The Butterfly Plague

by Timothy Findley

  There was a silence and then Ruth said, very quietly, “When Myra died, didn’t your life change?”

  Dolly couldn’t follow that. He said, “No,” and stared at his sister, who was sitting near a window, her face invisible in light.

  “We are the living dead,” said Ruth. “Walking around dead, until…”

  “Until what?”

  “Until we are forced by circumstances to live.”

  “No ‘circumstance’ could possibly make me live.”

  “Yes, it could,” said Ruth. “Yes, it could. The threat of extermination could.”

  “I have lived my whole life with the threat of extermination! Really, Ruth!”

  “It hasn’t been sufficient, then,” said Ruth. “It can’t have been, or else, when Myra died, your whole life would have changed.”

  “Why, why, why, do you keep saying that?”

  “Because she died wanting to live. That should mean something to you.”

  They stared at each other.

  “And Mother?” Dolly asked. “Don’t tell me she didn’t want to live.”

  “She didn’t,” said Ruth, very simply.

  “She hated dying. She hated it as much as I do. Or will.”

  Ruth shook her head. “No,” she said. “She was prepared and ready. She was eager.”

  “And what are you saying about Myra? What are you saying? It’s just a stupid paradox. Myra wanted to live and killed herself? Mother wanted to die but let a mere disease kill her when all she had to do was take poison? What are you saying?”

  “I am saying…”

  “Well?”

  “Wait a minute.”

  “Haven’t got it thought out, eh? Hah! I thought so.”

  “No, I have it thought out,” said Ruth. “I have it all thought out. Only.

  “Only what?”

  “Is it wise to tell you?”

  She jiggled the ice in her glass.

  “Myra was murdered,” she said at last.

  “Murdered! Nonsense. She did it herself with sleeping pills.”

  “She was murdered,” said Ruth, “and that’s the difference between the effect death has on me and the effect it has on you. The difference, now too, between the effect life has. No one loved Myra enough to make her…force her to live for their sake.”

  “And Mother? Are you saying no one loved Mama enough for that?”

  “No. I’m not saying that, at all. It’s just that Mama wasn’t a victim. And Myra was. And so are you. And so could I be. In fact, for a long while, I was.”

  “Fiddlesticks.”

  “Victims are victims, by choice. Other people’s choice at first, and then their own.”

  “Drivel.”

  “But they still die—the victims of killers.”

  “Name one.”

  “I have already. Myra.”

  “Myra was loved. I loved her.”

  Ruth slowly shook her head. “No,” she said. “No. You don’t understand me. There is only one love that can save life. And that love is the love that has killed, buried and replaced the love of self.” Now she looked directly at Adolphus and he could see the expression of her face, at last.

  Ruth appeared to have been possessed. It was not a pleasant expression. It contained no element of contemplation and too little confusion to be a recognizable human expression. She was not, he suspected, speaking to him at all, but to herself, and, from the way she looked at him, he also guessed that she was not for a moment even aware that he was there. She was speaking, not at all about Myra, or their mother, or himself, but about some other thing—some other time—some vision she had had or some experience that had returned to haunt her. She was speaking not of persons, one by one, but of people, hundreds by thousands.

  “I don’t,” he said, but quietly, as though afraid to interrupt her or even to allude, by his voice, to his presence, “I don’t—and I am sorry—understand.”

  Ruth stared at the floor and then back out of the window.

  “Victims,” she muttered. And then, Dolly swore, she added, “Butterflies,” but so gently and with such private wonder that he rose and left her there, knowing, inside himself, that the private wonder was at some private message and that, indeed, his sister had not changed. She did not vary, but only rose up, like a fish to dragonflies, from the depths of a dark and desperate lake, to the challenging surface of its element wherein there was safety, but beyond which for more than mere seconds, the fish could not hope to trespass and live.

  “Imagine,” Dolly thought, rising to leave her there, “that we must strangle on the very air we breathe.”

  The air of hope.

  Hope, Naomi had said, is death in the mind.

  But Dolly did not know that. He only knew that there was hope inside of him. The hope of eluding death—the subject of all conversation.

  He wavered on the brink of the doorway to his mother’s room. He looked inside. The empty bed seemed deprived of more than Naomi’s presence. It was sadder than a mere deathbed. The echo of something alive had rumpled the edges of its coverlet. Just a breeze, probably, for the windows were open. But someone undoubtedly was there.

  Adolphus had the very strange and almost sinister experience of thinking, with what he thought was rationality, that he must go in and check between the mattress and the spring, to see if his mother had left her integrity there, or some message about death that could assuage his fears of it—or the name of some place where one could go for safety.

  What had Ruth meant about no one loving Myra enough to force her to live for their sake? And “victims” and “butterflies”?

  Butterflies?

  Ruth cut his thought in half by speaking suddenly, aloud, from the living room.

  “I’m going to go and have a swim,” she said.

  Dolly stared at her.

  “Is that wise?” he asked.

  Ruth smiled.

  “Of course it’s wise,” she said. “Exercise is always wise.”

  “Well, you know best,” said Dolly.

  “Oh, by the way,” said Ruth, lowering her voice. “I think you should know I haven’t told Miss Bonkers. In fact, I haven’t told anyone but you. And, judging by the way you’re reacting, I think it’s a damn good thing I haven’t. So, I’d appreciate your silence.”

  “I’m not going to say a word,” said Dolly, appalled by the mere idea. “Not a word.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Ruth?”

  “What?”

  “Did you, by any chance, tell Mother?” Ruth thought this over for a moment.

  “Yes,” she said. “I did.”

  Of course she hadn’t.

  But she thought it might help Dolly to think she had.

  He needed lies to keep him going.

  11:30 a.m.

  Ruth changed into her bathing costume, an old one-piece Olympic suit that needed mending at one blue shoulder, and passed, carrying her towel and sandals, through the living room.

  She paused to look into her mother’s room.

  What she saw silenced her.

  Adolphus had gone to the bedside table where he’d picked up the last book read by Naomi. It was at this very moment that Ruth stopped to watch him.

  He looked askance at the bed.

  So did she.

  It was easy to imagine it occupied. Easy and sad, for both of them, for different reasons.

  With the pages of the book still dripping down, suspended in their own hoarse whisper of movement, Adolphus stood staring at the pillows, staring at something there that moved. He tiptoed quietly over.

  Closer, sidling up, he extended the backs of the fingers of his free hand, five little whisks of bone and vein, and he passed them gently across the pillow faces so that a fly, having settled there, rose up in a slow but definite retreat.

  Then Dolly turned away and sat down in the watching chair, still holding the book in his hand, and he began to read.

  The Bridge of San Luis Rey.

&nbs
p; Ruth quietly closed the door between them. He did not even notice.

  Dolly in the watching chair.

  Ruth, already swimming in her mind, went down to join her body to the legendary waters of peace.

  Something was about to happen. She knew it and was trying to escape. But action would not stop it from happening. Whatever it was. Neither action, nor stillness.

  So she swam.

  One.

  2:45 p.m.

  Adolphus had read all through the remainder of the morning. He had read through lunch (without eating) and now, at midafternoon, he was finished.

  He sat exhausted and elated in the watching chair, with The Bridge of San Luis Rey still clasped in his lap.

  He stared at his mother’s bed.

  Naomi was gone forever. So was Myra. And what was the pattern? There was none. None that was discernible. Like the butterflies—they came and went, lived and died. Migrated. Counter-migrated. Stood still and fled.

  He dangled the book and tried to see through the curtains to the sea.

  He saw light; perhaps he saw motion, but nothing was clear—there were no definitions, no demarcations—only a sense of presence, of weight and movement—light and dark—all mingling and marking like a star where Myra was, and Naomi. Or what had taken them, whether by urging or demand he could not tell. Tides. The pull of death.

  He wanted to sit on the book and brood over it like a hen, so that in this room, sitting on this nest, he might hatch an unshakable answer.

  But he laid the book aside.

  It was a book about people on a bridge—vulnerable people, vulnerable bridge, obeying together a vulnerable god. They had fallen in another time, to death.

  He looked at his booted feet. There they were. Vulnerable. He looked at his careful knees, encased in the pink impeccable ducks. Vulnerable. He stared into his crotch. There was life itself, denied. And vulnerable. He glanced across his stomach. Vulnerable. His thin, indented chest, his hands. All vulnerable. He touched his bearded, neat sharp chin—a point for impact and entry. Vulnerable. He gazed into mirrors, and there he was, all twenty of him, thirty of him. Forty. Vulnerable. Ad infinitum. Vulnerable. Frail.

  Could he not select one? Could he not choose one from the images and make it safe? Could he not escape, as his image had, into a mirrored existence somewhere safe? Could he not live forever? Safe?

  No.

  The bridge, all bridges, everywhere, must fall. And the bridge was love. Or did it mean that? No, it did not mean that. It meant the bridge that wasn’t there was love. The invisible, unseen bridge.

  All those people. Falling.

  All those people. Falling down.

  Falling down forever. Into love.

  3:00 p.m.

  When he emerged from the bedroom into the living room, Miss Bonkers was asleep over her knitting. (Why do people knit in California? Dolly wondered.) Ruth was nowhere to be seen.

  He would not disturb them. Ruth was probably asleep herself, in her room or on the beach or somewhere.

  Dolly watched Miss Bonkers.

  Miss Bonkers’s profession was death. Without it, she could not live. The list of her clients was long, and it culminated, altered, in the demise of Naomi.

  It seemed that there would be no more deaths for Miss Bonkers until her own. Now she would minister to life. She didn’t know this, of course. But she might have sensed it. She had changed. There was no doubt about that. The glint was gone from her eye—the purse from her lips—the twitch from her fingers. Her laughter had gentled down and her voice had softened around the edges of consonants, broadened through the centers of vowels. What had done all this? Not just her books and her knitting and the presence of the sea and her dreams of airplanes.

  It was Naomi’s doing, Dolly thought. For such is the power of how we die. And live.

  Adolphus tiptoed onto the balcony and looked along the sand.

  The gypsies were out. But only the very youngest, and their father. The rest must be in school, still, and perhaps B.J. had gone off in the little Ford to pick them up.

  Noah was not wearing his shirt. He was a very handsome man with a well-defined, rather than a muscular, body.

  Adolphus watched him. He wore dark trousers, and his feet were bare. All at once he hoisted a little girl onto his shoulders, and Adolphus could see that she brandished a butterfly net. The other children, who were all boys, carried tin pails with sailboats, rubber balls, and choo-choo trains painted on them. They all began to run.

  Noah’s run was like a horse’s canter. He joggled Charity up and down, holding onto her fat little legs. Now, all of them were laughing, Charity crying out in her high-pitched, strident sing-song, “Take me to a butterfly, take me to a butterfly!” And Noah, running, would spot one and veer in its direction, trying to point it out to her with little ducks and jabs of his head.

  How beautiful they were, Dolly dreamed: Noah with his coltish gaiety, the little boys with their ragged flags of uncut hair, the wild Boadicea-child with her net, and the barking, joyous yellow dog who circled and fell and circled and rolled and circled and jumped among them.

  They moved in Dolly’s direction. The running became leaping. The leaping became a dance—the dance became a celebration.

  Charity caught a butterfly. It was given into an upraised pail. The little boys pounced on the corpses that littered the beach. It did not seem cruel; it did not seem callous. It seemed—useful, somehow, what they were doing.

  Noah began to fly. Charity held onto his hair with one hand and flapped the net with the other. Noah whirled and whirred and flew with his arms. They were all laughing, all playing, all—unbearably—alive.

  And Dolly watched.

  The celebration fell in a circle.

  Adolphus heard one of the boys (it was Josh) say, “Papa, all the dead butterflies: I think it’s sad.” And Noah said, “Nothing is sad that’s as it ought to be.”

  Then Adolphus thought, Yes, the butterflies are dying—but they’ve lived.

  Now the children began to sing, and Adolphus had to sit down in a chair to listen, because a bleakness was rising in him—the bleakness of loss. That he had not taken what existed to be taken—which was life—and had never drifted, as these real people did, on the current of his existence, freely floating, waving at the sky, certain of the shore, dabbling with complacent fingers at the bright stones, the little pebbles, the colored, sparkling sands of the shallows.

  All his life had been a picture of life. Something through a lens, far away at the end of a camera, beyond telescopes, caught in binoculars, laid out under glass. He’d thrived on pictures. On scripted situations, on the careful, brilliant assemblage of pretended beauty. On prearranged trees, modified mountains, altered architecture, Max-Factored faces, flattened or padded bosoms, dyed hair and wigs, well-modulated vowels, coached consonants, and perfume from Paris.

  Down there on the sand there was something that he had never known. It was something he could never have arranged, or set, or directed. He could not have coaxed it from a thousand writers or described it to a million cameramen. It could not be done because it was.

  That was why Myra had died. She hadn’t believed. She hadn’t believed in what she was—in the fat lady—in Old Fat. She had only believed in what she thought she was—in what she thought she ought to be—in what was expected of her—and, finally, demanded.

  You die when you can’t be real, Dolly thought. When you can’t see who you are and when you cannot see what is.

  You die when you forget the Milky Way. What is there. What is—there.

  The butterflies.

  The gypsies on the beach.

  Naomi’s seals. Naomi herself.

  Just as he had fallen in love with Jasmyn Jo, who wasn’t there. Who didn’t exist. Who wasn’t a boy. Who was a girl. Who masqueraded.

  Stop the masquerade. Take off the dominoes and cross the bridge.

  It all fell together, and Dolly closed his eyes and felt faint with the pleasure o
f it, sick with anticipation. He was going to meet reality.

  The sea sounded its afternoon hush and the circle of gypsies, the Trelfords—Noah, his dog and his children—sang. They all seemed to sing together—children, man, dog, and sea—even the birds were singing.

  Myra won’t die, Adolphus thought. I’ll make her live. It will only be in my mind, but it will be real because she’ll be walking around alive in me—in everything I do so long as I try, so long as I believe in what she really was.

  A cloud of butterflies drifted overhead, close enough to touch. They didn’t make a sound.

  At Fringes Field the dead had died. That was real. He’d been there. He’d seen it. But it wasn’t the butterflies’ fault. It was the fault of people. People who didn’t believe. Who hadn’t believed what they saw with their own eyes. If only they had stood and stared, had laughed at them, joyously, as Noah and his children did.

  Adolphus stood up. He could feel his knees gently touching one another.

  He looked over the rail.

  Noah was staring at the sky. The boys were digging pits in the sand.

  Charity had laid aside her net and had stretched out one arm, and a platoon of monarchs sat there now, examined and spoken to by the little girl.

  “Don’t fly away,” she said. “Don’t fly away from me. Rest for a while. Stay here. And rest. Please.”

  Adolphus smiled.

  The dog slept.

  The butterflies waited.