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They rounded a bend in the trail and could see the whole dark greenthe buray teeth grinning through the dark trees Wherever sun fell on thelowed 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?"
"Hoould I?"
He said no uiltywhat he implied He knew she’d been up here? No possibility s 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 souely understood it to be a touchy topic, but now she got it The fale Probably she should not have asked
"The extension fellows told hihty, and they’s looking for so 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 the thehosts of Christe 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 Coeriatric trees Ghosts of bad ti it up, but she knew so Mexican workers for the winter labor Presumably the same o hoeese at Great Lick that so 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 soo for a substantially clipped advance on Cub’s paycheck if the bills caether Christ caain, with a worse pay scale
Conversation ceased while they mounted a steep section of the rutted trail, then canized as the spot where she’d stopped for a snize the filter of her brand if he saw it She felt strung out from nerves and exhaustion Soon they would round the ain 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 theup the pace
Hester seeed from her routine She hummed steadily under her breath in a thin, monotonous way So Dellarobia could not ien They were all out of shape except Hester, who stayed ihts Dellarobia counted steps toher feet She noticed little darts in the trail, first one and then round like litter They were the sa 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 caolden darts filled the whole of the air, swirling like leaves in a s 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 aht fishes They filled the sky Out across the valley, the air itself glowed golden Every tree on the farflame, and that, of course, was butterflies She had carried this vision inside herself for so nancy The fire was alive, and incoation of flame-colored insects
This tiht 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, evenbranches seeht Of butterflies The verity of that took her breath AHer ht to be the domain of teachers and pure invention
"Great day in the o," Bear said "Whatever the hell that is, it can’t be a dauht run into one of those governered"
"No sir," said Bear "I believe there’s ot people"
The nuued Butterflies rested and crawled even on the path around their feet, giving the i 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 recenthis 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 alrass of the world, she couldn’t recall having spent two minutes alone with a butterfly