Dellarobia felt the doubtful stares. She’d been sitting it out every week in the café, drinking coffee and making her grocery list, in no way deserving of a miracle. And yet a small shatter of applause broke out, like a handful of gravel on a tin shed. Someone very close to them shouted: “Heaven be praised, Sister Turnbow has seen the wonders!” It was the man who’d come in late, with the sporty sunglasses on his head. And here she thought he’d been checking her out. Grace comes, motion and light from nowhere on that mountain in her darkest hour. She felt the dizziness coming back. It didn’t help anything that she’d skipped breakfast. Cub slipped his arms under hers from behind, which may have looked like some unusual form of affection, but it was all that kept her vertical. The last thing she wanted this morning or ever was to be a display model on the floor of a church, but Cub walked her gently to the end of the pew and posted her in the center aisle, like a holy statue.

“Sister Turnbow,” Bobby said, “your family has received special grace. Friends, are you with me? Sister Hester, will you covenant with us?”

It seemed like a dare. Hester looked like she’d swallowed a chicken bone. She was accustomed to special favor in all things church, and taking second fiddle to Dellarobia was not on the program. But there would be no slugging it out here. She conceded, “I will.”

Pastor Ogle beamed first at Hester, then Dellarobia, as if lifting a big bouquet from the arms of one to the other. Welcome to the fold. He asked all those present to covenant with him in celebrating a beautiful vision of our Lord’s abundant garden.

The doors at the back of the sanctuary flew open, admitting Brenda and Crystal in their own raucous packet of atmosphere. Actually it was Crystal versus Brenda’s whole family, broken fingers and all. The mother led the pack, trailed by Brenda and the other two daughters, then Crystal, her hellion boys, and a slew of kids from the nursery swarming around the adults like sweat bees.

“I’m sorry for the interruption, Bobby,” Brenda’s mother said, cocking one hand on her hip, doing a poor job of looking sorry. That family reminded Dellarobia of the Judds, with the mother trying to out-pretty and out-skinny her daughters. Her hairdo was a fright, however. The battle must have come to blows. Pastor Ogle’s hands came together as his mouth made a little O.

“I beg your pardon,” she repeated, “but me and my daughters need to leave immediately for Brenda’s personal safety, and we have got to return these children to their parents.” She glanced around and made a defiant little side-to-side move with her head, like the saucy girls in music videos. “I’m sorry. If you all were about done.”

The children charged down the aisle with Preston leading, headed for Dellarobia. He grabbed the hem of her sweater and pulled hard, as if he meant to climb her like a tree, and Cordie followed, wailing, with her arms upstretched. Other kids followed like panicked cats, and within seconds were hanging on Dellarobia too. Cub held on hard, keeping her upright. She felt like the pole in that famous statue of soldiers grappling the flag at Iwo Jima.

“Suffer the little children to come unto me,” said Pastor Ogle with an appealing little chuckle, recovering his calm. “My friends, I want you to celebrate with all these little ones. I think they must know our sister here has received the grace.”

Brenda’s mother marched out one hip at a time, exiting with her entourage. The heavy double doors folded closed behind them as if in silent prayer. All eyes circled back from the rear of the sanctuary to the front, wheeling like a great flock of blackbirds flushed up from one place and settling down on another: the spectacle of Sister Turnbow. And it wasn’t Hester. The family had a new beacon.

4

Talk of a Town

Hester called the butterflies “King Billies.” She seemed to think each one should be addressed as the king himself. “There he goes, King Billy,” she would say.

She said it now, in her kitchen. Dellarobia glanced up from her work but from where she sat with her back to the window, she couldn’t see it. Instead she watched the butterfly pass in a reflected way as Hester, Crystal, and Valia all faced the morning-lit window and followed the motion with their eyes. Even the collies stood up, ears pricked, alert to the unusual human attention. If someone asked her later, Dellarobia realized, she might think she’d seen that butterfly herself. False witness was so easy to bear.

Seeing King Billy down here around Hester’s house was becoming an everyday thing. On Thanksgiving Day, while Cub and the male Turnbow cousins were in the yard reliving their football days, Dellarobia and Preston had sat on the porch steps and counted the passing of eleven butterflies. She suspected they’d been sneaking up the valley to their convention all summer long. Possibly even for years. Everyone could have missed them, given the tendency for all eyes to remain glued to the road ahead and last month’s bills. Bear’s theory was that the insects had suddenly hatched and crawled out of the trees, which Dellarobia knew was ignorant. If they’d hatched, something had to go up there first and lay an egg. Even miracles were somehow part of a package deal.

“Where’d that name come from, King Billy?” Valia asked. She was fiddling with wet skeins of rainbow-colored wool that hung from an old wooden laundry rack and dripped onto a tarp spread underneath. She poofed and lifted the loops of yarn like a hairdresser working on a punked-out client.

“It’s just something I learned from my old mommy,” Hester said. “Valia, honey, you need to quit fussing with those skeins or they’ll get felted together.”

Valia pulled her hands back as if scorched. Hester was poking at her dye pots and didn’t notice. She was looking particularly witchy today in her most ruined cowgirl boots and stained apron, with three enormous cauldrons boiling on her old monster of a stove. Witchy with a country-western motif. This was one of Hester’s winter projects, dyeing all the yarn that remained unsold when the summer farm market in Feathertown closed for the season. The natural colors did okay, but people reached their limits on gray and brown. Hester’s solution was to perk it up with color, and her instinct about that was right, every spring when the booth reopened, the customers were so fed up with winter they’d reach for anything bright. Like zombies stalking a heartbeat.

Dellarobia sat at the table preparing skeins for dyeing, with Cordelia close by in the wooden high chair that had once held her father and maybe her grandfather. This house was stuffed with Turnbow antiques, of the half-their-screws-loose variety. Dellarobia unfailingly checked the legs on that chair before inserting any child of her own, and had furthermore tied Cordie in with a dishtowel because there was no strap. The chair pre-dated the whole notion of child safety. Cordie was eating applesauce and occupying herself obligingly with the toy she called Ammafarm, a red plastic barn with levers that made animals come out and bleat their sounds. A city child would get a sorry education from a toy like this, as the cow, horse, dog, and chicken were approximately equal in size and all uttered the same asthmatic wheeze. None of that bothered Cordelia. “Moooo!” she cried into the face of the petite cow that emerged from its flimsy door.