“I do. Devary University, in New Mexico. I did my graduate studies at Harvard, and that”—he gave Preston a knowing look—“is a very cold place.”

“You came all the way here from New Mexico?” Cub asked. “Sheez! That’s what, two thousand miles? How long a drive is that?”

“I came by plane. It’s a long ride in a small seat, I can tell you that, my friend.”

“I’ve not been on an airplane, nor my wife either one,” Cub said, with unbridled awe. Cub himself was an accessory to this voyage; his small place in the world had appeared on the map of the learned man. A dining event of national proportions. Dellarobia felt as if she’d received a blow to the head.

“You came here because you’re one of the people who study these monarchs,” she said.

“You are exactly right. I spent the day doing a quick census up there.”

Quick, she thought, as in nine hours. Had he counted them all? “So, you do what, experiments, or observations? And write up what you find out?”

He nodded. “A dissertation, articles, a couple of books. All on the monarch.”

“A couple of books,” she said to this man, recalling his look when she’d informed him, They’re called monarchs. So there were worse things than feeding meat loaf to a vegetarian. Like blabbing wiki-facts to the person who probably discovered them in the first place. She was in the same camp with her blithe, cheese-covered daughter here, acting like a toddler with food on her face. Minus the good excuse of actually being one.

Preston, on the other hand, appeared keen to crawl into the man’s lap, and Cub wasn’t far behind him. Only Cordie remained aloof, putting the finishing touches on her composition, getting her hair into play. Ovid Byron did not seem insulted by any of it. He was helping himself to seconds on the casserole.

“So,” Dellarobia asked, “what kinds of things would you study, on a monarch?”

He finished chewing a mouthful before he spoke. “Things that probably sound very dull. Taxonomy, evolution of migratory behavior, the effect of parasitic tachinid flies, the energetics of flight. Population dynamics, genetic drift. And as of today, the most interesting and alarming question anyone in the field has yet considered, I think. Why a major portion of the monarch population that has overwintered in Mexico since God set it loose there, as you say, would instead aggregate in the southern Appalachians, for the first time in recorded history, on the farm of the family Turnbow.”

They all stared, to hear their family name at the end of a sentence like that.

Dellarobia’s eye caught the remains of a pink balloon dangling from the fixture over the table, the months-old vestige of a birthday party she had overlooked in today’s cleaning binge and many others. Small, limp, and shriveled, it looked like an insulted testicle, and although she obviously didn’t have those, she could guess. It pretty well went to her state of mind. You get racked, you keep going, but merciful heavens the hurt.

“Mr. Byron,” she said, “why did you let me rattle on like that through half of supper? When you ought to have been telling us about the monarchs?”

He laughed and hung his head, feigning remorse to put her at ease, she could see that. “Forgive me, Dellarobia. It’s a selfish habit. I never learn anything from listening to myself.”

6

Span of a Continent

Preston gave up hoping for a white Christmas and asked his mother if Santa knew how to drive a boat. That’s the kind of December they were having. It fell on them in sheets and gushes, not normal rain anymore but water flung at the windows as if from a bucket. At times it came through the screens, visibility zero, and gusts of air seemed to burst from the ground, swirling the deluge around in clouds of spray. Groundwater was rising everywhere. The front yard became a flat, grassy pool. Dellarobia couldn’t let the kids play out there unless they wanted to pull on their rubber boots and splat around on it. She would have considered putting them in their swimsuits, if it were just a hair warmer, so they could run around as they did in summertime under the sprinkler.

But this was winter, the dead of it. Johnny Midgeon on the morning radio show sang “I’m Dreaming of a Wet Christmas,” inventing new verses daily, of which Dellarobia had had enough. The rain made her want to bawl. For days without cease it had lashed the window casings and seeped under the kitchen door, puddling on the linoleum. She got tired of mopping and blocked it with rolled-up towels. The times seemed biblical. Save me, O God, for the waters have come up to my neck: that line in particular she remembered, from the Psalms, because it sounded dramatic and modern, like something Dovey would say.

Just now Dellarobia was jonesing to step out on the back porch for a very quick smoke, but was thwarted by the pink roll of towel that lay at the bottom of the door like a dank, fat snake. She knew that thing would be cold to the touch, like something dead. She fingered the cigarette pack in her sweatshirt pocket, feeling trapped. Cordie sat on the floor, playing with her toy telephone. Dellarobia was trying hard to raise her kids unfumigated by secondhand smoke. What would Mrs. Noah do? Their house was becoming a boat, her family launched out to sea.

She pulled the door open gently, shoving the pink snake with it, noticing nose prints that covered the storm door up to a height of two feet. They weren’t put there by the dogs, either. She left both the inner and outer doors propped open so she could listen for Cordie and slid out to the back porch to light up, inhaling and slowly exhaling a long, silent exclamation mark at what she beheld. The pond was completely blown out. The drainage gully down the center of the pasture had swollen into a persistent, gushing creek. After last night’s strong winds, a fresh raft of sticks and small trees had washed down into the pasture and were strewn down the full length of the hill, pinned on their sides like little dams so the runnel broadened and poured over each one in turn. No creek had ever run here, in any year Cub could remember, and now a series of waterfalls climbed the hill like a staircase. Her eye was not used to so much flickering motion back there. It made her fretful. Piles of dark detritus lay in leafy clumps at the edges where the flow had receded, and these, she knew, were not leaves but corpses. The latest round of insect invasion that had swamped her life. Before this year she had hardly looked a butterfly in the face, and now they were star players in her own domestic drama. Which was officially no longer just domestic. She eyed Dr. Byron’s camper for signs of life.