Free Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver

eyes from Hester’s skinny bottom in sagging Levi’s, and trusted that Cub was finding her own rear view more pleasing. Whenever she complained of being so small, Cub told her she was a sports car: no junk in the trunk, but all you need for speed. Maybe that’s how he was keeping his feet moving. Back before marriage, she’d known the power of being physically admired, changing the energy of a room by walking into it. She wondered if that was her problem, missing that. Falling for guys who flattered her. It seemed so shallow and despicable, she hoped that was not the measure of her worth. She peered off through the woods, seeing nothing altered in the last two weeks except for a greater barrenness among the trees. And herself, of course. Nothing had changed except every conscious minute and a strange fire in her dreams.
    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