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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 oay, 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 hiht hoazines at school and taped thees, much like those his father had once assembled with pictures of Captain Fantastic and Jesus With all his ht Preston wanted to be a scientist and study animals But in the lab Dellarobia listened to Ovid and Pete speaking hopelessly about so ht-stricken Africa, the polar bears on the one," 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 wereof 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 hetoward a future like so under the tide She didn’t kno scientists bore such knowledge People had to ined 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 hiht she crossed the sa there on her way to the lab to record the previous day’s high and low temperatures He used these to esti up their fat reserves when they stayed quiet in the trees, versus warerous 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 caer’s sideShe pressed the s and then zero the to master but it pleased her to do it, like Preston with his watch Ovid showed her how to h and low te across the month with the survival zone forpencil line on graph paper that first ain now she pictured the man in a bowler hat with a white-painted face, expressionless, raising and lowering black-slippered feet in slowhis wire Life in the balance She couldn’t say where she had seen hilimpse as Cub cruised past on his way to e was in her mind as she approached the ca, Ovid did not expect her to be in the lab on Saturdays, though he and Pete usually were Today she’d pulled on her boots and coat in order to help Cub walk the fence line behind their house, at Hester’s request She had decided to nant ewes over here Cub had already taken Cordie and Preston over for his mother to babysit while they worked on the fence, but now he sat procrastinating in the kitchen, drinking a third cup of coffee and listening to Johnny Midgeon’s uitated as alith her husband’s balky progress To defuse her i’s te for her notebook, and that hen she saw Ovid Byron naked
Just a glance Not his face, it was frohs, approximately She turned away so quickly she nearly fell down in theHoas she supposed to knoas in there? He was always up at dawn The camper’s pleated curtains with their snap closures stayed perrown used to his durable privacy, never noticing that the other side facing the ht be open Of course he would want that view of the high ridge, which she took for granted She stu Toht was excruciating Going to work, ever, see hiain His eyes were no part of the snapshot, only the long-waisted torso she could not erase, burned onto her retina The coffee-colored skin, the surprisingly sculpted abdohtly curled hair like a funnel cloud down the center of his chest, nearly touching down on the dark pubic ground She wondered how she could have seen soanything ht on the smooth planes she only understood after the fact to be a body Truly, she hadn’t seen what she’d seen She was sure Cub would see guilt on her face when she entered the back door, scraping her boots, looking at the doorsill
"Okay, let’s get this over with," Cub said, not even looking at her He rose froht of his farm coat from the back of a chair She felt unaccountably emptied out Even this did not matter, then, that she had seen a man so important to her in his nakedness, a biblical act She felt invisible
She had failed to record the temperature, obviously The notebook was still in her hand as they stepped out the kitchen door She slid it quickly onto the junk table next to a flowerpot jaarette butts, a still life of her sins, before descending the two steps down froht now But that was the regular forave their lives for a smoke Cub shivered copiously inside his coat and reset the cap on his head, not one of the countless woolen ones knitted for him by Hester but a baseball cap, a poor choice for such a coldpeople to put on clothes If her children and husband couldn’t figure out it inter, the world would still turn
The te in the early hours Frost lay on the ground in patterns, a white powder so dry and fine it flew up in tiny storms of confetti-frost ahead of their boots as they walked They followed the path of the creek up the left side of the pasture, wordlessly agreeing to cli of frost outlined a zone of te both sides of the creek where the water had held in war the solid pelt of butterflies clinging to the great coluiant water bottles Watercress she had never noticed grew up through the surface of this creek, frozen to blackness in the air above but still green underwater, and also alive in a narrow zone an inch above the surface of thecreek She had heard him say the word thered the clubbish vocabulary at first, but realized now she had crossed sos a person could see Even iffirst, to see it