“We’ve got to get a chain and a padlock for this gate,” he said.
“I was thinking that. Hester’s ewes will wander off into the wild blue yonder if we can’t keep this closed.” She wondered if the lock would get cut, and knew Cub was thinking the same. He felt all the trespassers were basically the same brand of hoodlum, unwilling to respect private property, but Dellarobia was not so sure. Maybe they thought it was some kind of nature park. The butterflies had now been on the news so many times she’d lost count, which made it seem like anyone’s business, just as the Internet gave away their address simply for the asking. Free was free.
She and Cub followed the fence along the top of the pasture, looking closely for breaches in the perimeter. Downed trees lay across the fence in several places, having fallen over from the woods on the other side. As husband and wife they worked together well, exchanging few words as they hefted dead wood from the wire, freeing the fence from the tangle, reattaching wire to post. No livestock had been in this field since early November, before the fall shearing. Dellarobia had a vivid recall of marching up the hill that day and taking her last look back down that hill, like Lot’s wife, before heading into a new place. This new place was the last thing she’d expected.
Ovid Byron’s body in the dimness caught up to her again, and she wished she could scrub her own eyes out. No, not that. But hated how she kept running and her mind still dragged it along, shoving the memory forward, daring her to taste its thrill. It felt acute, like tooth pain, like falling. Not again, this losing her mind to a man. She’d thought surely something had changed, for all the strange fortune those butterflies had brought her. She’d thought she could be free.
A flock of sparrows flushed up from the dead brush with a startling rush of wings. They all disappeared into the woods, save one. This odd loner darted ahead, lighting on one fence post and then the next as Cub and Dellarobia walked along in its direction. “Flying from pillar to post,” her mother used to say, when Dellarobia jumped from one infatuation to another in high school. She hadn’t thought of those words in years.
Cub stopped to study a long section of fence along a washed-out gully that would have to be restrung. She dug in her pockets for her gloves, found her glasses there, and touched the nub of a pencil, one he’d given her in the lab. If only she had not gone out there this morning. If Cub had been ready for once. She couldn’t fathom how tomorrow would go. If she couldn’t face him she’d have to quit. The loss hit her like a death.
“Hey, do you want to hear something funny?” Cub asked, and she said yes, she did. She pulled the panel of woven wire toward the post so Cub could nail it. Though she leaned with her whole body, her full weight was barely sufficient.
“When I saw Dad this morning, he told me he caught Peanut trying to get the butterflies to come over on him.” Cub paused to finish pounding the topmost U-nail, taking some of the pressure from Dellarobia.
“How do you mean?”
“He’s trying to lure them in, I guess. Over the property line onto his land. Dad said he got these hummingbird things, where you put sugar water in them.”
She laughed aloud, one small bark, at the idea of Peanut Norwood creeping around with a bird feeder. “Why on earth?” she asked.
“He wants a piece of the action. Dad says there’s guys in town talking about making it a Disneyland kind of thing.”
“A theme park. That’s crazy. Don’t they know that’s—” She sought some kinder word than stupid. “It’s useless,” she finally said. “The butterflies are all going to die, as soon as the temperature goes down into the teens. This could be it already, they might be dying now.”
“Well, but maybe next year.”
Dellarobia felt dragged to her knees by the hopelessness of getting from A to B here. It wasn’t just Cub; much of the town was in on this nonconversation. “There won’t be a next year. It gets too cold, they die, and then it’s over. No next generation.”
“Tell that to Jack Stell and them,” Cub said. “They’ve got it figured like supply-side economics. The Good Lord supplies the butterflies, and Feathertown gets the economics.”
“Really. Just like that, Jesus hands out the butterflies?”
“Why wouldn’t our town deserve to get lucky for once?” Cub asked.
Dellarobia recognized the same naive thinking she had heartily shared in the beginning. If anything, she’d been more selfish, wanting the butterflies to be hers alone. She saw them first. She’d been reluctant to surrender her flight of fancy to the scientists’ prior claim. “We do deserve it, Cub,” she said. “I’m not saying we don’t. But luck is just throwing dice. You can’t build some kind of industry on just hoping they’ll come back. That’s what screws people up. Flying blind like that.”
They finished pulling the bottom strand, and Cub took the time to yank long, leathery tentacles of invading vines from the wire. Honeysuckle was widely despised for taking over fields and entangling machinery, and it was all over this fence. The leaves had a bruised, purple cast in the cold, but the plant persisted. The sheep wouldn’t touch it. Ovid had told her some animals did eat honeysuckle in Japan, where this foreign plant belonged, but they didn’t travel with it. No natural predators here, to keep it in check.
“It’s not just Dad and them,” Cub argued. “The whole state is pushing the natural thing now. For tourists.” He clapped his gloved hands together, trying to warm them, and she did the same, the two of them saluting the cold morning with a muffled applause. She knew the “Natural State” campaigns he meant, to which she’d never given a dime’s worth of thought before Natural landed in her backyard. Only to find out this so-called phenomenon was unnatural in the extreme. She owed it to Cub to explain this, but hardly knew where to begin. It was like telling a story of childhood damage, backing up to the unhappy parents, then the unhappy grandparents, trying to find the whole truth.
“The trouble with that,” she said finally, “with what those guys are saying about the butterflies, is that it’s all centered around what they want. They need things to be a certain way, financially, so they think nature will organize itself around what suits them.”
Cub seemed to consider this. “What else can they do, though?”