Barbara Kingsolver's work has been translated into more than twenty languages and has earned a devoted readership at home and abroad. She was awarded the National Humanities Medal, our country's highest honor for service through the arts. She received the 2011 Dayton Literary Peace Prize for the body of her work, and in 2010 won Britain's Orange Prize for The Lacuna. Before she made her living as a writer, Kingsolver earned degrees in biology and worked as a scientist. She now lives with her family on a farm in southern Appalachia.

Flight Behavior

HarperCollins Publishers

Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

The Measure of a Man

A certain feeling comes from throwing your good life away andit is one part rapture. Or so it seemed for now, to a woman withflame-colored hair who marched uphill to meet her demise.Innocence was no part of this. She knew her own recklessness andmarveled, really, at how one hard little flint of thrill could outweighthe pillowy, suffocating aftermath of a long disgrace. Theshame and loss would infect her children too, that was the worstof it, in a town where everyone knew them. Even the teenagecashiers at the grocery would take an edge with her after this,clicking painted fingernails on the counter while she wrote hercheck, eying the oatmeal and frozen peas of an unhinged familyand exchanging looks with the bag boy: She's that one. Howthey admired their own steadfast lives. Right up to the day whenhope in all its versions went out of stock, including the crummydiscount brands, and the heart had just one instruction left: run.Like a hunted animal, or a racehorse, winning or losing feltexactly alike at this stage, with the same coursing of blood andshortness of breath. She smoked too much, that was anothermortification to throw in with the others. But she had cast herlot. Plenty of people took this way out, looking future damagein the eye and naming it something else. Now it was her turn.She could claim the tightness in her chest and call it bliss, ratherthan the same breathlessness she could be feeling at home rightnow while toting a heavy laundry basket, behaving like asensible mother of two.

The children were with her mother-in-law. She'd dropped offthose babies this morning on barely sufficient grounds and itmight just kill her to dwell on that now. Their little faces turnedup to her like the round hearts of two daisies: She loves me, loves menot. All those hopes placed in such a precarious vessel. Realistically,the family could be totaled. That was the word, like awrecked car wrapped around a telephone pole, no salvageableparts. No husband worth having is going to forgive adultery ifit comes to that. And still she felt pulled up this incline by thehand whose touch might bring down all she knew. Maybe sheeven craved the collapse, with an appetite larger than sense.

At the top of the pasture she leaned against the fence to catchup on oxygen, feeling the slight give of the netted woven wireagainst her back. No safety net. Unsnapped her purse, countedher cigarettes, discovered she'd have to ration them. This hadnot been a thinking ahead kind of day. The suede jacket waswrong, too warm, and what if it rained? She frowned at theNovember sky. It was the same dull, stippled ceiling that had beenup there last week, last month, forever. All summer. Whoeverwas in charge of weather had put a recall on blue and nailed upthis mess of dirty white sky like a lousy drywall job. The pasturepond seemed to reflect more light off its surface than thesky itself had to offer. The sheep huddled close around its shineas if they too had given up on the sun and settled for secondbest. Little puddles winked all the way down Highway 7 towardFeathertown and out the other side of it, toward Cleary, a longtrail of potholes glinting with watery light.

The sheep in the field below, the Turnbow family land, the white framehouse she had not slept outside for a single night in ten-plus yearsof marriage: that was pretty much it. The wide screen version of her lifesince age seventeen. Not including the brief hospital excursions,childbirth related. Apparently, today was the day she walked out of the picture.Distinguishing herself from the luckless sheep that stood down therein the mud surrounded by the deep stiletto holes of their footprints,enduring life's bad deals. They'd worn their heavy wool through themuggy summer and now that winter was almost here, theywould be shorn. Life was just one long proposition they neversaw coming. Their pasture looked drowned. In the next fieldover, the orchard painstakingly planted by the neighbors lastyear was now dying under the rain. From here it all looked fixedand strange, even her house, probably due to the angle. She onlylooked out those windows, never into them, given the companyshe kept with people who rolled plastic trucks on the floor.Certainly she never climbed up here to check out the domesticarrangement. The condition of the roof was not encouraging.Her car was parked in the only spot in the county that wouldn'tincite gossip, her own driveway. People knew that station wagonand still tended to think of it as belonging to her mother. She'drescued this one thing from her mother's death, an unreliable setof wheels adequate for short errands with kids in tow. The priceof that was a disquieting sense of Mama still coming along forthe ride, her tiny frame wedged between the kids' car seats,reaching across them to ash her cigarette out the open window. Butno such thoughts today. This morning after leaving the kids atHester's, she had floored it for the half mile back home, feelinghigh and wobbly as a kite. Went back into the house only to brushher teeth, shed her glasses and put on eyeliner, no other preparationsnecessary prior to lighting out her own back door to wreckher reputation. The electric pulse of desire buzzed through herbody like an alarm clock gone off in the early light, setting inmotion all the things in a day that can't be stopped.

She picked her way now through churned up mud along thefence, lifted the chain fastener on the steel gate and slippedthrough. Beyond the fence an ordinary wildness of ironweed andbriar thickets began. An old road cut through it, long unused,crisscrossed by wild raspberries bending across in tall arcs. Inrecent times she'd come up here only once, berry picking with herhusband Cub and some of his buddies two summers ago, and itdefinitely wasn't her idea. She'd been barrel round pregnantwith Cordelia and thinking she might be called on to deliver thechild right there in the brambles, that's how she knew whichJune that was. So Preston would have been four. She rememberedhim holding her hand for dear life while Cub's hotdogfriends scared them half to death about snakes. These raspberrycanes were a weird color for a plant, she noticed now, not thatshe would know nature if it bit her. But bright pink? The colorof a frosted lipstick some thirteen-year old might want to wear.She had probably skipped that phase, heading straight forImmoral Coral and Come-to-Bed Red.

The saplings gave way to a forest. The trees clenched the lastof summer's leaves in their fists, and something made her thinkof Lot's wife in the Bible, who turned back for one last look athome. Poor woman, struck into a pile of salt for such a smalldisobedience. She did not look back, but headed into the woodson the rutted track her husband's family had always called theHigh Road. As if, she thought. Taking the High Road to damnation;the irony had failed to cross her mind when she devisedthis plan. The road up the mountain must have been cut forlogging in the old days. The woods had grown back. Cub andhis dad drove the all terrain up this way sometimes to get to thelittle shack on the ridge they used for turkey hunting. Or theyused to do that, once upon a time, when the combined weightof the Turnbow men senior and junior was about sixty poundsless than the present day. Back when they used their feet forsomething other than framing the view of the television set.The road must have been poorly maintained even then. Sherecalled their taking the chain saw for clearing windfall.

She and Cub used to come up here by themselves in those days,too, for so called picnics. But not once since Cordie and Prestonwere born. It was crazy to suggest the turkey blind on the familyproperty as a place to hook up. Trysting place, she thought, wordsfrom a storybook. And: No sense prettying up dirt, words from amother-in-law. So where else were they supposed to go? Herown bedroom, strewn with inside out work shirts and a onelegged Barbie lying there staring while a person tried to get inthe mood? Good night. The Wayside Inn out on the highwaywas a pitiful place to begin with, before you even started deductingthe wages of sin. Mike Bush at the counter would greether by name: How do, Mrs. Turnbow, now how's them kids?The path became confusing suddenly, blocked with branches.The upper part of a fallen tree lay across it, so immense she hadto climb through, stepping between sideways limbs with clammyleaves still attached. Would he find his way through this orwould the wall of branches turn him back? Her heart bumpedaround at the thought of losing this one sweet chance. Onceshe'd passed through, she considered waiting. But he knew theway. He said he'd hunted from that turkey blind some seasonsago. With his own friends, no one she or Cub knew. Younger,his friends would be.

She smacked her palms together to shuck off the damp gritand viewed the corpse of the fallen monster. The tree was intact,not cut or broken by wind. What a waste. After maybe centuriesof survival it had simply let go of the ground, the wide fist of itsroot mass ripped up and resting naked above a clay gash in thewooded mountainside. Like herself, it just seemed to have comeloose from its station in life. After so much rain upon rain thiswas happening all over the county, she'd seen it in the paper,massive trees keeling over in the night to ravage a family'sroof line or flatten the car in the drive. The ground took wateruntil it was nothing but soft sponge and the trees fell out of it.Near Great Lick a whole hillside of mature timber had plummetedtogether, making a landslide of splintered trunks, rock and rill.People were shocked, even men like her father-in-law who tendedto meet any terrible news with "That's nothing," claiming alreadyto have seen everything in creation. But they'd never seenthis and had come to confessing it. In such strange times, theymay have thought God was taking a hand in things and wouldthus take note of a lie.

The road turned up steeply toward the ridge and petered outto a single track. A mile yet to go, maybe, she was just guessing.She tried to get a move on, imagining that her long, straight redhair swinging behind her might look athletic, but in truth herfeet smarted badly and so did her lungs. New boots. There wasone more ruin to add to the pile. The boots were genuine calfskin,dark maroon, hand-tooled uppers and glossy pointed toes,so beautiful she'd nearly cried when she found them at SecondTime Around while looking for something decent for Prestonto wear to kindergarten. The boots were six dollars, in like newcondition, the soles barely scuffed. Someone in the world hadsuch a life, they could take one little walk in expensive newboots and then pitch them out, just because. The boots weren'ta perfect fit but they looked good on, so she bought them, herfirst purchase for herself in over a year, not counting hygieneproducts. Or cigarettes, which she surely did not count. She'dkept the boots hidden from Cub for no good reason but to keepthem precious. Something of her own. In the normal course offamily events, every other thing got snatched from her hands:her hairbrush, the TV clicker, the soft middle part of hersandwich, the last Coke she'd waited all afternoon to open.She'd once had a dream of birds pulling the hair from her headin sheaves to make their red nests.

Not that Cub would notice if she wore these boots, and notthat she'd had occasion. So why put them on this morning towalk up a muddy hollow in the wettest fall on record? Blackleaves clung like dark fish scales to the tooled leather halfway upher calves. This day had played in her head like a movie onround-the-clock reruns, that's why. With an underemployedmind clocking in and out of a scene that smelled of urine andmashed bananas, daydreaming was one thing she had in abundance.

The price was right. She thought about the kissingmostly, when she sat down to manufacture a fantasy in earnest,but other details came along, setting and wardrobe. This mightbe a difference in how men and women devised their fantasies,she thought. Clothes: present or absent. The calfskin boots werea part of it, as were the suede jacket borrowed from her bestfriend, Dovey, and the red chenille scarf around her neck, thingshe would slowly take off of her. She'd pictured it being cold like this,too. Her flyaway thoughts had not blurred out the inconveniencesaltogether. Her flushed cheeks, his warm hands smoothingthe orange hair at her temples, all these were part and parcel.She'd pulled on the boots this morning as if she'd received writteninstructions.
(Continues...)Excerpted from Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver. Copyright © 2012 by Barbara Kingsolver. Excerpted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
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