Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver

Author:Barbara Kingsolver
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Religion, Feminism, Contemporary, Azizex666, Adult
ISBN: 9780062124265
Publisher: Harper
Published: 2012-11-06T05:00:00+00:00

10

Natural State

January made its way like a high-wire walker, placing one foot, then another, on the freezing line. It wavered, rising to forty, dipping to thirty, but never plunged. A small, nervous audience watched. On some nights Dellarobia could not sleep for thoughts of cold air creeping down along the ridgelines. It would fill the forest secretively like a poisonous gas and surround the butterflies in the quarters where they crowded close, riveted to their family trees, lulled into a dormancy from which they would not wake. One crystal clear night it would happen.

No one close to her shared her dread. Dovey wouldn’t hear it; her methods of self-preservation were fierce. And Cub was protected in his own way, unable to believe that this outpost of life that had landed in their custody was irreplaceable. She feared Preston would be the opposite, that he would feel the multitude of deaths too deeply, so she didn’t tell him everything. He brought home pictures of monkeys and tree frogs cut from magazines at school and taped them to his bedroom wall in elaborate collages, much like those his father had once assembled with pictures of Captain Fantastic and Jesus. With all his might Preston wanted to be a scientist and study animals. But in the lab Dellarobia listened to Ovid and Pete speaking hopelessly about so many things. The elephants in drought-stricken Africa, the polar bears on the melting ice, were “as good as gone,” they said with infuriating resignation as they worked through what seemed to be an early autopsy on another doomed creature. Gone, as if those elephants on the sun-bleached plain were merely slogging out the last leg of a tired journey. The final stages of grief. Dellarobia felt an entirely new form of panic as she watched her son love nature so expectantly, wondering if he might be racing toward a future like some complicated sand castle that was crumbling under the tide. She didn’t know how scientists bore such knowledge. People had to manage terrible truths. As she lay awake she imagined Ovid doing the same in his parallel bed, not so far away across the darkness, joined with her in the vigil against the cold. Because of him, she wasn’t alone.

Each morning by daylight she crossed the same distance from her kitchen door to Ovid’s camper, pausing there on her way to the lab to record the previous day’s high and low temperatures. He used these to estimate the rates at which butterflies were using up their fat reserves when they stayed quiet in the trees, versus warm days when they flew around. Too warm was just as dangerous as too cold, he said. Dellarobia felt like an accessory to the crime as she plotted the numbers each day, but it was one of her tasks. A special thermometer was attached to the camper by means of a metal arm extending from the passenger’s side window. She pressed the mechanism’s tiny buttons to reveal the day’s

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