"So what happens to us, if this farm gets folded in half overnight?"
Cub remained mute and supine on his bed of hay. Cub's only off-farm income was what he made driving a truck that delivered gravel, intermittently, as that company was not seeing a lot of action these days either. Ever since the economy tanked, people had been settling for what they had. Renewing their vows with their bad gravel driveways.
His inert response to this crisis was predictable. In case of fire, take a nap. She tried an easier question. "How'd you happen to come by this information?"
"Listening. He talks more to Peanut Norwood in a day than he does to me in a year."
"Lord, if he's telling the neighbors of his downfall, we must be pretty near the end of the rope. You know your dad."
"Yeah, I do."
"No bad news comes looking for Bear Turnbow that he can't send running."
"I know, I was thinking that. It's worse for the Norwoods, I guess. Peanut wants to log out his side too. They said it works best if they clear-cut the whole deal at once."
"A clear cut. Cub, honey, could you at least sit up and discuss this like a human? You mean where they take out everything down to the slash?"
Cub sat up and gave her a sorry look. He had fleece clinging to his trousers and hay in his hair, a sight to see. "That's where they'll give you the most money. According to Dad, it's easier when they don't have to pick and choose the trees."
She stared at Cub, trying to find holy matrimony in there, pushing her way back through the weeds as she always did. To what she'd seen in him when she was still looking: the narrow face and long chin that gave an impression of leanness, despite his burgeoning middle. The thick lashes and dark, ruler-straight eyebrows like an interrupted pencil line across his forehead, behind the pale forelock that hung in his eyes. The cause of their marriage had been conspicuous at the wedding, but she'd gone a little foggy on the earlier motives. She recalled the nice truck, other plans canceled, an ounce of pity maybe. A boy named Damon who'd kissed her half to death and then left her for dead, on the rebound. And there stood Cub, with his rock-steady faith that she knew more than he did, in any situation outside of automotive repair. His bewildered sexual gratitude, as near a thing to religious awe as a girl of her station could likely inspire. These boyish things had made him lovable. But you could run out of gas on boyish, that was the thing. A message that should be engraved in every woman's wedding band.
"So this is a done deal," she said finally. "Has he talked to the logging people?"
"Whatever's too little to cut up for lumber, he said they can grind into paper."
"Oh, Cub. They'll make it look like a war zone, like the Buchman place. Have you looked at that mountain since they finished logging it out? It's a trash pile. Nothing but mud and splinters."
Cub began pulling white threads of wool from the knees of his jeans, one at a time. The air was so dry they stuck to him, drawn by static electricity. How strange, the humidity dropping like that overnight. She cleared a spot on the floor and carefully ground out her cigarette with the toe of her work boot. "I drive past there every time I go to Food King," she said. "It looks like they blew up bombs all over it. Then all these rains started and the whole mountain is sliding into the road. They have road crews out there blading the muck out of the way. I bet I've seen that six times since July."
Cub's voice flagged in ready defeat. "Well, you won't have to drive past Dad's upper hollow when you go get your groceries." He was already losing interest, ready for a new topic, the same way he went glassy in front of the TV every night and channel-surfed without cease. Some flashy woman in a silk suit would be describing a faux-emerald necklace, and suddenly they're landing the biggest fish in the Amazon. Or Fox News would morph into a late-night comedian making jokes about Christians and southerners. Cub claimed the surfing relaxed him. It made Dellarobia grind her teeth.
"I need to get back to the house," she said. Hester was feeding Preston and Cordie their supper, probably an array of items from the choking-hazard checklist: grapes, peas, hot dogs cut crosswise. There was no point in arguing with Cub, when neither of them had a say in the family plan. She and her husband were like kids in the backseat of a car, bickering over the merits of some unknown destination.
She stood up, but instead of heading for the stairs, walked on impulse to the end of the loft, where the giant door was propped open to ventilate the hay. A person could just run the length of the haymow and take a flying jump. For the first time in her life she could see perfectly well how a person arrived on that flight path: needing an alternative to the present so badly, the only doorway was a high window. She'd practically done it herself. The next thing to it. The thought of that recklessness terrified her now, making her step back from the haymow door and close her eyes, trying to calm down.
When she opened them she looked down on the sheep milling around in the dusk, surprisingly slim and trim without their wool. Pastor Bobby at Hester's church spoke of Jesus looking down on his flock from on high, and it seemed apt: an all-knowing creator probably would find humans to be exactly the same kind of ignorant little dumb-heads as these sheep. Right now they were butting each other like crazy. Hester said head-butting was a flock's way of figuring out who was boss, so it was normal to some extent, but Dellarobia had noticed that shearing always left them wildly uncertain as to who was who. She had asked about it, but no one in the family could say why. She stood watching now, oddly fascinated. Grumpy ewes lowered their horns to toss off lambs that weren't theirs, the poor little things bunting at the wrong udders, and one old girl in particular was running up against puny yearlings, revisiting arguments long ago settled. Suddenly they were strangers, though they'd been here together all along. In the still evening she heard the dull, repeated thud of heads making contact, horn and skull. They must have some good reason; animals behaved with purpose, it seemed. Unlike people.
And then it dawned on her: scent. They must recognize each other that way. And all their special odors had been removed with the wool. They'd be blind to one another's identities until they worked up a good personal aroma again. Dellarobia felt a glimmer of pride for working out this mystery by herself. Maybe one day she'd inform Hester.
She walked back and sat down across from Cub. "When do you think your folks were planning to clue us in about the foreclosure?"
"I don't know."
"Just one day the phone would ring and they'd be like, 'Hey, pack up the kids, get a new life, we just lost your half of the family deal.' Or that they're moving in with us, or us with them? Cub, I swear, your mother and me under one roof, never again. You'd just as well call nine-one-one right now and get it over with. Because homicide will ensue."
"I know that, hon."
"If he can't make the payment, why wouldn't they just repossess his equipment?"
"Depreciation, I guess. It's not enough. They needed that lien on the farm."
This shocked her. The equipment was so nearly new. She wondered if anyone totally understood how banks could make the ground shift underfoot and turn real things into empty air, just with a word. "So you think he's really going to do that logging?"
"He said it was as good as done. He's signing a contract."
"Are they from here?" she asked.
"Is who?"
"The logging company. Whoever's in charge."
"Are you kidding me? What man in this county owns anything more than what he squats on to take a crap?"
"Thanks for the visual." She thought of a magazine article that advised keeping your marriage sexy by closing the bathroom door. She couldn't remember whether she'd actually read that article, or just wished someone would write it.
"Naw," Cub said, "a guy came over from Knoxville. And that's not even the main office, the outfit's owned by Warehouser or something. Out west."
"That figures. Come on down. Get the poor man's goods and haul them out of here to make I don't know what. Toilet paper for city people, I guess."
"Well, hon, it's money we need."
"I know. Let's all sing the redneck national anthem: Settle for what you can get."
"I'm sorry you see it that way, but I don't see where we have a lot of choice."
He looked sorry all right. It made her want to punch something, all that sorry. She wished he would get mad. Instead he sat pulling threads of fleece from his jeans in a slow, passive way that made her blood boil. With occasional exceptions in the bedroom, Cub did every single thing in his life in first gear. It could take him forty minutes to empty his freaking pants pockets. In high school Dovey used to call him Flash. She was furious when Dellarobia first went out with him. They'd sworn onto a flight plan, older guys with vocabularies and bank accounts, men from anywhere but here.
Inadmissable thoughts. Dellarobia forced herself now to try being someone else, a wife from Mars with a nicer personality. She'd come down that mountain feeling so sure there was something new here to see. She slowed her breathing and just watched the little threads that clung to his jeans, standing straight out as he pulled them away from the fabric. The night air was crisp for the first time in months, full of promise and static. Spark weather, was how she thought of these fall nights when the air suddenly went so dry her pajamas lit the sheets with little sparks. Why would cool weather make dry air? She'd wondered such things a thousand times, inciting the regular brainless replies: woolly worms predict the weather and the Lord moves in mysterious ways. Good night. She knew she should be patient with those underly endowed with intelligence, but could everyone at once be below average? Most, she suspected, were just sliding by.
She had seen trees aflame on the mountain. For some reason that knowledge was hers alone. What had she been thinking? The full proposition now flooded her with panic, shutting her into a tight place. "They can't log that mountain," she said.
"Why not?"
"I don't know why not."
A lake of fire, what would Cub make of that? The route to the world's end, a vivid moral suggestion he'd heard all his life and probably believed. The Revelations. Her mind worked differently. Flame and inundation were opposites, they canceled. "The world can surprise you," she said finally. "It could be something special up there."
Cub lifted the plane of his eyebrows. "He's selling trees, Dellarobia."
She balked, knowing his wariness of people who wanted to save trees for trees' sake. An easy want, when they weren't your trees, or your foreclosure. "But what kind of trees?" she pressed. "I mean, are they big or little or red or blue or what? If Bear's signing a logging contract, I think he should walk up there and look at what he's selling. You both should."
Cub stopped picking at his jeans and looked at her as if confronted with a whole new wife. Like those sheep out there, bewildered by the familiar. He took off his cap, ran a hand over his standing-up hair, and replaced it, studying her all the while. For the first moment in a long invisible time, she actually felt she was being seen.
"What for?" he asked, at last.
"What for? It's out of the question to walk your own land?"
"Not my land yet."
She had carried the leaf rake up here, and now pictured herself walking to the haymow door and throwing it out, just to hear the satisfying metallic clatter. Cub still drove the same pickup truck they'd dated in, now on its third engine overhaul, with so many miles on it you'd think surely he'd been somewhere. But he hadn't seen a state line, and didn't care. What did it take to move a man who, when he ran out of steam, which he didn't have much to begin with, resembled a mountain?
"If it's not your land, then what are we, sharecroppers?" she asked. "We work this farm, it's almost our entire living, so you might want to claim it. Even if your dad has not passed away as of yet. Why won't you act like one thing in the world is yours?"
"I walked the fences that time when the ram got out."
"Jesus Christ, that was the winter I was pregnant with Preston."
"No need to take the Lord's name in vain."
"I've hardly seen you set your boots outside this barn in five years. That's a fact, Cub. How do you even know what's up there in that hollow? There could be anything. You all are fixing to sell off something, and you don't even know what it is."
"Well, I don't expect there's any gold mines. Just trees. The green ones, I'm a-thinking."
"Trees, okay. But you could go look at them. The logging company could rob you blind. They could tell you the timber is not any count, when it is."
"How do you know what it is?"
"We've been up there, you and me. We've consumed some Ripple in that turkey-hunting shack." She blushed, her fair skin ever ready to give her away. But Cub was so unsuspecting. He would think it was sins of their own she was blushing over.
He smiled. "Maybe we ought to go up there again one of these days, baby."
"Okay, let's do that. We'll have one last look before you go knocking down all the trees with your shock and awe, turning your family's land into frickin' Iraq."
"Ain't no A-rabs on the Turnbow property, Dellarobia."
"That's not what I meant. Anyway, for all you know, there could be terrorists camped up there on the ridge. Who'd find them? Nobody around here will get out of their darn pickup trucks. That ridge is probably the safest hiding place in the world."
Cub rolled his eyes, and she felt overwhelmed with futile energy, like a dog chasing its tail. She could see this was going the way of all their arguments, poised to step from the ground of true complaints into the quicksand of trivial nonsense. With full righteous outrage intact. "You and your dad ought to lay eyes on your own property once in a while, is all I'm trying to say."
"Why are you nagging me about this all of a sudden?"
"I don't know. There's just reasons. There could be more treasure than you think in your own backyard."
He shook his head. "What you're saying is what you always say. Work harder, Cub, go faster, Cub."
"Is not."
"Well, what am I supposed to do? The ATV busted an axle last month."
"Busted an axle all by itself, as I understand it. With no help from your drunk friends."
"Nobody was entirely drunk."
Here we go, she thought, into the quicksands of stupid. She stood up. "I'm going in the house. I just thought I'd mention that God gave you feet, to set one down in front of the other, if memory serves me. Seems like you'd go up there and look at what you're selling off before it's gone. It's just good business."
"Good business. Since when did you get your business-lady degree?"
The contempt startled her. That wasn't even Cub, he was just parroting his father in some last-ditch attempt at manhood. She made for the stairs without looking back. "I hear you. Good business, and it's none of mine."
A thicket of reasons led them up the mountain, and Dellarobia's insistence was one strand of it. Bear and Peanut Norwood's mistrust of the logging company, and possibly of each other, comprised the rest. Four men in hard hats had flagged the boundaries of the section proposed for logging and declared that it was up to the Turnbows and Norwoods to see that property lines were respected. The hard-hat men, who were subcontractors for the real decision-makers in California, came from Knoxville in a panel truck that said Money Tree Industries. Suspicion was only natural.
Cub rallied to repair the all-terrain vehicle so they wouldn't have to make the hike on foot. It took four of his buddies and nearly a week of evenings to replace the broken axle. Dovey observed to Dellarobia that there was no end to the amount of effort a man would put into saving himself some work. On a Friday morning the expedition piled onto the ATV with Cub at the wheel, Bear riding shotgun, and Peanut Norwood in the cargo bucket hugging his knees, insufficiently shaped like a bale of hay to fit in there very well. Dellarobia stood at her kitchen window watching the squat vehicle crawl up the steep pasture slope like a broad, flat toad with three men clinging to its back. Her life had become some kind of fairy tale, in which her family members set off one by one t
o meet their destiny on the High Road. She couldn't have said what she hoped the men would discover up there, but her distraction was acute. Ten minutes after they left, she found herself folding clothes from the dirty-laundry basket while the clean ones sat in the dryer.
Less than an hour passed before the men came back, astounded, to collect their wives as witnesses.
There was no question of everyone riding in the vehicle. They would have to walk. Dellarobia surprised herself by asking to go along, despite the sticky fact of Cordelia eating cereal in her high chair, and Preston needing to be picked up from kindergarten at noon. She asked anyway. Dovey was off work that morning and could come over to mind the kids. Cub made his parents hold their horses while they waited the ten minutes it took for Dovey to get there. Cub was surprisingly resolute on Dellarobia's behalf.
Her heart raced as they mounted the hill, on various accounts. Mostly for the strangeness of reenacting this walk she'd so recently taken with outrageous intent, this time with husband and family in tow. It felt like a reality show, poised to expose and explode her serial failures. The wife who keeps having inappropriate crushes, falling off the marriage wagon, if only in her mind. They navigated the mud at the top of the pasture where the sheep had beaten down the perimeter, cursed with their certainty of greener grass on the other side. Like herself, she thought, when she'd last slipped through this gate. Like a dog in a yard, pacing the edges of her confines to the tune of "Get me out of here." Cub held the gate open for her, and she couldn't meet his eyes.
Beefy, ruddy-faced Bear led the way, the platoon leader. He'd served in the military ages ago and carried certain vestiges: the haircut, the weight lifting, the blood pressure. He'd held on to a muscular build, despite his weight and age, and the natural supremacy that went with a frame of six feet, four inches. Hester bought his trousers from a place called Man of Measure, on rare shopping trips to Knoxville. Cub was nearly as tall but managed to fit into regular Wranglers, size 38-36, which to Dellarobia sounded more like the shape of a TV screen than a man. She assumed it was the tour in Vietnam that accounted for the difference in men like Burley Turnbow Sr. and Jr., so similar in their dimensions and opposite in bearing. Like those boxes that guaranteed they were equally filled, but contents may have settled. She could hear Cub huffing and puffing now as he brought up the rear, saying little. The two older men gave him no chance. Bear and Peanut Norwood were talking a lot but failing to explain anything, mostly contradicting one another's accounts or declaring no explanation was possible. Cub was the first of them to say they thought it was insects.