Flight Behavior
Page 15
They rounded a bend in the trail and could see the whole dark green mountain range laid out above them, stippled with firs along the bumpy spine. Limestone cliffs erupted here and there, gray teeth grinning through the dark trees. Wherever sun fell on them, the tops of the knolls faintly glowed. The color could have been a trick of the light. But wasn’t. She turned, risking a glance at Cub’s face.
“Is that it?” she asked quietly. “That shine on the trees?”
He nodded. “You knew, didn’t you?”
“How would I?”
He said no more. They kept moving. Her guilty mind ran down a hundred alleys, wondering what he implied. He knew she’d been up here? No possibility made sense: mind-reading, sleep-talking, these things happened in movies. She’d told only Dovey, who honestly would endure torture without betraying her. They entered the chilly darkness of the fir forest. Its density was so different from the open sky and widely spaced trunks of the leafless deciduous woods.
“Why in the world did these evergreens get planted up here?” Dellarobia asked. She needed to hear someone talk.
“Bear’s daddy wasn’t the only one,” Hester said. “There was other ones that put them in. Peanut, didn’t your daddy plant some?”
Dellarobia had vaguely understood it to be a touchy topic, but now she got it. The family joke, a Christmas tree boondoggle. Probably she should not have asked.
“The extension fellows told him to,” Norwood said. “The chestnuts was getting blighty, and they’s looking for something new to put in. The Christmas tree market.”
“Christmas tree market,” Bear spat. “In the nineteen-forties, when a man could cut a weed cedar out of his woodlot for free. They couldn’t get two bits for them. It wasn’t worth hauling them out.”
The old firs stood fifty feet tall now, ghosts of Christmas past. An image landed in her head with those words, the hooded skeleton pointing at gravestones that scared the bejesus out of her in childhood. A library book, Charles Dickens. But that was the Yet to Come ghost, and these were just geriatric trees. Ghosts of bad timing, if anything. She wasn’t going to bring it up, but she knew some farmers were planting Christmas trees again, hiring Mexican workers for the winter labor. Presumably the same men who showed up in summers to work tobacco. They used to go home in winter and now stayed year-round, like the geese at Great Lick that somehow quit flying south. She’d seen these men in hard-luck kinds of places like the Cash Rite, which she and Dovey called Ass Bite, a Feathertown storefront where she sometimes had to go for a substantially clipped advance on Cub’s paycheck if the bills came in too close together. Christmas tree farms were just proof that every gone thing came back around again, with a worse pay scale.
Conversation ceased while they mounted a steep section of the rutted trail, then came to the flat section she recognized as the spot where she’d stopped for a smoke. She scanned the ground, knowing Cub would recognize the filter of her brand if he saw it. She felt strung out from nerves and exhaustion. Soon they would round the mountainside and gain the view of the valley, and then what? Several trees along the path bore the bristly things she’d seen before, the fungus, if that’s what it was, but the men seemed not to notice. They looked ahead, picking up the pace.
Hester seemed increasingly put out, to be dragged from her routine. She hummed steadily under her breath in a thin, monotonous way. Some hymn. Or a show tune—with Hester there was no telling. Dellarobia could not imagine humming or anything else that required extra oxygen. They were all out of shape except Hester, who stayed miraculously shipshape on her regimen of Mountain Dew and Camel Lights. Dellarobia counted steps to make the time pass, watching her feet. She noticed little darts in the trail, first one and then more, scattered on the ground like litter. They were the same orange as the flagging tape but made of something brittle that crunched underfoot. Little V-shaped points, like arrows, aimed in every possible direction, as if scattered here for the purpose of sheer confusion. To get people lost in the woods.
They rounded the bend to the overlook and came into the full sight of it. These golden darts filled the whole of the air, swirling like leaves in a massive storm. Wings. The darts underfoot also were wings. Butterflies. How had she failed to see them? She felt stupid, or blind, in a way that went beyond needing glasses. Unreceptive to truth. She’d been willing to take in the run of emotions that stood up the hairs on her neck, the wonder, but had shuttered her eyes and looked without seeing. The density of the butterflies in the air now gave her a sense of being underwater, plunged into a deep pond among bright fishes. They filled the sky. Out across the valley, the air itself glowed golden. Every tree on the far mountainside was covered with trembling flame, and that, of course, was butterflies. She had carried this vision inside herself for so many days in ignorance, like an unacknowledged pregnancy. The fire was alive, and incomprehensibly immense, an unbounded, uncountable congregation of flame-colored insects.
This time they revealed themselves in movement, as creatures in flight. That made the difference. The treetops and ravines all appeared in strange relief, exposed by the trick of air as a visible quantity. Air filled with quivering butterfly light. The space between trees glittered, more real and alive than the trees themselves. The scaly forest still bore the same bulbous burden in its branches she’d seen before, even more of it, if possible. The drooping branches seemed bent to the breaking point under their weight. Of butterflies. The verity of that took her breath. A million times nothing weighed nothing. Her mind confronted a mathematics she’d always thought to be the domain of teachers and pure invention.
“Great day in the morning,” Hester said, looking stricken.
“There you go,” Bear said. “Whatever the hell that is, it can’t be a damn bit of good for logging.”
“I’d say it would gum up their equipment,” Norwood agreed. “Or we might run into one of those government deals. Something endangered.”
“No sir,” said Bear. “I believe there’s more of them than we’ve got people.”
The numbers could not be argued. Butterflies rested and crawled even on the path around their feet, giving the impression of twitchy, self-automated dead leaves marching across a forest floor. Dellarobia squatted down and waved her hand over one, expecting it to startle and fly, but it stayed in place, wings closed. Then opened wide to the sudden reveal: orange. Four wings, with the symmetry of a bow-tied shoelace. Preston had spent all of a recent morning trying to tie a bow, biting his lower lip in concentration, but here was perfection without effort. He would love to see this. She let it crawl onto her hand and held it close to her eyes. The orange wings were scrolled with neat black lines, like liquid eyeliner, expertly applied. In almost thirty years of walking around on the grass of the world, she couldn’t recall having spent two minutes alone with a butterfly.
“Is that it?” she asked quietly. “That shine on the trees?”
He nodded. “You knew, didn’t you?”
“How would I?”
He said no more. They kept moving. Her guilty mind ran down a hundred alleys, wondering what he implied. He knew she’d been up here? No possibility made sense: mind-reading, sleep-talking, these things happened in movies. She’d told only Dovey, who honestly would endure torture without betraying her. They entered the chilly darkness of the fir forest. Its density was so different from the open sky and widely spaced trunks of the leafless deciduous woods.
“Why in the world did these evergreens get planted up here?” Dellarobia asked. She needed to hear someone talk.
“Bear’s daddy wasn’t the only one,” Hester said. “There was other ones that put them in. Peanut, didn’t your daddy plant some?”
Dellarobia had vaguely understood it to be a touchy topic, but now she got it. The family joke, a Christmas tree boondoggle. Probably she should not have asked.
“The extension fellows told him to,” Norwood said. “The chestnuts was getting blighty, and they’s looking for something new to put in. The Christmas tree market.”
“Christmas tree market,” Bear spat. “In the nineteen-forties, when a man could cut a weed cedar out of his woodlot for free. They couldn’t get two bits for them. It wasn’t worth hauling them out.”
The old firs stood fifty feet tall now, ghosts of Christmas past. An image landed in her head with those words, the hooded skeleton pointing at gravestones that scared the bejesus out of her in childhood. A library book, Charles Dickens. But that was the Yet to Come ghost, and these were just geriatric trees. Ghosts of bad timing, if anything. She wasn’t going to bring it up, but she knew some farmers were planting Christmas trees again, hiring Mexican workers for the winter labor. Presumably the same men who showed up in summers to work tobacco. They used to go home in winter and now stayed year-round, like the geese at Great Lick that somehow quit flying south. She’d seen these men in hard-luck kinds of places like the Cash Rite, which she and Dovey called Ass Bite, a Feathertown storefront where she sometimes had to go for a substantially clipped advance on Cub’s paycheck if the bills came in too close together. Christmas tree farms were just proof that every gone thing came back around again, with a worse pay scale.
Conversation ceased while they mounted a steep section of the rutted trail, then came to the flat section she recognized as the spot where she’d stopped for a smoke. She scanned the ground, knowing Cub would recognize the filter of her brand if he saw it. She felt strung out from nerves and exhaustion. Soon they would round the mountainside and gain the view of the valley, and then what? Several trees along the path bore the bristly things she’d seen before, the fungus, if that’s what it was, but the men seemed not to notice. They looked ahead, picking up the pace.
Hester seemed increasingly put out, to be dragged from her routine. She hummed steadily under her breath in a thin, monotonous way. Some hymn. Or a show tune—with Hester there was no telling. Dellarobia could not imagine humming or anything else that required extra oxygen. They were all out of shape except Hester, who stayed miraculously shipshape on her regimen of Mountain Dew and Camel Lights. Dellarobia counted steps to make the time pass, watching her feet. She noticed little darts in the trail, first one and then more, scattered on the ground like litter. They were the same orange as the flagging tape but made of something brittle that crunched underfoot. Little V-shaped points, like arrows, aimed in every possible direction, as if scattered here for the purpose of sheer confusion. To get people lost in the woods.
They rounded the bend to the overlook and came into the full sight of it. These golden darts filled the whole of the air, swirling like leaves in a massive storm. Wings. The darts underfoot also were wings. Butterflies. How had she failed to see them? She felt stupid, or blind, in a way that went beyond needing glasses. Unreceptive to truth. She’d been willing to take in the run of emotions that stood up the hairs on her neck, the wonder, but had shuttered her eyes and looked without seeing. The density of the butterflies in the air now gave her a sense of being underwater, plunged into a deep pond among bright fishes. They filled the sky. Out across the valley, the air itself glowed golden. Every tree on the far mountainside was covered with trembling flame, and that, of course, was butterflies. She had carried this vision inside herself for so many days in ignorance, like an unacknowledged pregnancy. The fire was alive, and incomprehensibly immense, an unbounded, uncountable congregation of flame-colored insects.
This time they revealed themselves in movement, as creatures in flight. That made the difference. The treetops and ravines all appeared in strange relief, exposed by the trick of air as a visible quantity. Air filled with quivering butterfly light. The space between trees glittered, more real and alive than the trees themselves. The scaly forest still bore the same bulbous burden in its branches she’d seen before, even more of it, if possible. The drooping branches seemed bent to the breaking point under their weight. Of butterflies. The verity of that took her breath. A million times nothing weighed nothing. Her mind confronted a mathematics she’d always thought to be the domain of teachers and pure invention.
“Great day in the morning,” Hester said, looking stricken.
“There you go,” Bear said. “Whatever the hell that is, it can’t be a damn bit of good for logging.”
“I’d say it would gum up their equipment,” Norwood agreed. “Or we might run into one of those government deals. Something endangered.”
“No sir,” said Bear. “I believe there’s more of them than we’ve got people.”
The numbers could not be argued. Butterflies rested and crawled even on the path around their feet, giving the impression of twitchy, self-automated dead leaves marching across a forest floor. Dellarobia squatted down and waved her hand over one, expecting it to startle and fly, but it stayed in place, wings closed. Then opened wide to the sudden reveal: orange. Four wings, with the symmetry of a bow-tied shoelace. Preston had spent all of a recent morning trying to tie a bow, biting his lower lip in concentration, but here was perfection without effort. He would love to see this. She let it crawl onto her hand and held it close to her eyes. The orange wings were scrolled with neat black lines, like liquid eyeliner, expertly applied. In almost thirty years of walking around on the grass of the world, she couldn’t recall having spent two minutes alone with a butterfly.
