. The ponytail-yank was impending. "You ought to be looking after your own," she said.
Dellarobia was indignant. Her daughter was perfectly content, throwing herself around in the crate of belly wool like a tiny insane person in a padded cell, and Preston was circling nearby making the whooshing noises boys make to imply they are going fast. It was Crystal's pair running wild all over the barn, two freckled, big-for-their-age elementary boys in buzz cuts and tight Tshirts just a little past expired. Jazon and Mical. What kind of mother misspelled her kids' names on purpose? Dellarobia had last seen them jumping off the loft stairs with empty feed bags over their shoulders like superhero capes. Now they were nowhere in sight, not a good sign. Roy, the collie, tended to keep tabs on the kids and now wore a long-nosed look of concern.
"Preston, come here a minute," Dellarobia called. "Where's your buddies?"
He arrived dramatically panting, his straight-cut bangs stuck to his forehead and his little wire glasses askew. "Outside. They wanted to step on poops but Mr. Norwood said they couldn't. Look!" Preston in one vigorous hop turned his back to them, revealing that over his shoulders he wore a full white fleece for a cape.
"You're going to wreck that fleece," said Hester.
He turned back around and said in a cartoon growl, "I'm Wool Man!"
"Wow, what superpowers do you have?" Dellarobia asked, but Wool Man was off, orbiting the skirting table and calling out answers on the fly, including being tricky and eating grass. His shenanigans pulled the fleece apart in less than a minute, as Hester predicted, and that was all it took to get the family thrown out of the proceedings. Hester ordered Dellarobia to round up Preston and Cordie and the other two boys and take them in the house for the rest of the day.
She felt bruised, and inclined to argue, but this was Hester's show. Immediately Crystal was demoted into Dellarobia's former position of step-and-fetch, and ran to get the next fleece. No more ogling Luther Holly's biceps until the spring shearing. Dellarobia went to find the kids and tell Cub they'd been banished to the house, in case he should wonder. Her anger collapsed into a familiar bottomless sorrow. It was just the one fleece, and not an especially valuable one. A more forgiving grandmother would have let Preston have it for a day of play, since it clearly made him happy. The woman had no feeling for children's joy. She could take the fun out of ice cream, dirt, fishing with live bait, you name it. Being around Hester tended to invoke an anguish for Cub's childhood that made Dellarobia wish she could scoop him up and get him away from there. Probably that was where all her family troubles began.
At half past five, she lay flat on her in-laws' uncomfortable sofa with Cordie asleep on her chest. The jelly toast Mical had demanded, but not eaten, sat flattened in its plate on the floor where Jazon had stepped on it, and then violently refused to let her take off his sneaker. He'd used his fists. As a personage of third-grade status Jazon was no joke, within striking distance of her own height and weight. Probably one of those kindergarten holdbacks where teachers tried to postpone the inevitable. She'd surrendered to spending some of the afternoon crawling on her knees with a damp dishtowel following that sticky, waffled left footprint over rugs and floors and sofa cushions, imagining Hester's ire if she overlooked one. When Jazon started running and leaping against the wall to see how high he could leave a jelly print, poor little dutiful Preston lost it and started crying, which set off Cordelia too. Dellarobia finally started up a game of Crazy Eights for money--a desperate measure--in which kids were allowed to use shoes for money, and won on purpose so she could gain control of the offending sneaker. She hid it upstairs in a laundry hamper.
Her mind was on temporary leave from the din when her phone caused her to jump, ratcheting its manic jangle from the sofa cushions under her. It must have slid out of her pocket and attempted its own escape. She tried to move Cordie without waking her, but missed the call before she could locate the phone. Dovey. She hit call.
"Help," she moaned. "I'm trapped in that Twilight Zone episode where a child has mental power over adults and turns one of them into a three-headed gopher."
"I hate when that happens," Dovey said. "So how does that work, are there three corresponding butt-holes?" Dovey and Dellarobia had started life under the surnames Carver and Causey, thrown together in grade school by alphabetical seating. No one had come between them since. "So where are you?" Dovey asked.
"At Hester and Bear's. Hell, in other words, department of child management. Can you come over? I'm seriously losing my mind here."
"Nope. I'm on break, I had to come in to work. Three guys called in sick."
"Three? So you have to close, on a Saturday? That stinks." Dovey worked behind the meat counter at Cash Club, a man's world if ever there was one, and was of such slight stature she had to stand on a box to use the grinder. But Dovey held her own. Be sweet and carry a sharp knife, was her motto.
"There's a U-T game today," Dovey said. "I'm sure that's the reason those guys called in, basketball flu. So yes, I'm closing, and we're swamped. That's why I couldn't answer when you texted, like, sixteen times. Jeez, Dellarobia."
"Sorry." She lay down again and eased Cordie back onto her chest, facedown, without disrupting the child's devoted unconsciousness.
"The problem can't possibly be those angels of yours," Dovey said. "It's you."
"Actually it's Crystal Estep's two boys. She and Valia are over here for the shearing, and Hester is using the occasion to put me in my place."
"Oh, God. She stuck you with what's-their-names, Jazzbo and Microphone?"
"Affirmative. I'm in the custody of two small men with plastic AK-47s forcing me into the slave trade."
"Why do they even make toys like that? I ask you."
"Crystal said Jazon and Mical are fixing to be terrorists for Hallowe'en."
"No real stretch there. Okay, look, you have to find your fierce. That's what the instructor says in my kickboxing video. Aim for the groin."
Dellarobia lowered her voice. "To tell you the truth, I'm kind of scared of Crystal's boys. She told us about some friend of hers that came over and the kids broke her fingers in a car door."
"Here's my advice. Run for your life. Maybe put in a really long video first, so you'll get to the state line."
"A video, are you kidding? Jazon and Mical are hating on me here because there's no X-box in Hester world. The only child-oriented thing she's got is this one DVD they're playing over and over, probably for revenge. It's that squeaky-voiced muppet thing with the red matted hair."
"You want to know something? That creature right there is why I have no children. That voice was invented by the drug companies to get all the parents on Xanax."
"My own kids have better taste, I'll give them that much. Listen." She held up the phone. Preston had stuck his fingers in his ears and was walking in a circle shouting the words to "Willoughby Wallaby": An elephant sat on YOU!
"Do you hear that? That's my son. He is innocent by reason of insanity. His sister gnawed awhile on a stuffed dog and then she conked out."
"Okay, honey, I suggest you do the same. I have to run, my break's almost over."
"Here I go. This is me, chewing on a stuffed doggie."
"Listen, Dellarobia."
"What."
"Not now, but sometime. Are we going to talk about it?"
"What?"
"You."
"Me and what."
"Whatever happened two Fridays ago. With your telephone guy."
"Nothing happened. I told you that. Over and out."
"But you were like, Category Five obsessed. How's that just over?"
&nbs
p; She had told Dovey the outlines of her affair, after the torment rose so high in her throat she felt she would choke. And if Dovey had seen reason to judge, she didn't say so. The better part of friendship might be holding one's tongue over the prospect of self-made wreckage. Dovey had weathered her own run-ins with strange fortune, in several varieties including the man kind, and seemed to understand the appetite for self-destruction. What stumped her now was the return of sensible behavior. Dellarobia could see the perspective. Of the two events, the latter did seem further outside the standard script.
"If I had a reasonable explanation, you would hear it, Dovey. This is all I can tell you: it wasn't my decision. Something happened. I was blind, but now I see."
"Now you're talking crazy. Is this something religious?"
Dellarobia was at pain to answer. In twenty years she'd sheltered nothing from Dovey, but there were no regular words for this. When you pass through the rivers they will not sweep over you. When you walk through the fire, the flames will not set you ablaze. That was the book of Isaiah. "It's not religious," she said.
"I know you," Dovey said. "And I don't get this."
"Me either."
"Okay, but we're not done."
"Okay, go back to work, bye. I hear the rescue squad."
The shearing crew must have wrapped things up. She could hear them outside the front door, stomping the muck off their barn boots. Dellarobia knew she should look alive so Hester wouldn't call her Lazy Daisy, but the weight of her baby's sweet sleeping body kept her immobile on the couch. The collies rushed in and circled the toy-strewn living room like the sheriff's posse in an old western, surveying the wrecked Indian camp, then retreated upstairs. The tumbling dog feet on the stairs sounded like a waterfall in reverse.
From her horizontal position she watched Bear lean over Luther in an intimidating way, apparently in disagreement over payment due. Surely Bear wouldn't push it too far. Sheep farmers lived in dread of getting crossed off Luther's list for some infraction, such as trying to short the head count when they wrote his check. As the only shearer in the county, Luther's skills probably put him in greater demand than any doctor or drug dealer out there. Dellarobia and Cub had actually changed the date of their hastily planned wedding when it turned out to be the day Luther had put the Turnbows on his calendar for shearing. She'd argued with Hester about it, and still to this day felt humiliated by the priority, but they'd ended up moving the wedding from October to November: first trimester to second. Not that she'd been showing that much yet, but the compromise felt significant. That was over a decade ago, and even then Luther was the last shearer standing. Younger men wanted nothing to do with such hard work, preferring to drive some rig or gaze at a screen.
She glanced around for Cub, but he hadn't come in. Hester had probably left him to sweep up. She and the other ladies were washing up at the kitchen sink, and Crystal was nowhere to be seen, probably off somewhere plotting to have another horrible child and dump that one on Dellarobia too. No word of thanks would be forthcoming, she assumed. She sat up gently and settled Cordie in the sofa cushions, warning Preston to keep the roughhousing away from her. Jazon and Mical were using the edge of a CD to press down cornerwise on Legos and make them pop into the air. She stretched her stiff back, waiting for acknowledgment from someone who had attained the age of reason.
"You're welcome," she announced finally. "I'll go see if my husband needs any help." All four women turned simultaneously to gawk at her, as if her life had become a bad school play. "The kids are hungry," she added. "If y'all are about to feed yourselves, you might think of them while you're at it."
The shadows outside were longer than she'd expected, the long dusk of wintertime. Bear's penned hounds were snuffling and growling low in their throats, maybe catching wind of some raccoon on the ridge they pined to chase down and take apart. The wind banged the doors of the metal building behind the house where Bear had his machine shop, in the middle of what looked like a truck graveyard. Dellarobia had never even entered that shop, knowing it would make her homesick for the long-ago place where her own father built furniture. Even this fleeting thought, the shop doors banging, socked her with a memory of sitting on his shoulders and touching the cannonball tops of bedposts he'd spooled out of wood with his lathes.
She drew a very squashed pack of cigarettes from the back pocket of her jeans and lit up, thinking that if someone had asked her to wait one minute longer for it, she might have taken them out. She was trying hard not to smoke around the kids. Just a couple of sneaks, one of them when she'd gone upstairs to hide Jazon's shoe, and that was it, in over six hours. In truth, Hester's reproach the other day had left its impression. Dellarobia now felt her foggy head clear as she picked her way across the muddy ground and entered the fluffy storm inside the barn, where fluorescent lights blazed and it looked as if it had snowed indoors. She found the broom exactly where she'd left it, beside the leaf rake and boxes of trash bags. If Cub was cleaning up, he was doing it without much in the way of technology. Where was he? When she opened her mouth to speak, she had a weird feeling that squeaky muppet voice would come ratcheting out. And that he would answer in a child's voice. She was not born into this family business, which explained her low-ranking position, but they had no excuse for treating Cub as they did. How could a man amount to much when his parents' expectations peaked at raking up waste wool? Dellarobia doubted she'd have much gumption either, if she'd been raised by a mother like Hester. The woman ran all horses with the same whip. She'd even aimed some hits at the shearer today about second cuts, but he'd ignored her, exactly as he ignored Bear's posturing. Maybe that vibrating metal cylinder next to Luther's skull drowned out the whole family. Dellarobia could use a thing like that.
"Cub?" she called, and heard a faint reply. Animal or husband, she couldn't say. She peered into the paddocks one after another, all empty of sheep. The shearing stall was knee-deep in belly wool, so Crystal must have abandoned her post as cleanup girl after about ten seconds. Lucky her, she could defect without getting court-martialed. Dellarobia called Cub's name repeatedly and heard an answer each time, eventually realizing it was coming from overhead. She climbed the narrow stairs to the hay mow and found him lying on his back across a row of hay bales. This time of year the mow should have been packed like a suitcase, filled side to side and top to bottom, but the cavernous loft was more than half empty. They'd lost the late-summer cutting because three consecutive rainless days were needed for cutting, raking, and baling a hay crop. All the farmers they knew had leaned into the forecasts like gamblers banking on a straight flush: some took the risk, mowed hay that got rained on, and lost. Others waited, and also lost.
"Cub, honey, what's wrong. You dead?"
"About."
"I've seen you further gone than that, and resurrected at the sight of a cold beer."
He sat up straight. "You got one?"
"From your mother's kitchen?"
He flopped back against the hay, taking off his Deere cap and settling it over his face. She sat down opposite him on the lowest row of bales, which were stacked like a wide staircase leading up to the rafters. Not many farms still maintained the equipment to make square bales, instead favoring the huge rolls that were handier to move with a tractor and fork. But these made nice furniture. She dragged one close for a footstool, swung up her short legs and leaned back against a prickly wall of hay, waiting for further signs of life from her husband. Lying on his back, he resembled a mountain: highest in the midsection, tapering out on both ends. He pulled his cap farther down over his face.
"You're just worn out," she offered.
"No, it's more than that."
"What, are you sick?"
"Sick and tired."
"Of what?"
"Farming."
"I hear you." She was conscious of her unfinished cigarette, aware that only a fool or city person would smoke in a hayloft. It could catch fire in a flash. But that would be in some year other than this
one, in which the very snapping turtles had dragged themselves from silted ponds and roamed the soggy land looking for higher ground. A little tobacco smoke might help dry out this hay. Cub evidently didn't disagree, for he lay silent awhile. Then spoke from under his cap.
"Dad's fixing to sign a contract with some loggers."
"You mean to cut timber? Where?"
"That hollow up behind our house. All the way to the top, he said."
"What possessed him to do that now? That timber's been standing awhile."
"The taxes went up, and he's got a balloon on his equipment loan. You and I are behind on our house payments. Money's coming in even lower this year than last. He's thinking we'll have to buy hay out of Missouri this winter, after we lost so much of ours."
She looked at the backs of her hands. "Just one month behind, you and me."
She'd been hoping Bear and Hester didn't know about the missed payment, but every nickel gained or lost on that farm went on the same ledger. Bear and Hester knew every detail of their lives, as did their neighbors and eventually the community as a whole, thanks to the news team down at Hair Affair.
"I talked to the man at the bank about our payment, Cub. It's Ed Cameron, you know who that is. He said it was no big deal, as long as we're caught up by year's end."
"Well, foreclosure on Dad's equipment loan is a big deal."
She felt something in herself drop. "That's not an issue, is it?"
"The word was mentioned."
She wanted to throw something, though not necessarily at Cub. She hated how his parents left them in the dark, even on something so important. Bear earned as much or more on machine repair and metalwork in his shop than from anything that happened in this barn. For years he'd gotten steady contracts making replacement parts for factories and something for the DOT, a bracket for guardrails, was her understanding. Dellarobia kept out of it. Bear seemed to think of these contracts as more valid than regular farm work, maybe because he'd learned welding in the military. He'd borrowed a huge sum to expand his machine shop, a few months before transportation departments everywhere suddenly came up strapped, and people decided they hated government spending. The equipment loan was backed up by a lien on the land.