Summary
On New Year’s day, Dovey comes over to Dellarobia’s in order to help her out with household tasks and chores. Dellarobia tells Dovey about their Christmas and how Mako, upon leaving to return to school, gave Dellarobia his watch so that she could give it to Preston for Christmas. Preston was overjoyed to receive the watch and exclaimed that the watch had proven to him that Santa was real, since the present was exactly what he had wanted. Dellarobia helps Dovey do her hair for a date and the two women discuss Ovid, who will be coming back to the farm the next week, along with Peter. Dovey hints at the fact that Dellarobia seems to have a crush on Ovid, but Dellarobia dismisses her, telling her that she’s seen Ovid wearing a ring and assumes him to be married.
Dellarobia tells Dovey that Ovid was planning on hiring more research assistants and that he had hinted she should apply for the job. She confesses that she feels underqualified and that Cub wouldn’t want her working. Dellarobia also fears Hester’s retaliation. Dovey pushes back, telling Dellarobia that she would help out with Preston and Cordie, and urges Dellarobia to apply. After they discuss various other topics, including a miscarriage that Dellarobia had at seventeen, Dovey jokes about a guy who stops by the grocery store where she works and flirts with her. Dovey describes him and Dellarobia realizes that the man Dovey is describing is Jimmy—the same man who Dellarobia initially wanted to have an affair with. She feels betrayed and idiotic for having fallen in love with someone who had been flirting with other women the whole time.
The next day, a news crew comes by Dellarobia’s house and asks to interview her about the butterflies. Dellarobia agrees and the two newscasters, Tina and Ron, drive Dellarobia and the kids out to the mountain in order to get some footage. Dellarobia becomes nervous in front of the camera and tells Tina how she had been trying to run away from her life when she saw the butterflies. Realizing she’s said too much, she asks Tina to cut that segment. However, the next night, Dovey calls Dellarobia and tells her that they’d aired the clip on CNN, with the newscasters hinting that Dellarobia had been attempting to commit suicide when she saw the butterflies. The clip rapidly spreads, causing Cub to worry that people will villainize him and Bear for wanting to tear down the trees. Dellarobia’s fame grows, with some even photoshopping her onto Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus” and dubbing her the patron saint of the butterflies.
The next chapter begins with Ovid interviewing Dellarobia for the research assistant position. During the interview, they begin to discuss Dellarobia’s high school education and she tells Ovid about the poor learning conditions at the local high school, where baseball and basketball coaches taught math and science, and no math education went beyond elementary pre-algebra. Ovid is horrified and tells her that he had already been struggling to find local volunteers to help out with the project—a task that had been easy in other areas where he’d worked. Dellarobia grows angry and tells him about the lack of state attention and funds dedicated to their region, a poor agricultural part of the state where college educations are irrelevant and few resources are available. They end things on a tense note, but Ovid still offers Dellarobia the position. He tells her they’re under pressure, since a winter storm could come and kill all the butterflies at any moment.
Ovid, Dellarobia, and Pete continue to discuss the butterflies. The conversation turns grim as Ovid tells Dellarobia about the devastating effects climate change will inevitably have, and how the butterflies are just one warning sign that is getting overlooked. Dellarobia tells Ovid and Pete that she keeps urging journalists to talk to the scientists, but Pete responds cynically, stating that the journalists don’t want to actually report news—they’re only interested in repeating what people already believe, and they interview Dellarobia because she has limited knowledge on the subject. Dellarobia feels targeted and tells Ovid and Pete that out of her entire high school class, she was the only one with the chance of going to college. She had been the only person who took the ACT, but because of the school’s inability to prepare her and the fact that she was already pregnant, she had not been able to score high enough.
The following day, Dellarobia starts working with Pete and Ovid. On her way to the lab, she runs into some high schoolers who are protesting the logging and points them toward Bear’s house. She and Ovid examine the butterflies and discover parasites, which could be a contributing factor to the butterfly’s new migration pattern, but he’s not certain if it’s a symptom or a cause.
Dellarobia continues to work at the lab. Ovid continues to teach her new tasks and give her more responsibilities, which lets her stay away from Hester and even cease regularly going to church. One morning, as she steps outside to record the temperature, she accidentally sees Ovid naked in his trailer. She immediately runs back inside but can’t help but feel conflicted and distraught by the occurrence, sure that Cub will sense her accidental indiscretion. Dellarobia and Cub head out to the farm grounds and talk about the butterflies and Dellarobia’s work with Ovid. She tries to tell him that the butterflies are here because of global warming but Cub doesn’t listen, making fun of the idea of climate change and telling her it’s not real.
Cub then tells Dellarobia that Crystal Estep has been stopping by the house, presumably to try and start an affair with Cub. Cub swears that he hasn’t done anything, but Dellarobia feels thrown off by the fact that she hadn’t seen any of the signs coming.
The next day a snowstorm hits the area and Ovid tells Dellarobia to come out to the mountain with pillowcases. Pete, Ovid, and a group of young boys who volunteer with the team are all gathered there. They begin to gather the butterflies and set up measurement devices, determined to work through the night to try and gather as much data while the cold sets in. Dellarobia offers to make the group some soup. Before she leaves, she and Ovid discuss climate change again and Ovid tells her about the disastrous changes going on around the world, even at this very moment.
Analysis
Much like in the preceding chapters, here the contrast between Ovid’s team and Dellarobia’s community is continually emphasized, most acutely during the conversation Ovid and Dellarobia have while Ovid interviews her for the research assistant position. As Dellarobia tells Ovid about her high school experience, Ovid has a difficult time fathoming how a school can function so poorly; basketball and baseball coaches teaching biology and having kids play sports instead of teaching, no math education beyond multiplication, and no students continuing on to attend college, are all features of her rural high school experience that Ovid finds intolerable.
Over the course of their conversation about high school, Dellarobia grows frustrated with Ovid’s inability to understand the cycles of poverty and under-resourced structures that make the education system so stunted. Where Ovid believes that the education system needs to improve, Dellarobia’s experience living in the area has pushed her to believe that there will always be some level of drastic inequality present—and her town is simply one that has, unluckily, become one of the places that are doomed to be poor. Her own experience proved this to her, since even when she had a chance to get out—going to Knoxville, a city, in order to take the ACT because of the promise she showed at school—she was unable to complete the test well enough due to the school’s inability to help her prepare and, on top of that, the fact that she was already pregnant with the child that she miscarried at seventeen.
Despite the fact that Dellarobia never got the chance to go to college, as she works with the research team, she finds herself fulfilled intellectually for the first time in her life. Over the course of the previous chapters, Dellarobia already felt animosity towards Cub and his attitude towards education. She loathed his habit of watching television and mindlessly flipping through channels. In these chapters, that tension becomes even greater; Dellarobia grows annoyed with Cub, picking apart his grammar and wishing that she could ignore “his simplicity” instead of looking down upon it. While there are many factors contributing to Dellarobia’s feelings of being trapped within her domestic life, the intellectual disparity and differing values that she and Cub share are some of the major ones that are highlighted by Ovid’s arrival.
When Dellarobia accidentally sees Ovid naked, she discovers that she may have feelings for him that she’s previously attempted to suppress. Although Dovey has teased Dellarobia about her “crush” on Ovid, witnessing his body pushes Dellarobia’s thoughts into the same erotic direction that she thought she left behind after seeing the butterflies and deciding not to pursue an affair with Jimmy. These feelings continue to develop as she and Ovid spend more time together. Ovid and Cub serve as foils—characters who emphasize opposing traits in each other—since both provide Dellarobia with totally different styles of attention. Where Cub works on the farm, resists standing up to his parents, and rejects any sort of academic or educational pursuit, Ovid is deeply invested in research. He hires Dellarobia even though she has little experience, giving her an opportunity to break out of the housewife role that Cub keeps her in.
Ovid and Cub’s opposing views manifest most obviously in their juxtaposing opinions on climate change, which continues to be one of the novel’s central themes. Ovid is one of the first people to fully explain to Dellarobia the devastating consequences that even a few degrees of warming could have on humanity’s survival. He is also skeptical about the media’s motives in reporting on the butterflies. Cub, on the other hand, believes the media and adopts the attitude that because he can’t “see” climate change, it is probably a hoax. Cub refuses to believe research, especially the kind that Ovid conducts. Because the butterflies’ migration patterns don’t obviously correlate to global warming, Cub argues that climate change is something indeterminate and false. Dellarobia, on the other hand, changes her mind after listening to Ovid, and demonstrates an ability to grow and develop as a character over the course of learning about climate change. This growth further exacerbates her role as an outsider to her community, where disbelief and an avoidance of conversations about climate change are rampant.
