Cub examined his fingernails. Hester kept glancing at the framed photo on Bobby’s desk, probably wishing her own family had turned out that well. It was a dated picture, Winnie Ogle wore a ponytail in a scrunchy, and the twins were just toddlers. Dellarobia had lately seen those girls helping out in the nursery, preteens now, both a bit burdened by the look of too much metal around the face: braces, glasses, loopy earrings. But sweet girls, responsible kids. Dellarobia’s eyes wandered around the office. It was no-fuss, like Bobby, with a simple cross on the wall and one of those colossal Bibles on a stand, the type that would break bones if dropped. He had a less menacing New American translation on his desk, she noted, pressed between a pair of weird, crudely made ceramic bookends that looked like fists. As if some superhero were trying to squeeze scripture juice out of that thing. A congregant must have made the bookends. This in fact she observed to be a theme of Bobby’s decor: the Kleenex box wore a brown and pink crocheted cozy, and three hand-carved wooden wise men marched alongside his open desk calendar, carrying paper clips, Sharpies, and a yellow cube of Post-it notes. Dellarobia couldn’t decide if that was tacky or astute. If born to the present day, what would the Savior find handier than Post-its?
At length Bobby laid the pages down on his desk and folded his hands together. “There’s nothing in that contract to hurt you,” he said, looking Bear directly in the eye. “Hester is right. You return that earnest money, and you’re clear. She’s got it worked out on the spreadsheet there, with the balloon paid off by your extra income this winter and the rest of the loan refinanced. I’d consider your son’s advice about selling off some of that equipment, too, to keep your machine shop going. There are folks in this congregation who’d be happy to send work your way. Contractors and so on.”
Dellarobia could see this rankled Bear, who would not want his working life in any way the concern of this flock. Bobby apparently saw this too, and subtly shifted gears. “Your financial concerns can be met. I think that’s clear. That land has value to your family the way it is.”
She was impressed with Bobby’s acuity in negotiating these rocky shoals. But he still sounded a lot like a guy at the bank turning you down for a loan: overly benevolent, in a manner intrinsically related to the fact that he’s about to sock you. Bear sat on the front of his chair with his big-knuckled hands on his knees and his elbows out, essentially in a crouch, ready to stand at any moment, if not lunge. Everything about Bobby Ogle must infuriate him right now. The new beard, the bank-manager demeanor, the undeviating spell cast over Hester.
“Well, sir,” Bear said, “I’m not aiming to return that money. Not when there’s trees standing that could be trees laying down. All due respect, Bobby, that’s money in the bank and it’s my call.”
Bobby nodded, leaned back, folded his hands behind his head. “What I hear you saying is you want to log that mountain because it’s yours, and because you can. And my job here I think is to warn you about the sin of pride.”
Cub’s head came up suddenly as if someone had grabbed him by the chin. “That’s true, Dad. When a man is greedy and gets too big for his britches, he pays for that. You’ve seen that.”
“You pay with your health and your peace of mind,” Hester agreed. “You heard Cub about the well water. If you can’t live by the laws the Lord God made for this world, they’ll go into effect regardless.”
“My name’s on the deed of that land too, Dad. My family’s house.”
“That land was bestowed on us for a purpose,” Hester said. “And I don’t think it was to end up looking like a pile of trash.”
For a moment Bobby’s and Dellarobia’s eyes met, as bystanders to the family arbitration. To all appearances, they could just as well have fought it out in their own living room, but Bobby probably did this all the time. Witnesses changed the stakes. Not just the pastor but this setting, those mountains in the window, the mondo Bible containing thirty pounds of higher laws. And Bear in his Sunday suit, this was no small part of it either. He was an older and smaller man here than at home in his work clothes, without access to his ordinary tools of contempt. It crossed Dellarobia’s mind that he would be buried in that suit. Bobby now advised him that strength did not come from laying down his own law on the land. Strength came from elsewhere. Bear, apparently at the end of his argument rope, responded by calling Bobby a tree hugger.
Bobby looked amused. “Well now, what are you, Burley, a tree puncher? What have you got against the Lord’s trees?”
In a sense the meeting went like the faked wrestling matches on TV, Dellarobia thought, where the winner is called abruptly for no discernible reason. Suddenly Bear was defeated and Bobby was beaming, congratulatory, leading the family in prayer. Hester seemed swollen with admiration, the nearest thing to maternity she’d ever seen in her mother-in-law. Too bad it was not her son but Bobby in those high beams, and too bad Bobby didn’t notice. His eyes were already sneaking toward the big open calendar on his desk, where the squares of his days were jammed with little handwritten notes in various inks. Maybe Dellarobia was mistaken about his distraction. But she did not imagine the condescending way he patted Hester’s shoulder when they left. Doing his best, she knew. Bobby’s flock was needy and his duties large.
Dellarobia went to collect the kids and brought them out to the empty parking lot, where her station wagon and Bear’s red pickup sat together like family dogs. Bear had one hand on the roof of his truck and was slicing the air with the other as he spoke to Cub, regaling him with the specs on some piece of equipment. A wood splitter. Cub and his father had been selling firewood, spoils of all the downed timber after the winter’s floods. Bear now explained that this fellow he knew was selling the splitter for next to nothing because it needed a little work, one of those fools who’d throw out something rather than fix it. Bear’s voice had a pit-bull growl underneath the dimensions of this bargain, and his blood pressure was still measurable in his face. Dellarobia knew they probably had not seen the last of his arguments about the logging. She watched the three of them: accusatory father, contrite son, mother standing ten feet away ignoring the grandkids, absorbed in untwisting the strap of her yellow purse. As if everything that had just happened to this family had not happened. What was with these people?