“Is that it?” she asked.
“No. There are five other categories.”
“Let’s hear them.”
“We don’t have to.”
“No really. You came all this way. To get us on board.”
“Okay,” he said, sounding a little nervous. “Skipping ahead to Everyday Necessities. Try your best to buy reused. Use Craigslist.”
“What is that?” she asked, although she had a pretty good idea.
“Craigslist,” he said. “On the Internet.”
“I don’t have a computer.”
Mr. Akins moved quickly to cover his bases. “Or find your local reuse stores.”
“Find them,” she said.
“Plan your errand route so you drive less!” Now he sounded belligerent.
“Who wouldn’t do that? With what gas costs?”
He went quiet again.
“What are the other categories?” she asked.
“Home-office-household-travel-financial. We don’t have to go on.”
She put down the binoculars and looked at him. She’d lost track of the butterflies anyway. “Let’s hear financial.”
Mr. Akins read in a rushed monotone: “Switch some of your stocks and mutual funds to socially responsible investments, skip, skip. Okay, Home-slash-Office. Make sure old computers get recycled. Turn your monitor off when not in use. I think we’ve got a lot of not applicable here.” He gave her a fearful look. “Household?”
“Good one,” she said. “I have a household.”
“Switch your light bulbs to CFLs. Upgrade to energy-efficient appliances.”
She needed to talk to Ovid again about the electric bill, because February’s had come in. Electricity, on or off, being the household question of note. “Sorry,” she said. “If it involves buying something, check me in the bad-girl column.”
“But the savings are worth the cost.”
“I’m sure.”
“Okay. Set your thermostat two degrees cooler in winter and higher in summer.”
“Than what?” she asked.
“Than where it is at present.”
“Technically that’s impossible. You’d just keep moving it down forever.”
Leighton evidently took this for a refusal, and leaped in for the kill. “Well, there’s only one planet! We all have to share.”
She nodded slowly, exercising what she felt was laudable restraint.
“Almost done,” he said. “Transportation. Ride your bike or use public transportation. Buy a low-emission vehicle. Sorry, no buying anything, you said. Properly inflate your tires and maintain your car.”
“My husband’s truck is on its third engine. Is that properly maintaining?”
“I would say so, definitely.”
She had a feeling Leighton Akins would not find the bank. He and his low-emission vehicle would just head on out of here. She and Dimmit Slaughter would claim their place among his tales of adversity.
“Okay, this is the last one,” he said. “Fly less.”
“Fly less,” she repeated.
He looked at his paper as if receiving orders from some higher authority. “That’s all she wrote. Fly less.”
12
Kinship Systems
The pregnant ewes looked like woolly barrels on table legs. They had scattered for their morning graze, facing this way and that all over the muddy field, but froze in an identical aspect of attention when the women entered the pasture. Every head faced them, each triangular face framed by its V of splayed horns. A thin horizontal cloud drifted from each set of nostrils in the cold morning light, trails of ruminant breathing. All those present waited for a cue to the next move, including the collie at Hester’s side and Dellarobia herself. She’d volunteered to help vaccinate the ewes this Saturday, with little idea of how it would go. Hester gave the grain bucket a loud shake, and that was the answer to all questions; the sheep began slowly to move. Hester whistled Charlie out in a wide arc to the right and the collie raced uphill in a smooth gallop, gleaming joy in black and white. The old boy still had it. Charlie was thirteen, in this family longer than Dellarobia herself. The sheep responded to the dog’s pressure, gathering in.
“Charlie, look back,” Hester called, and he altered his course, aiming for the back fence. A trio of white yearlings had perched atop a rock pile but gave up their game at the dog’s approach and leaped down. Higher up the hill, though, four of the reddish brown ewes Hester called moorits stood their ground, camouflaged against the mud. Charlie dropped to a wolfish crouch and inched toward them, one white forepaw at a time, until these four also conceded to join the flock. The multicolored flow converged, moorit, white, black, and badgerfaced silvers all loping together downhill in their lumbering gait, rolling fore-and-aft like an unsynchronized troop of rocking horses.
They were pastured here for the higher ground, but after the past week of torrents any former notion of high ground was called into doubt. Dellarobia’s spattered house loomed drearily, as did the old barn that contained the lab and now also sheep when they needed shelter. The ewes paid no mind to the mud, only to their pregnancy-tuned hunger. Their hooves threw clots of muck high in the air as Hester led them into the barn, holding her bucket of sweet feed up out of their reach, a ponytailed pied piper in cowboy boots. She had induced Bear and Cub to repair the waist-high walls subdividing two large stalls inside the barn’s front gallery, enclosures well separated from the lab in the old milking parlor at the back. Still, Dellarobia sometimes heard the rustle and bleating of the ewes through the plastic-sheeted wall, especially on long rainy days when they all gathered restlessly under roof. Hester now wanted Cub to build lambing jugs, where new mothers with tiny lambs could be isolated safely from weather and trampling hooves. Lambing would begin in late March. One month hence.
The enriched warmth of the barn struck all Dellarobia’s senses at once as they entered. The presence of animals had changed this barn, a long-dead place smelling of dust and fuel oil transformed into an environment rich with the scents of sweet feed and manure. She stepped over shiny mounds of sheep droppings nested on the barn’s hay-covered floor. They looked like whole boxes of raisins dumped out in piles on a carpet, a sight she had seen, thanks to Cordelia. Hester let Charlie do most of the work, pressing the animals forward when asked, otherwise holding back with faultless restraint. Charlie was Roy’s sire, the older of the two collies. The kids loved Roy because he could be drawn into their romping and tussling, but Charlie was old-school, above all that.